Measurement of Childrearing Expectations Using the Parent as a Teacher Inventory

Abstract

Many programs in parent education aspire to treat the participants as individuals. Usually this goal is not achieved for lack of instruments which could differentiate parents according to their specific needs. This paper reports the progress of one effort to develop and validate an instrument that can be used to measure critical aspects of a parent’s attitudes and behavior that influence child development. The Parent as a Teacher Inventory (PAAT) is a composite attitude scale in which individual parents of preschoolers or primary students describe feelings about aspects of the parent-child interactive system, their criteria of judgment for assessing child behavior, and their value preferences and frustrations concerning child behavior.