Family relationship profiles and their associations with children's academic school readiness and approaches to learning

Abstract

This study aimed to explore latent profiles of family relationships based on marital quality, coparenting, and parent–child relationships, and examine their associations with children's academic school readiness and approaches to learning with a Chinese sample. Previous research often used variable‐centered approaches, which potentially overlook unique relationship configurations and their influence on children. At the beginning of kindergarten, both fathers and mothers from 366 families completed questionnaires of demographic information, child temperament, and family relationship variables. At the end of kindergarten, research assistants assessed children's academic school readiness, and the primary caregivers reported children's approaches to learning. Five family relationship profiles emerged: highly cohesive, moderately cohesive, and dysfunctional families showed consistently high, moderate, and poor relationship quality across all subsystems, respectively. Compensatory families had poor marital quality and coparenting quality but low parent–child conflict. Unbalanced families exhibited contrasting evaluations between mothers and fathers across subsystems. Although family relationship profiles did not predict children's school readiness on math, language and literacy, they made significant differences in children's approaches to learning. The findings reveal variations of families in the synchronism of relationship quality across subsystems. Families with boundaries across subsystems showed some buffering effect on children's approaches to learning. This study underscores the value of a family‐centered approach in capturing the complexity of family dynamics. Furthermore, maintaining subsystem boundaries may help families experiencing difficulties in certain relationships.