BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1568020
Bridging the Gap: The Impact of Parental Education and Child Leisure Activities on Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills in Preschoolers
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Psychology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Russia
- 2Laboratory of Childhood Psychology and Digital Socialization, Federal Scientific Center of Psychological and Multidisciplinary Research, Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Russia
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Family socioeconomic status is broadly acknowledged to be associated with child development and well-being. However, the extent of this association across various dimensions of child development remains a topic of ongoing debate. This study aims to investigate the relationship between parental education and child cognitive and socioemotional skills, as well as the mediating role of children's leisure time activities, including screen time and shared book reading. The study involved 1288 preschool children (M=70.4 months, SD=4.53) and their parents. Children's executive functions, emotion comprehension, and peer acceptance were assessed. Parents provided information regarding their educational levels, their children screen time duration and frequency of shared book reading. The conducted assessment of direct and indirect effects through path analysis revealed following findings. First, parental education is related to children's verbal working memory, cognitive flexibility, and emotional comprehension. Second, it showed no significant relation to children's peer acceptance, visual working memory, or inhibitory control. Third, shared book reading and screen time can statistically significantly explain differences in verbal working memory between children, including those associated with differences in parental education. Therefore, low reading frequency and high screen time, often observed in families with lower parental educational attainment, may serve as potential sources of disparities in children achievement and psychological well-being throughout development.
Keywords: Family SES, Parents, Media Use, screen time, reading, executive functions, emotion comprehension, Preschool children
Received: 28 Jan 2025; Accepted: 16 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shatskaya, Tarasova and Surilova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Arina Shatskaya, Department of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Psychology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, 125009, Moscow Oblast, Russia
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