Socioeconomic status and parent-child relationships predict metacognitive questions to preschoolers.

The importance of metacognitive language exposure to early educational achievement is widely recognized in the development literature. However, few studies have explored parents’ metacognitive language, while accounting for family SES and stress within the parent–child relationship. This is a preliminary descriptive study to explore metacognitive language to preschoolers during a collaborative task, and explored family SES (parent education and occupation) and stress within the parent–child relationship as predictors. Using partial correlations controlling for child age and language ability, parent education, occupation, and stress associated with parent–child dysfunctional interaction were found to significantly correlate with parents’ metacognitive questions. A hierarchical regression (controlling for child age and language ability) indicated that only parent education levels uniquely predicted questions overall.