Saudi Mothers’ Perspectives on Early Home Learning: Play, Literacy, and Socioemotional Experiences in Everyday Family Interactions

This qualitative study explores how Saudi mothers describe the relationship between play, literacy-related practices, and socioemotional experiences within everyday home learning interactions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 mothers of children aged 3–6 years in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, the study employed reflexive thematic analysis to examine mothers’ accounts of shared reading, symbolic play, routine-based interaction, sibling engagement, and media-related learning. The findings suggest that mothers frequently narrated literacy-related experiences—such as vocabulary use, emergent reading behaviors, storytelling, and symbolic representation—alongside socioemotional experiences, including confidence, motivation, emotional security, persistence, and self-regulation. Rather than providing direct evidence of children’s developmental change, the study shows how mothers perceived and interpreted these domains as interconnected within relational home interactions. Play emerged as an important context, but the findings also highlight the broader role of responsive relational interaction across non-play routines such as shared reading, cooking, storytelling, and sibling exchanges. The study proposes a provisional interpretive framework that organizes mothers’ narratives around family and educational background, interactional opportunities, relational qualities, and perceived child experiences. This framework is intended as hypothesis-generating rather than as a validated developmental model. Situated within a Saudi sociocultural context, the study contributes to early childhood research by foregrounding mothers’ perspectives on the relational and culturally embedded nature of early home learning.