Maternal literacy teaching, causal attributions and children’s literacy skills in Finnish-speaking and language minority families

•Majority population mothers’ and language minority mother’s attributions and reactions for the literacy teaching were different.•Majority population mothers attributed success and progress by the abilities of their children.•Language minority mothers explained more their children’s success in school by hard work.•Internal attributions have more positive effect on children’s success in school than do external attributions.

This study investigated the effect of mothers’ (language minority group mothers, LM, n = 49, and Finnish speaking mothers, MP, n = 368) literacy teaching at home, and mothers’ causal attributions of their children’s (mean age 11.48 years) literacy skills at fourth grade in Finland. For Finnish speaking mothers, results showed a negative correlation between the amount of literacy taught at home and children’s performance on reading tests i.e., more teaching was associated with poorer performance and vice versa. Also, the more MP mothers measured their children’s success by their ability, the better their children performed in reading comprehension tests. In the LM group, maternal literacy teaching did not predict children’s reading skills.