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Article Excerpt
The current study examines whether associations exist between household chaos and children's early reading skills, after controlling for a comprehensive battery of home literacy environment characteristics. Our sample included 455 kindergarten and first-grade children who are enrolled in the Western Reserve Reading Project. We go on to test whether these associations are moderated by maternal reading ability. Results suggest that the degree of household order is significantly and positively associated with the expressive vocabulary, Woodcock Reading Mastery, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers are above-average readers. By contrast, the number of books a child owns or brings home and how often a child amuses self alone with books are significantly associated with the expressive vocabulary, Woodcock Reading Mastery, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers are average-ability readers. These results suggest the potential for new approaches to encouraging literacy development in the home beyond those that depend solely on parental literacy.
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The home environment is a primary context for children's early learning and socioemotional development (Bradley, Caldwell, & Rock, 1988; Bradley et al., 1989; Morrison & Cooney, 2001). In particular, scholars have employed the term "home literacy environment" (HLE) to refer to the subset of environmental factors thought to be most germane for literacy growth (Foy & Mann, 2003; Leseman & de Jong, 1998; Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002). Two early attempts to operationalize the HLE yielded multifaceted inventories of home and family characteristics, including frequency with which a parent reads to child (also known as shared or joint reading), age when reading with child began, number of minutes spent reading to child yesterday, number of books child owns, frequency with which child asks to be read to, frequency with which child looks at books by self, frequency of trips to library with child, frequency with which mother reads to self, frequency with which father reads to self, amount caregiver enjoys reading to self, child's hours of television viewing per day, and the number of household newspaper, magazine, and child magazine subscriptions (Griffin & Morrison, 1997; Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994). Numerous studies have since substantiated an association between the HLE and children's early literacy skills (e.g., Burgess et al., 2002; Frijters, Barron, & Brunello, 2000; Molfese, Modglin, & Molfese, 2003; Rashid, Morris, & Sevcik, 2005; Roberts, Jurgens, & Burchinal, 2005; Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998; Senechal & LeFevre, 2002; Taylor, Clayton, & Rowley, 2004).
The dimensions of the HLE presented by Payne et al. (1994) and Griffin and Morrison (1997) are often treated by researchers as exhaustive. However, neither index explains more than a modest amount of variance in children's early reading skills. After controlling for primary caregiver IQ and education, an index combining nine HLE characteristics explained only 12% of the variance in a sample of 4-year-old children's expressive and receptive vocabulary (Payne et al., 1994). When Griffin and Morrison (1997) controlled for both child general cognitive ability and maternal education, their seven-item HLE index explained only 3% of the variance in kindergarten children's receptive vocabulary. We believe that the explained variance is small because there are aspects of the broader home environment not captured in traditional HLE studies. The present study considers other literacy-related behaviors as well as inputs not directly related to reading, shedding new light on the concept of the HLE.
Researchers looking for other aspects of the HLE that may explain additional variability in early reading development have found that children's interest in, or enjoyment of, reading is predictive of early reading skills (Burgess, 2005; Frijters et al., 2000; Scher, Baker, & Mackler, 1997; Scarborough, Dobrich, & Hager, 1991). These findings are important because they suggest a broader definition of the HLE than that conceived of by both Payne et al. (1994) and Griffin and Morrison (1997), which consisted almost exclusively of those facets of the home environment directly under parental control. Studies have also found that reading behaviors initiated by the child rather than the parent, such as the number of books child brings home from school and the frequency with which child initiates self-reading, are associated with early reading skill (Petrill, Deater-Deckard, Schatschneider, & Davis, 2005). It is likely that to some degree child behaviors are the result of parent behaviors such as encouragement and modeling; however, both sets of behaviors contribute to early reading development.
In addition to expanding the scope of the HLE to include child-directed measures, it is also important to examine other aspects of the home that, although not directly related to literacy instruction, may set the conditions for learning. In particular, there is reason to suspect that household chaos, which has demonstrated negative associations with a range of child cognitive outcomes, may also be associated with children's literacy growth. Chaotic environments have been defined as being very noisy, with a high degree of crowding and foot traffic (i.e., many people coming and going), and a lack of routine, predictability, and organization (Wachs, 1989, 2000).
