Marital Satisfaction, Family Emotional Expressiveness, Home Learning Environments, and Children's Emergent Literacy.

The current study investigates associations among marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, the home learning environment, and preschool-aged children's emergent literacy skills among 385 Midwestern mothers and their children. Path analyses examined how marital satisfaction related to emotional expressiveness in the home and whether this path was associated with the home learning environment and children's literacy skills. Higher maternal satisfaction was associated with higher levels of positive and lower levels of negative family emotional expressiveness. Additionally, family emotional environments characterized by mothers with higher positive expression were related to better home learning environments, which in turn were associated with higher literacy skills in children. Study findings underscore the importance of marital and family processes when considering young children's academic development.Key Words: child school achievement/failure, early childhood, home environment, parental investment/involvement, satisfaction (marriage and close relationships).The marital relationship is viewed as the relational center of the family (Davies, Sturge-Apple, Woitach, & Cummings, 2009) and has long been considered to play a crucial role in the emotional and relational structure of the family as a whole (Amato & Cheadle, 2008; Feldman, Wentzel, Weinberger, & Munson, 1990). As such, the quality of the marital relationship has significant implications for the overall family emotional environment (Stocker, Ahmed, & Stall, 1997; Waldinger, Schulz, Hauser, Allen, & Crowell, 2004), parent -child interactions (Davies et al., 2009; Gerard, Krishnakumar, & Buehler, 2006), and socioemotional and behavioral outcomes for children (Feldman et al.; Gerard et al.). Although there is a plethora of evidence indicating that marital quality is important for children's emotional and behavioral development (Cummings & Davies, 1996; Fosco & Grych, 2007), research investigating the influence of marital relationship quality on children's early academic and cognitive development is limited (Belsky & Fearon, 2004). In addition, relatively little is known about how the quality of the marital relationship influences the home learning environment (HLE), which includes aspects of parenting that are specifically related to early educational outcomes (Senechal, 2006; Senechal & LeFevre, 2002; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), such as shared reading, playing number games, and teaching the names of letters (Buehler & Gerard, 2002).Family systems and human ecological theories indicate that individuals are influenced by the various systems in which they are embedded (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998; von Bertalanffy, 1976). Research in this area suggests that emotions and affect spill over from the marital relationship into other family systems (Krishnakumar & Buehler, 2000). Most studies on the relationship between marriage and academic outcomes in children, however, have focused on differences between children from divorced or single-parent homes and children from homes with parents married to each other. These studies have shown that divorce affects academic outcomes in children (Amato, 2010; Potter, 2010), in that children do better overall in two-parent families that are stable over time (Brown, 2010). One study showed that both adolescent boys and girls whose parents divorced performed less well academically in the 2 years prior to the actual divorce than their peers whose parents did not divorce (Sun & Li, 2001). This suggests that family disruption affects child academic achievements, but relatively little is known about how marital quality affects child academic achievements in families that are currently intact. In addition, the majority of studies rely exclusively on measures of broad academic functioning (Sun & Li), student grades (Ghazarian & Buehler, 2010), or teacher reports of academic functioning (Bascoe, Davies, SturgeApple, & Cummings, 2009) rather than individual assessments of children's specific skill sets. …