Home Life in Early Childhood Shapes Which Social Skills Preschoolers Develop, Chinese Study Finds

Every kindergarten classroom is a small society, and within it, children differ strikingly in how they assert themselves, control their impulses, and cooperate with peers. A new two-year study of Chinese preschoolers suggests that these differences are not random. By tracking hundreds of children from toddlerhood into their kindergarten years, researchers have identified distinct profiles of social skill development and found that the quality of the home-rearing environment in early life helps determine which profile a child falls into. The findings, published in Current Psychology, add weight to a growing body of evidence that the earliest years at home cast a long shadow over how children navigate their social worlds.

The research team, led by Zhu Zhu of Hangzhou Normal University and Xiang Li of Zhejiang Normal University, together with Tokie Anme of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, focused on three subdomains that developmental psychologists regard as the core building blocks of social competence: assertion, self-control, and cooperation. Assertion covers a child’s ability to initiate interactions, express needs, and stand up for themselves. Self-control reflects the capacity to regulate behavior, take turns, and respond appropriately to frustration. Cooperation captures the willingness to share, help others, and work toward joint goals. While decades of research have examined these skills as a single aggregate score, far fewer studies have asked whether children combine them in qualitatively different ways.

To answer that question, the team turned to a person-centered statistical approach known as latent class analysis, or LCA. Unlike traditional methods that average across children and assume the population is homogeneous, LCA searches for hidden subgroups, or classes, of individuals who share similar response patterns. In this case, the technique allowed the researchers to ask whether the combination of assertion, self-control, and cooperation scores clustered children into meaningful types, rather than simply spreading them along a single continuum from low to high. The method has become increasingly popular in developmental science precisely because it respects the possibility that children with the same overall score may arrive there by very different routes.

The study unfolded in two waves. In 2021, parents of children attending Chinese kindergartens completed self-report questionnaires covering demographic characteristics and the home-rearing environment, a construct encompassing the stimulation, responsiveness, and support children experience in daily family life. Two years later, in 2023, kindergarten teachers rated the children’s social skills across the three subdomains. This separation of reporters matters: the environmental data came from parents at an earlier point in time, while the outcome data came from teachers who had no role in reporting the home environment, reducing the risk that shared biases between reporters inflated the observed associations. The final analytic sample included 340 children with a mean age of 4.1 years, of whom 45.6 percent were girls.

When the latent class analysis was run, four distinct subtypes of social skills emerged. The researchers labeled these groups high, moderately high, moderately low, and low, reflecting overall levels of social competence across the three subdomains. The existence of four ordered classes, rather than a single smooth distribution, indicates that preschoolers’ social skills vary in degree more than in kind: children tended to be relatively strong or weak across assertion, self-control, and cooperation together, rather than excelling in one domain while lagging sharply in another. That pattern is consistent with theoretical accounts in which the three subdomains develop in tandem, supported by common underlying capacities such as language ability and self-regulation, even though each domain retains its own developmental signature.

The crucial question was what predicted membership in these groups. Using a multinomial logistic regression model, a statistical technique suited to outcomes with more than two categories, the team examined whether the home-rearing environment measured in 2021 forecasted a child’s social skill subtype in 2023. The answer was clear. Compared with children in the high social skill group, those who had experienced a better home-rearing environment were less likely to end up in the moderately low and low groups. In other words, richer early home environments acted as a protective factor, reducing the odds that a child would settle into one of the lower social skill profiles by the time teachers assessed them two years later.

This longitudinal design strengthens the causal interpretation that the authors favor, though it does not prove causation outright. Because the environmental measure preceded the social skill assessments by two years, the findings are less vulnerable to the reverse-direction explanation, in which socially skilled children simply elicit better parenting. Still, the researchers and outside observers alike caution that unmeasured factors, from parental education to neighborhood resources to genetic influences, could partly account for the association. Families that provide stimulating, responsive home environments may also differ in other ways that support children’s social development, and the study’s self-report measures of the home environment, while validated, cannot capture every nuance of daily family life.

The results arrive amid a broader scientific reassessment of how much early social competence matters for the life course. Prior longitudinal work has linked kindergarten social skills to outcomes decades later, including educational attainment, employment, and public health indicators, suggesting that the preschool years represent a window in which social trajectories are set into motion. Related studies from the same research group and collaborators have documented the importance of home environments for children’s social competence in Japan and Nepal, and have shown bidirectional relationships between supportive parenting and social skills among Chinese preschoolers. The new study extends this literature by moving from variable-centered correlations to a classification framework, which may prove more useful for identifying children who need support.

The practical implications are likely to resonate with educators and policymakers. If children’s social skills cluster into distinguishable subtypes, then screening and intervention programs could be designed to identify children in the lower-profile groups early, rather than waiting for difficulties to surface in school. The finding that the home-rearing environment predicts subtype membership points to the family as a key lever: parenting programs, home visiting schemes, and public education campaigns that enrich the early home environment, for example by promoting responsive interaction, play, and shared learning activities, may help shift children away from the lower social skill profiles. In China, where kindergarten typically spans ages three to six and where rapid social change has transformed child-rearing practices, such interventions are already the subject of active policy discussion.

The authors emphasize that their work highlights the need to provide a better home-rearing environment at early ages to help children develop higher levels of social skills, while acknowledging the study’s limitations, including its sample size and its reliance on parent-reported environmental data. Future research, they suggest, should follow children over longer periods, incorporate observational measures of the home environment, and test whether the same subtypes replicate in other cultural settings. For now, the message from this Chinese cohort is a familiar but powerful one: the social lives of preschoolers are not shaped in the classroom alone. Long before children learn to negotiate the sandbox, the texture of their earliest years at home has already begun to write the script.

Subject of Research: Latent class subtyping of preschool children's social skills and its prediction by the early home-rearing environment in Chinese kindergartens

Article Title: Subtyping of children’s social skills and association with home-rearing environment: Evidence from Chinese preschools

Article References: Zhu, Z., Li, X., & Anme, T. (2026). Subtyping of children’s social skills and association with home-rearing environment: Evidence from Chinese preschools. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09971-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09971-0

Keywords: social skills, preschool children, home-rearing environment, latent class analysis, assertion, self-control, cooperation, child development, parenting, Chinese kindergartens, longitudinal study, social competence