The plurality of research on the association between household chaos and child and parent well-being has focused on the impact of household crowding and noise or foot traffic on children's outcomes and parental competencies (Bronzaft & McCarthy, 1975; Bronzaft, 1981; Cohen, Krantz, Evans, Stokols, & Kelly, 1981; Cohen, Glass, & Singer, 1973; Evans, Wells, & Moch, 2003; Evans, Hygge, & Bullinger, 1995; Haines, Stansfeld, Job, Berglund, & Head, 2001; Maxwell & Evans, 2000; Maxwell, 1996). Specifically, a small but growing body of literature has illuminated associations between environmental noise, crowding, and disorganization and the communication development of infants (Wachs &Chan, 1986), the general cognitive and language development of primary-grade children (Cohen et al., 1973; Gottfried & Gottfried, 1984), and the social and emotional development of preschool and school-aged children (Coldwell, Pike, & Dunn, 2006; Dumas, Nissley, Nordstrom, Phillips Smith, Prinz & Levine, 2005) and young adolescents (Evans, Gonnella, Marcynyszyn, Gentile, & Salpekar, 2005). Research has also linked lower levels of household chaos in childhood to the later accumulation of human capital (measured by years of completed schooling and average hourly earnings) when children are grown (Dunifon, Duncan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2001). However, no studies have tested for explicit associations between elements of household chaos and early reading skills in young school-aged children. The present study explores associations between two distinct aspects of household chaos--quiet and order--and early reading development.
There are several reasons to hypothesize that household chaos may be linked to literacy development. First, there is evidence that environmental noise generated outside of the home or school is connected to literacy development. Several studies have found associations between school-based chaos and language or reading ability among preschool and school-aged children (Bronzaft & McCarthy, 1975; Bronzaft, 1981; Cohen et al., 1981; Evans & Maxwell, 1997; Haines et al., 2001; Maxwell & Evans, 2000).
Second, studies have found associations between household chaos and measures closely related to reading skill. Specifically, household chaos has been linked to general cognitive ability in elementary school-aged children (Hart, Petrill, Deater Deckard, & Thompson, 2007) and verbal and nonverbal skills in 3- and 4-year-old children (Petrill, Pike, Price, & Plomin, 2004), which suggests that chaos in the home may be linked to early reading as well.
A third reason that the degree of household chaos may be important for early reading development comes from evidence suggesting covariance between chaotic homes and negative parenting. For example, compared to parents in less chaotic households, the parents of young children in chaotic homes are less likely to be responsive and vocally stimulating with their child (Corapci & Wachs, 2002; Evans, Maxwell, & Hart, 1999; Wachs & Camli, 1991) and more likely to exhibit high levels of parenting stress and to report symptoms related to depression (Corapci & Wachs, 2002; Wachs & Camli, 1991). Because parenting quality (for reviews, see Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000; Maccoby, 2000) and parent mental health (e.g., NICHD Network, 1999; Sameroff, Seifer, Baldwin, & Baldwin, 1993) are associated with children's early cognitive development, the degree to which they are related to household chaos suggests a likely association between household chaos and early reading skills.
It is possible that household chaos is associated with young children's reading skills but that some children are more vulnerable to its effects than others. Similarly, associations between the HLE and early reading may vary across subgroups of children. In particular, we propose that high maternal reading ability may serve as a buffer against deficits in the HLE and broader home environment. Maternal cognitive and reading ability is strongly associated with children's early reading (Hess, Holloway, Dickson, & Price, 1984; Luster & Dubow, 1992; Payne et al., 1994) as well as with the quality of the home environment in general and the HLE in particular (Baharudin & Luster, 1998; Bradley et al., 1993; Burgess, 2005). Consequently, studies seeking to assess the influence of the HLE on early reading have typically controlled for maternal reading ability (e.g., Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000; Griffin & Morrison, 1997). No studies to date have considered the possibility that maternal reading ability is a moderator, rather than a confounder, of the HLE.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that maternal reading ability moderates the association between the HLE and early reading because it may compromise the effectiveness of literacy activities such as shared book reading. Even if mothers who are not themselves strong readers engage in shared book reading with the same frequency as other mothers, the quality of their shared reading may be lower. Furthermore, mothers who find reading to be taxing or who simply do not enjoy reading may model reading behaviors and make reading materials available in the home in ways that make reading appear less attractive to the child. In fact, a study on the language development of children of adolescent mothers found that the impact of a lower-quality home linguistic environment was only negatively associated with child language outcomes when mothers had low verbal abilities, suggesting that maternal reading-related abilities may very well moderate the influence of various home characteristics, including the HLE, on early reading skills (Oxford & Spieker,...
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