With many parents and caregivers working outside of the home, infants and toddlers are spending more time with other individuals, such as early childhood educators (ECEs). This creates a need to form a partnership between parents and ECEs to provide an environment where children have optimal development across childcare centers and homes. The purpose of this study is to understand how ECEs support parent-child interactions and parenting efficacy through support strategies they use during home visits with families. Data from this study comes from the Getting Ready intervention, a longitudinal study focusing on promoting children’s development by strengthening relationships between parents, ECEs, and children. In this study, ECEs were provided with training on eight strategies designed to promote parent-child interactions and parent partnerships. Parent-child interactions were examined using data from 15–30-minute coded videos. Approximately 1-hour coded videos were used to examine the strategies used by ECEs during home visits. Lastly, a self-reported parent questionnaire was used to examine parenting efficacy. Overall, about 42% of the ECEs used 5 or more strategies out of the 8 that were examined for this study. The most used strategy was focusing parent’s attention on the child’s strengths, while the least used was encouraging parent-child interactions. Additional analysis will explore associations. These results will add to the understanding of the Getting Ready intervention and highlight the importance for ECEs to use the strategies during their home visits.

Executive function skills are essential for a child to prioritize daily tasks, control impulses, problem solve, and accomplish milestones. Executive functions improve across childhood and demonstrate variable developmental profiles. Numerous research studies have demonstrated a correlation between a broad range of parenting behaviors and children's executive function development. For example, parental scaffolding predicts child developmental outcomes, such as executive functions. However, the true correlational size of parental scaffolding and executive functions is unclear due to terminological inconsistencies of broadly defining parental scaffolding. To address this issue, I will conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship between parental scaffolding and child executive functions by first narrowing parental scaffolding into three categories: (1) cognitive support, (2) behavioral support, and (3) the promotion of autonomy. A unique machine learning approach (LitsearchR) will be used to generate the meta-analysis search protocol. This approach will further systematize the search process, help to resolve terminology paradoxes, and identify key search terms related to our phenomenon of interest. As a result, the meta-analysis will inform theories of child development and parental impact by clarifying the relationship between parental scaffolding and executive function development. Future research should consider how parental scaffolding facilitates executive function development and how environmental factors may influence this relationship. This work will help inform future studies interested in individual parental scaffolding techniques and how environmental and contextual considerations may play a role in children's executive function development.

Despite the continued lack of supportive university policy for student parents, this population is growing and research shows that they are a highly motivated student group that often has greater academic achievement than their non-parenting counterparts. Minimal research has focused on how children are affected by their mothers pursuing higher education. Previous research has found a positive relationship between mothers’ student role motivation and children’s academic motivation. There are also additional factors related to mothers’ direct interactions with their children (e.g., attitude in helping with homework) that are partial mediators for this relationship. However, there has not been enough research investigating other mechanisms through which student mothers may impact their children. The present study seeks to examine how student mothers affect their children through unintentional role-modeling, like studying in their children’s presence. Using questionnaires, this study will investigate the relationships between children’s perceptions of their mothers’ student role and children’s academic self-efficacy, growth mindset, and academic achievement. It is hypothesized that positive relationships will be found among these variables. This research is significant because it can suggest whether student mothers have a positive psychological effect on their children when they are active students in higher education. Therefore, the findings can inform universities on why they should invest in efforts to promote the retention and success of this population by further supporting student parents and their children.