This study assesses the feasibility of predicting children's verbal attainment scores by examining mothers' education and parenting styles and children's experience of preschool. Data are derived from a group of 5,362 children born in England, Wales, and Scotland in March of 1946. The parenting styles have been studied from the time the parents' firstborn children were 4 years old. Tests administered when the children were 8 years old assessed the children's abilities in vocabulary, reading, and sentence completion. Study findings focused on five areas: (1) parents' educational and socioeconomic characteristics in relation to their children's preschool experience; (2) styles of parenting as associated with children's preschool attendance or nonattendance; (3) maternal assessments of self and child; (4) association of preschool experience and parenting characteristics, styles, and self-assessments with children's verbal attainment scores; and (5) verbal attainment of children who experienced relatively low levels of maternal stimulation. Although preschool experience was an independent and significant predictor of verbal attainment scores, its power was small when compared with mothers' education. In addition, preschool attendance had no significance in predicting the scores of children whose mothers were relatively understimulating. (DST)