Relations among Preschool Children's Adult and Peer Contacts and Later Academic Achievement

HARPER, LAWRENCE V., and HUIE, KAREN S. Relations among Preschool Children's Adult and Peer Contacts and LaterAcademicAchievement. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1987, 58, 1051-1065. We analyzed relations between day-to-day variations in the amounts of time individual 2-5-year-old children spent interacting with peers and adults. At all ages, in a variety of settings, American youngsters from a broad socioeconomic spectrum and the offspring of Mexican migrant farmworkers tended to treat social interactions with age-mates and adults as alternatives. Moreover, across an 8-month period, American, middle-class 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds showed progressive increases in the proportion of time that they spent interacting with peers, relative to time with adults, although only 3and 4-year-olds showed increases in the degree to which involvement in the 2 categories of behavior was treated as a trade-off. Individual children's day-to-day variance for the combined behaviors was not consistently smaller than that for either one alone. These findings suggest that relationships with caregivers and with peers represent 2 partially incompatible behaviors and that, for individuals, sociability is not unidimensional. Because being adult-oriented may facilitate adjustment to grade school, we did a follow-up study in which we correlated the free-play activity choices of American middle-class 4-year-olds in preschool with their later academic achievement in the third grade. The results indicated that early, adult-oriented activities were positively related to later academic achievement. Our findings are consistent with the contention that conditions fostering the early development of a preference for involvement with peers, as opposed to adults, may reflect a social orientation that interferes with later academic success in grade school.