Parental Enactment During Shared Book Reading in Japan

Abstract

This paper examined how Japanese parents use enactment toward their 0–4-year-old children in the context of joint picture book reading. The use of enactments/utterances and dialogues created for emulating a fictional character has not been sufficiently studied in the context of parent-child joint picture book reading. In this study Japanese parent–child dyads (children’s age=0;2–4;11, n=105) were video-recorded while the parents read a picture book to their children in Japanese. The results showed that enactments can be further divided into three categories, namely action, sensation, and conversation, each of which is employed differently and tailored to the child’s age. Furthermore, the parents of pre-verbal children were found to immerse their children in rich enactment, whereas the parents of older children tended to scale back the use of enactments as their children matured. Based on the content of the enactments, in conjunction with the quantitative results, this study suggests that the use of enactments during shared book reading by Japanese parents may be a form of scaffolding for the formation of empathy and the acquisition of social routines that begin in infancy and end when children are about four years old.