Sensitive Parenting

Children are like a sponge; they absorb influences from the environments they are

exposed to very quickly. Environmental factors, parental influences and many other outside

factors can possibly affect children not only in their early childhood, but also at later ages.

Parents especially are the most influential factor for acquiring language and social skills when

children are very young (Pancsofar & Vernon­Feagans, 2006) because of the large amount of

time children spend with them. Thus, it is important to examine the possible factors and

acknowledge how they would influence children.

Language development of children has been studied by many researchers. Barnett,

Gustafsson, Deng, Mills­Koonce and Cox (2012) have studied the bidirectional …show more content…
The result of academic experience score did not support my hypothesis either.

Surprisingly, the students of the parents with a sensitive parenting style mostly belonged to the

groups with middle to low academic experience scores, suggesting that sensitive parenting may

PARENTING AND PARENTAL LANGUAGE INPUT 11

not improve college students’ academic experiences. The result of the present study opposes the

argument of the previous study that sensitive parenting impacts children’s social competence

skills and language skills that will further contribute to their later development (Barnett et al.,

2012). Also, students who were exposed to frequent language input by their parents in their

childhood belonged to the groups with middle to low academic experience scores, indicating that

there is an indistinct correlation between parental language input and students’ overall academic

experiences. The result of the present study also conflicts with the argument of Lee and Kim

(2012) that sensitive parenting improves children’s vocabulary skills, and having a good

vocabulary skill is related to future learning …show more content…
It may have resulted from a lack of sufficient number of participants. Using a

wider and larger sample population is strongly suggested for further improvements of the

research to gather more various results to correlate variables.

Another limitation is that parenting style and language input assessment were

self­assessed by participants which could have provided biased data because data is relied on

only their perceptions. Like how many researchers do for their studies, further improvements can

be made by surveying both participants and their parents, or through a longitudinal study that

observes participants’ childhood and measure their academic experiences in college to get more

unbiased and accurate data. In their studies, Barnett et al. (2012), Lee and Kim (2012), McNally

and Quigley (2014), Pancsofar and Vernon­Feagans (2006), and Pungello et al. (2009) measured

both children’s development, and parental behaviors and familial characteristics