Our study shows that additional aspects of EF are important for scaffolding as our EF composite measure included inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility and that parental EF also matters for scaffolding of preschoolers. • It is noteworthy that parental EF contributed to scaffolding above and beyond verbal ability. This suggests that it is not just overall cognitive level, but rather specific cognitive capacities that are important.• Scaffolding had a nonsignificant trend in the direction that higher scaffolding related to better child DCCS, measuring cognitive flexibility. And it is possible that in a larger sample this relation would be significant.