Parents and Teachers Differ in Judging Preschool Readiness of Young Children

Parents see their three-year-olds through rosier lenses than the trained eyes of preschool teachers, according to a large-scale new study from the Czech Republic—and the gap between the two perspectives is systematic, not random. The research, published in the International Journal of Early Childhood, compared how parents and teachers assess the same children’s readiness for preschool and found that parents consistently rate their children’s abilities higher, particularly in language, social communication, and self-care skills. The finding carries significant weight at a moment when early childhood assessments are increasingly used not just for screening but for consequential decisions such as classroom placement, raising concerns that over-reliance on any single observer could distort the trajectory of a child’s education from its very first days.

The team, led by Milon Potmesil and Petra Potmesilova of Palacký University Olomouc together with Jitka Petrova, set out to fill a genuine gap in the developmental literature. Although early childhood development is one of the strongest predictors of later academic success—neuroscience shows that the first three years of life involve the most intense synaptogenesis of the entire lifespan, with a toddler’s brain containing roughly twice as many synaptic connections as an adult’s—remarkably little research has examined how different observers perceive developmental milestones during the initial transition into preschool. Most existing studies rely on either clinical assessments or a single informant’s perspective. This new work provides a direct head-to-head comparison of two informants evaluating the same child, using identical instruments, in a large real-world sample.

The study’s scale and design lend it considerable statistical power. In October 2024, one month after children began attending kindergarten, the researchers collected 706 paired questionnaires covering 706 children—353 boys and 353 girls, all aged between 36 and 47 months, with an average age of 42 months. Critically, each child was assessed independently by one parent and one teacher, producing two separate data points per child and allowing paired statistical comparisons. The instrument was the anonymized Preschool Education Questionnaire, comprising 15 items organized into three thematic domains: language and speech, motor skills and independence in self-care, and social communication. The items were calibrated for children aged 36 to 48 months entering preschool education, with most rated on a three-point scale capturing whether a behavior is consistently present, occasionally present, or absent. Content validity was established through review by a panel of experts in early childhood education and special pedagogy, and the instrument was piloted in selected kindergartens before full deployment.

The psychometric properties of the tool proved solid. Internal consistency, measured by Cronbach’s alpha, reached .727 for teacher assessments and .820 for parent assessments—values indicating sufficiently high reliability for research purposes. Test-retest stability, assessed with Pearson’s correlation coefficient in a subsample, yielded coefficients of .847 for teachers and .778 for parents, both statistically significant, confirming that respondents produced consistent results across repeated measurement. Data were analyzed in IBM SPSS version 29, with paired-sample t-tests used to compare parent and teacher ratings item by item and across category totals, alongside linear regression and Student’s t-tests for the broader hypotheses.

The central result is unambiguous: parents tend to overestimate their children’s abilities compared to teachers, regardless of the child’s gender or age. The discrepancy was statistically significant in two of the three domains—motor skills and independence in self-care, and social communication—with the largest item-level gaps concentrated in items eight through eleven, which focus on a child’s interaction with another person. In other words, the very behaviors that matter most for functioning in a group setting are the ones on which parents and teachers diverge most sharply. Parents observe their children at home, on playgrounds, and among extended family, where communication and social behavior sit close to the emotional core of relationships; teachers, by contrast, benchmark each child against peers in a group setting and against professional standards for what children of that age typically do in structured collective routines.

The study also produced a genuinely surprising finding on gender. Overall readiness scores showed no statistically significant difference between boys and girls, and neither parents’ nor teachers’ total ratings varied by gender or age. Yet in the specific domain of language and speech, both informant groups rated boys significantly higher than girls—a result that directly contradicts a substantial body of prior research, including studies of early communication development indicating that girls typically develop verbal skills earlier and acquire richer vocabularies with greater grammatical accuracy. The authors offer a methodological explanation: unlike standardized linguistic tests that emphasize vocabulary size or syntactic complexity, the Preschool Education Questionnaire emphasizes the spontaneity and frequency of communication. In a novel, stimulating environment like a preschool classroom, boys may display more externalized, assertive communication styles that observers interpret as higher linguistic competence, even though structured language measures would likely favor girls. The finding may also reflect perceptual bias shaped by family “gender culture,” in which parental expectations and gendered socialization filter what adults notice and how they rate it.

The researchers are careful to frame these informant discrepancies not as mere measurement error but as meaningful signals. Their explanation centers on differing “frames of reference.” Parents evaluate in terms of daily functioning and emotional concern—can the child communicate needs, tolerate separation, dress, eat, perform basic motor tasks—and these judgments are colored by attachment and by aspirations. Teachers evaluate within a professional, comparative framework, prioritizing independence, concentration, and social regulation in the context of group instruction. A child may therefore be “ready” in the home context while simultaneously appearing “unready” in the institutional one. The authors argue this means preschool readiness is not a fixed trait residing within the child but a relational construct that emerges between the child and the specific demands of the environment. Previous research supports this interpretation: studies across multiple developmental domains have reported only low to moderate consensus between parent and teacher ratings, and large-scale work on caregiver reports has documented measurement bias across demographic variables, including the caregiver’s gender, education level, and the child’s age.

The stakes of getting this right are higher than they might appear. Teachers’ evaluations of children’s academic readiness at kindergarten entry have been shown to predict academic outcomes years later, through the fifth grade, and readiness assessments are increasingly used for institutional decisions such as class placement—practices that can sort children by prior academic and linguistic ability before formal schooling even begins. If a single informant’s perspective drives these decisions, systematic optimism or systematic bias could translate directly into ability tracking at age three. The Czech context makes this especially pertinent: a growing number of Czech children now start kindergarten at age three, driven by parental employment patterns and the expansion of preschool provision, and a corresponding number arrive with developmental readiness that is not fully established. Some struggle with emotional separation, adapting to group routines, or following structured activities, and diagnosis at this age is complicated by the subjectivity of evaluators.

The practical prescription the authors advance is a multi-informant, multi-method assessment framework. Parental reports capture habitual behaviors, emotional responses, and emerging self-help skills in emotionally secure environments—subtleties that may never surface in a structured classroom. Teacher observations provide a standardized, comparative lens on how the child manages collective routines and peer interaction. Neither alone is sufficient: a child who appears shy and withdrawn at preschool may be confident and initiatory at home, and without parental input that pattern could be misread as developmental delay rather than situational adaptation. The authors recommend that teachers actively solicit specific examples of how a child behaves at home—how the child reacts to frustration, plays with siblings, follows instructions—while parents can be equipped with simple, validated screening checklists that help them align their observations with professional benchmarks. Where speech or motor concerns arise from either side, targeted standardized screening and referral to specialists such as speech therapists or physiotherapists should follow, since subtle articulation issues or coordination deficits can be masked by compensatory behaviors in everyday settings.

For parents, the message is not that their perceptions are wrong, but that they are incomplete. Emotional involvement heightens sensitivity to subtle deviations in speech, prosocial behavior, and motor skills that may be invisible in a group of twenty children; it also inflates ratings in comfortable, nonevaluative contexts. For educators and policymakers, the study is a warning against treating any single observer’s report as ground truth during the preschool transition. The collaborative model the researchers describe transforms assessment from a one-time verdict into a continuous, responsive process in which teachers, parents, and specialists share responsibility for developmental support—reducing the child’s stress during the transition, aligning expectations between home and school, and ensuring that interventions land within the narrow developmental window when neuroplasticity allows the fastest improvement. In an era when the first day of kindergarten increasingly functions as a sorting moment, the finding that parents and teachers literally see different children suggests that the most accurate picture of any child requires both sets of eyes.