Letters from Home: Sex-Discordant Patterns of Parent-Child Correspondence in Reading Achievement

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Abstract
Purpose: Children’s reading development is shaped through a complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences within families. This exploratory study investigated the intergenerational transmission of reading achievement within biological families. Prior studies have often measured different constructs in parents and children; many have included only mothers in models; and few have examined whether transmission varies by parent and child sex. We systematically examined whether parent-child associations in reading achievement varied by reading subcomponent, parent sex, and child sex. Method: Participants included 80 families (mother, father, child[ren] aged 7–12 years; n = 267). All participants completed identical standardized assessments across four reading subcomponents. Sex-stratified linear mixed models were used to estimate associations by parent and child sex, with shared reading explored as a mediator. Results: Sex-discordant dyads (father-daughter, mother-son) exhibited statistically significant associations across passage comprehension, reading fluency, and phonemic decoding efficiency, with sight word reading efficiency showing consistent trends but non-significant associations. Direct coefficients in significant sex-discordant dyads ranged from b = 0.49 to b = 0.89 (standard score units), with 99-100% sign stability under Monte Carlo cross-validation. Sex-concordant dyads showed non-significant associations. Permutation-based contrasts indicated that differences between sex-concordant and sex-discordant dyads were significant for passage comprehension, with suggestive evidence (confidence intervals excluding 0) for phonemic decoding. Shared reading did not significantly mediate associations. Conclusion: Observed associations were numerically stronger between children and opposite-sex parents, challenging assumptions of uniform transmission by dyad type. Passage comprehension and sentence reading fluency showed strongest similarity, while associations for sight word reading were weak. These exploratory findings underscore the importance of measure selection and the consideration of sex as a biological variable in familial control research.