Parental scaffolding and the development of executive function

Research has demonstrated that differential parental scaffolding utterances influence children's development of executive function. Traditional conceptualizations of scaffolding, though, have difficulty in explaining how such differential effects influence children's cognitive development; they do not account for the timing of parental utterances with respect to children's currently occurring activities. We present a study examining the relationship between the timing of different parental scaffolding utterances and children's attention-switching EF abilities. There was a strong relation between the timing of elaborative parental utterances and attention switching. We discuss the implications of the findings for the conceptualization of the scaffolding process.