Status of Families

Article Summary and Reflection

The article is titled “Cohesion, Flexibility, Communication and Socioeconomic Status of Families and Cognitive Development in Preschool and Early School-Age Children.” The article is published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology in issue four of the 16th volume, 246-255. The journal is also located in the medical communications database. All the authors are from Poland, teaching in various faculties at the university level. In total, the article is written by six authors that include Karolina Zalewska-Łunkiewicz, Natalia Maja Józefacka-Szram, Ludmiła Biskupek, Łukasz Gryl, Maria Sikora, and Sandra Suchowska. For example, józefacka-Szram is a faculty member in the pedagogy department for special needs education at the University of Silesia and works in the education department of Maria Grzegorzewska, located in Poland. The other authors are faculty members of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland. The article is peer-reviewed because there have been scholarly reviews following its journal database that led to its publishing.

The article contributes to understanding the topic of poverty and academic achievement of children at the elementary school levels. The connection is established by measuring how the family’s socioeconomic status of the children in the pre-school affects the outcome of performance in classes. The performance is measured through the early school-age children’s reading, numeracy, and writing skills. Therefore, the findings will indicate if poverty can influence the low performance or not, and to what extent, considering other variables that may affect the outcome of the results. In this case, the study’s main aim was to determine how the family’s functioning and socioeconomic status influence the educational achievements of young children at lower educational levels. The authors conducted the study by including a sample of 105 children as participants in the study, aged between five and six years (Zalewska-Łunkiewicz 246). Further, the parents of these children (105 parents) were also included in the study. The participants were drawn from the Silesia are in Poland. Two main methods were used to collect data from the parents, including a family rating scale known as FACES IV (family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scale) and a questionnaire entailing demographic questions used to evaluate the families’ socioeconomic status families (Zalewska-Łunkiewicz 246). For the Children, data were collected through the administration of a computer-adaptive test whose completion could show the child’s ability to start school.

The results were evaluated using a multivariate structural equation modeling. This helped determine how the level of parents’ cognitive ability and educational achievement and the parents’ socioeconomic status influenced the passage of school skills to children before they started schooling. Therefore, the findings were critical in concluding that family background, functioning, and socioeconomic status are important determinants in children’s school abilities. For instance, the mother who read more books and had higher educational levels contributed significantly to having a good social and economic status and the ability of their children to score higher than those from unbalanced systems. The information in the journal can therefore be used to discuss the issue of poverty and low socioeconomic status as a potential barrier to the ability of the child to learn school skills and be better prepared to start school. Therefore, the parent needs to initiate their children to start learning from family institutions before joining schools. The successes of such measures are determined by the parent’s education level and relevance to school skills at present.

Work Cited

Zalewska-Łunkiewicz, Karolina et al. “Cohesion, Flexibility, Communication And Socioeconomic Status Of Families And Cognitive Development In Preschool And Early School-Age Children.” Journal Of Psychiatry And Clinical Psychology, vol 16, no. 4, 2016, pp. 246-255. Medical Communications Sp. Z.O.O., https://doi.org/10.15557/pipk.2016.0033. Accessed 26 Apr 2022.