This study examined parental strategies used with beginning readers, particularly how parents responded to children's miscues and what general admonitions they provided while listening to their children read. Subjects were 19 middle-class children (from 5 to 7 years old) and their parents. Each parent-child pair was visited at home and presented with four storybooks of ascending level of difficulty for beginning readers. Parents were instructed to help their child read the storybooks as they normally would; sessions were audiotaped and nonverbal behaviors, such as pointing to words or pictures, were noted. Next, parents helped children complete six colored worksheets containing items from the reading recognition subtest of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised (PIAT-R). Finally, parents and teachers completed a questionnaire designed to determine their approach to reading instruction at home. Analysis revealed that the majority of parents viewed reading as a bottom-up process, frequently helping their children over miscues by helping them sound out the miscued words. Parents also tended to use more context cues with children who showed poorer reading ability on the PIAT-R. No significant correlation was found between children's reading level and parental use of decoding strategies. Contains 27 references. (MM)