Social interactive quality of parent-child scaffolding as a predictor of children’s executive function

The present study examined how specific social interactive patterns of parent-child scaffolding are predictive of the attentional-switching executive functioning (EF) of children, 20 – 29 months of age (M = 25.0, SD = 2.6, N = 37). Prior research has established that directive and elaborative parental utterances are predictive of children’s cognitive performance. A ring puzzle was used to assess parent-child scaffolding. Children were assessed on a battery of EF tasks. Contingency scores produced by sequential analysis of parent-child interactive patterns, wherein directive and elaborative parental utterances contingently followed children’s puzzle solving activities, were predicted to be positively associated with children’s EF performance. After controlling for children’s age, gender, verbal ability, parental education, frequency of both children’s problem solving activities and parental utterance type, hierarchical regression revealed that contingent elaborative utterances, but not contingent directive utterances, were predictive of children’s EF. Implications of the results for developmental research are discussed.