Research has confirmed that what parents view as being important for their children to learn and how they believe their children are able to learn are reflected in both the learning opportunities parents provide in the home and the teaching strategies they use with their children. Tape recordings of children and their parents during planned reading and writing events in the home showed that during the writing tasks, parents' language tended to be very directive. Some parents made the decisions about what the child should write. Some told their children where to place the letters or how to make them. For the most part, parents initiated the task with questions or made requests for specific information. Their responses were more often than not correcting ones. During the reading events, half of the parents did not read the title of the book. Most of the parents pointed to the illustrations as they read, but did not stop to talk about them. Parents read the text just as it was written. They tended to use the "what's that" kind of questions and they did not wait for cooperative reading that might have occurred in the repeated phrases in the books. The tapes showed an interesting phenomenon: without exception, all of the parents were far more comfortable with and supportive of the child's self-help model of writing than they were of that model of reading. (HOD)