Parental Factors and Pupils’ School Readiness in Umuahia North Local Government Area, Abia State

This study investigated the influence of parental factors and pupils’ school readiness in Umuahia North Local Government Area. To achieve this purpose, three specific objectives and corresponding research questions were also raised to guide the study, three null hypotheses were postulated to guide the study and were tested at .05 level of significance. The descriptive survey research design was employed and used for this study. The population of the study was 4500 ECC II pupils with parents. Purposive and simple random sampling was used to select a sample size of 450 ECC II pupils with parents. Parental’ Factors Questionnaire (PFQ), for parents and Pupils’ School Readiness Rating Scale (PSRRS) for pupils were used as instruments for the study. The face and content validities of the instruments was determined by experts in Psychological Foundations of Education and Early Childhood Education. The Cronbach’s alpha statistical analysis was used to determine the reliability of instruments which yielded reliability indices of 0.73, 0.71 and 0.77 respectively. Mean analysis and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to test the null hypotheses. The study revealed that: there is a significant influence of parental styles, parental socio-economic status, and parental educational background on pupils’ school readiness in Umuahia North Local Government Area. Based on the findings of the study, the study recommended among others that parents should be encouraged to improve on their relationship with their children and choose the right parenting style that will help the children to behave positively in their readiness to adapt to school environment.