These include child characteristics such as age, gender, and cognitive and sensory limitations and characteristics of the child's home environment and preschool experience. Mother's education is the background variable that is consistently related to children's knowledge and skills. One aspect of emergent literacy is the ability to recognize letters, which plays an essential role in learning to read. This skill varied by the level of the mother's education, from 38 percent of children with mothers who had not completed high school to 86 percent of those whose mothers had a bachelor's degree or higher. Another skill in emergent literacy is knowing the sounds associated with the letters that begin and end words.
Social skills are an important part of children's development.
The ability to make and keep friends forms the social foundation of school, and children's experiences with peers will likely influence their attitudes toward school and learning. The ways in which children approach learning frame how they think and act in learning situations. Behavioral inclinations or dispositions such as task persistence and eagerness to learn affect their ability to learn. Proficiency in all of these areas upon entry to kindergarten varies widely and is strongly related to the mother's level of education. Additional data can be found in a related report .