BECE. Newsletter 

Vol.13, No.2, 2023 1725 

 

 

 

 

Family Cultural Capital and Child Social Skills: 

The Mediating Effects of Maternal Childcare 

Competence and Maternal Rough Parenting 

By Yang, J., Zhang, L., Li, W., & Tao, Y. C. 
Correspondence to: Yachen Tao, University of the West of England, UK. E-mail: 

1968191087@qq.com  

OCIAL skills are essential to social adaptability and exchanges of the 

individual and have a significant impact on their academic and profes-

sional attainment. Individuals with superior social skills can perceive higher 

self-value while those with underdeveloped ones are more susceptible to 

mental problems due to their inability to properly interact with the external 

world. Family cultural capital poses direct effects on social skill development 

of the child, and they can be mediated by maternal childcare competence and 

the degree of roughness of maternal parenting. 

This study sampled 750 children aged between three and seven years 

old from 5 kindergartens in Yunnan Province to investigate their family cul-

tural capital, the level of their social skill development, childcare competence 

and parenting style of their mothers. Researchers distributed 750 electronic 

questionnaires and retrieved 705 valid ones, which constituted 94% of the to-

tal number of questionnaires. The majority of them were completed by moth-

ers, with a small portion being filled out by other guardians. 

Research findings demonstrated that family cultural capital was posi-

tively correlated with social skill development of the child, indicating that the 

more family cultural capital, the higher the level of social skill development 

of the child. Furthermore, family cultural capital was also positively related 

to maternal childcare competence, and so was maternal childcare competence 

to social skill development of the child. The more family cultural capital, the 

higher the maternal childcare competence; the higher the maternal childcare 

competence, the higher the level of social skill development of the child. At 

the same time, the degree of roughness of maternal parenting was negatively 

correlated with family cultural capital, and so was maternal childcare compe-

tence with child social skills. That indicated that in the family with less cul-

tural capital and lower maternal childcare competence, the mother treated the 

children more roughly and the children generally had less developed social 

skills.  

Additionally, it was discovered that maternal childcare competence 

could effectively mediate the relation between family cultural capital and so-

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Vol.13, No.2, 2023 1726 

cial skill development of the child, with a mediating effect constituting 4.6% 

of the overall effect; that the degree of roughness of maternal parenting could 

also effectively mediate the relation between family cultural capital and so-

cial skill development of the child, with a mediating effect accounting for 

18.9% of the overall effect; and that maternal childcare competence and the 

degree of roughness of maternal parenting had a significant chain mediating 

effect on the relation between family cultural capital and child social skills, 

which made up 2.5% of the overall effect. 

 

 

Source: Studies in Preschool Education, 2022; 2022(11):75-78.