Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Human Development and Family Science

Department

Human Development and Family Science

First Advisor

Hans Saint-Eloi Cadely

Abstract

Maternal education has been found to be a proximal measure of household income and has been directly linked to a child’s cognitive, social, and academic outcomes (Augustine et al., 2009; Harding, 2015; Kalil et al., 2012). Additionally, several studies examining children’s development found that children’s fine motor skills are the skillset that have a higher likelihood of experiencing delays when correlated with household socioeconomic status (Doulabi et al., 2017). The present study examined the relationship between children’s fine motor skills and maternal education and contributes to the literature in that it strictly examined a low-income sample population. The first wave of the 1999 dataset, Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) was utilized. Maternal education and children’s fine motor skills of children three and younger were the focus of the study while child gender was used as an exploratory variable working to understand whether the relationship between maternal education and fine motor skills varied across gender. Logistic regression and chi square models were fit to the data to find no statistically significant relationship between a mother’s level of education and her child’s fine motor skill development. However, results of both chi square and logistic regression analyses indicated that girls with mothers who did not complete high school were marginally more likely to have fine motor delays whereas girls with mothers who completed high school were marginally less likely to have fine motor delays. Limitations, future directions, and implications for practitioners are provided.

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