PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT TO INCREASE CHILDREN’S READING INTEREST FOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN’S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Parental involvement plays a significant role in early childhood education. Parents are the most important persons that influence the children at their homes until the children enter preschool. Character development is an essential for children and it starts at an early age. Children reading interest enhances their character development through the exposures of values in the stories. Moral story books provide role models for children’s reading interest and thus, by reading the stories and selecting high quality reading materials, parents help the preschool children character development and change their attitudes toward people in their surroundings. The purpose of this study was to provide an overview of parent involvement in increasing children reading interest in preschool to support their character development. The study was conducted to observe the level of parental involvement in reading the stories to the children at home. This research utilized quantitative analysis of responses gathered from 109 parents. Data was collected using questionnaire with descriptive statistics analysis. The results showed that the respondents’ (parents) level of involvement is high toward the reading interest of preschool children as depicted by the overall mean score (M=48.97; SD=.36). The research finding shows that there are differences between the parents’ that are frequently involved in reading the story than the parents’ that are not. Therefore, it can be concluded that as the frequency of parental involvement in reading stories for children is high, the level of reading interest follows to increase, and thus influence positively toward the children’s character development.

Keywords: Parental Involvement, Children Reading Interest, Preschool Children, Character Development