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.Specifically, scaffolding could be important for helping children develop abilities such as EF over time and conversely child cognitive level may influence scaffolding over time• The extent to which parental cognitive abilities matter for scaffolding may depend on the context and as well as other parental characteristics.• Task was designed specifically to elicit scaffolding. This does not address the question of how often parents scaffold in daily life