Fatherhood Study

Funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development

Recent studies of low-income children have revealed significant variations in the quality of parent-child communication as well as the quantity of parent input is important for successful child language development. However, the majority of this research has focused on mothers, and more research with ethnic minority fathers is critical for the development of preventive interventions to support language development and early academic success. In this study, we will use video-recorded data from an existing study to refine a rating system to capture characteristics of the father-child joint engagement in a sample of low-income African American and Latino fathers and their young children to examine relations between the quality of the father-child joint engagement and language input and later child language development and school readiness using data already being collected as part of the parent longitudinal study.