Child centered literacy orientation: A form of social capital?

Objective. To describe the home literacy environment and to identify financ ial, human, and social capital variables associated with the presence or la ck of Child Centered Literacy Orientation (CCLO) in families with young chi ldren who regularly attend pediatric primary care clinics. Design. Cross-sectional case-control analysis of structured parent intervie ws conducted in two hospital-based and four community-based pediatric clini cs in New England. Subjects. Parents of 199 healthy 1- to 5-year-old children whose mean age w as 30 +/- 15 (SD) months were interviewed. Parents were primarily mothers ( 94%) with a mean age of 28 +/- 7 (SD) years 60% of whom were single. Educat ional levels of study parents varied: 43% had not graduated from high schoo l, 29% had a high school equivalency, and 28% had at least a year of colleg e or vocational training. This was a multiethnic parent group. Sixty-five p ercent were bilingual or non-English speaking. Fifty-eight percent were bor n outside of the continental United States. Parents were primarily of low-i ncome status with 85% receiving Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) food supp lements, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and/or Medicaid. Results. Half of the parents interviewed reported that they rarely read boo ks. Sixty percent of children had fewer than 10 books at home and two-third s of these households contained fewer than 50 books total. When asked open- ended questions, 28% of parents said that sharing books with their child wa s one of their three favorite activities together, 14% said that looking at books was one of their child's three favorite things to do, and 19% report ed sharing books at bedtime at least six times each week. Thirty-nine perce nt of families had at least one of these three literacy-related responses p resent and so were said to have a CCLO. A backwards stepwise multiple logis tic regression on CCLO was performed with family financial, human, and soci al capital variables. Parents married or living together (odds ratio [OR] 2 .56, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.21-5.42), higher adult-to-child ratio s in the home (OR 1.92, 95% CI = 1.20-3.05), households speaking only Engli sh (OR 2.67, 95% CI = 1.24-5.76), parents reading books themselves at least a few times a week (OR 2.86, 95% CI = 1.38-5.91), and homes with more than 10 children's books (OR 3.3, 95% CI = 1.6-6.83), were all independently an d significantly associated with the presence of CCLO. Older child age and h igher parent education remain in the model but were not significant at the P < .05 level. Ethnicity and income status were dropped for lack of additio nal significance from this model, which described 24% of the variance in CC LO. Conclusion. Although two-parent families and higher adult-to-child ratios i n the home appear to be social capital variables with protective effects, l ow-income, single-parent, and minority or immigrant families are at signifi cant risk for lacking both children's books and a CCLO. We suggest that CCL O may itself be another form of social capital reflecting parental goals an d expectations for their children. We speculate that interventions which pr ovide children's books and information about reading with children to impov erished families with young children may facilitate more parent-child book sharing. Pediatricians and other primary care providers serving underserved populations may have a unique opportunity to encourage activities focusing on young children and promoting literacy.