This study examined the impact of different styles of parental communication and teaching on children's problem solving, focusing on how parental teaching and communication styles affected children's performance on four problem-solving games involving deduction/categorization and planning. Thirty-two children ages 4 and 5 years and their families from around the island of Oahu, Hawaii, participated in the study. Videotaped home visits consisted of an individual-play pretest, a parent-partner phase, and an individual-play posttest. The children played one deduction/categorization and one planning game with their parents. The study found that as parental metacognition instruction and strategic explanation increased, so did children's posttest scores compared to their pretest scores. Parents exhibited more metacognitive instruction and positive feedback on planning games than on deduction/categorization games. On the arrangement planning games, overall pedagogical interactions were important, but none of the specific styles was individually important. (MDM)