According to Lareau’s (2003) concept of concerted cultivation, upper and middle-class parents aim more systematically to promote their children’s skills in various ways in comparison with lower class parents. These differences in parenting are assumed to affect children’s skill development. Whereas Lareau developed her concept for families with elementary school children, and much of the subsequent literature has focused on this age group or older, we argue that concerted cultivation is likely to be visible already during early childhood. Therefore, we investigated if participation in organized leisure activities and parents’ promotion of cognitive stimulation during early childhood—as two indicators of concerted cultivation—explain later differences in cognitive skills. We furthermore examined if concerted cultivation mediates the association between social background and cognitive skills of children. We drew on longitudinal data from 1,632 children in the Starting Cohort 2 of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). We show that parents with high socio-economic status are more likely to enroll their 5-year-old children in organized leisure activities and to read to them daily. Results from lagged dependent variable regressions indicate that only enrollment in music mediates the relationship between parental socio-economic status and children’s skill development in math and reasoning. Our study highlights the prevalence of concerted cultivation as a parenting style of the German middle-class already during early childhood. Nevertheless, it only moderately contributes to children’s cognitive skill development. Our mediation analysis showed that only music participation explained a modest portion of the background-specific differences in math and reasoning skills.

根据Lareau（2003）的一致耕作概念，与低层父母相比，中上层父母的目标是通过各种方式更系统地提高孩子的技能。养育子女的这些差异被认为会影响儿童的技能发展。尽管Lareau为有小学生的家庭开发了她的概念，而随后的许多文献都集中在这个年龄段或更高的年龄组，但我们认为，在童年早期就已经可以看到一致的耕作。因此，我们调查了参加有组织的休闲活动和父母在幼儿期促进认知刺激（作为共同培养的两个指标）是否解释了后来的认知能力差异。我们还研究了一致的培养是否能够介导儿童的社会背景与认知能力之间的联系。我们从德国国家教育小组研究（NEPS）的第2项队列中抽取了1,632名儿童的纵向数据。我们表明，具有较高社会经济地位的父母更有可能让5岁的孩子参加有组织的休闲活动，并每天阅读。滞后因变量回归的结果表明，只有音乐入学才能介导父母的社会经济地位与孩子的数学和推理能力发展之间的关系。我们的研究凸显了早在童年就已经开始将协调耕作作为德国中产阶级的养育方式。不过，它仅适度地有助于儿童的认知能力发展。我们的调解分析表明，只有音乐参与才能解释数学和推理技能中背景特定差异的适度部分。