Chinese Mother-Child Interactions in Everyday Math Activities: Engaging Young Children in Mathematics at Home

Despite the well-documented phenomenon that Chinese parents tend to be actively involved in their young children's education, few studies have explored how Chinese parents manifest math involvement and how their practices operate in early math learning at home. This study investigated Chinese mothers' teaching behavior and its relation to child activity by examining mother-child interactions in everyday math activities. Forty-eight 5-year-olds and their mothers were recruited from 4 kindergartens in Northeastern China, and participated in two everyday mathematical tasks. Mother-child teaching interactions were video recorded. The results revealed that Chinese mothers modified their teaching strategies based on the task, and provided high level of learning-oriented support during the teaching interactions. The findings also suggested that contrary to the stereotypical image of Chinese parents as controlling and punitive, Chinese mothers who used more directive strategies were also more likely to use open-ended and positive strategies in math activities. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated that the relationship between maternal teaching and children's activities seem to resemble the white-middle-class pattern, which indicated open-ended and positive teaching strategies might be more important in promoting children's independent engagement in math tasks than directing and focusing strategies.