In the past decade, the shift in home language choice from Mandarin Chinese to English has sparked concerns of declining Chinese proficiency among the younger generation in Singapore. To address this, we conducted a study to examine how specific aspects of home language and literacy practices predicted Singaporean bilingual English-Chinese children’s emergent literacy skills in Chinese. We report here data from forty-nine Primary 1 (aged 6-7) children and their parents. Parents filled up a questionnaire asking about SES factors, home language environment (e.g., languages that the child hear and speak), and home literacy practices (e.g., reading and writing routines). Children’s emergent literacy skills in Chinese were measured with a radical awareness task which assessed their knowledge about the functions of semantic and phonetic radicals, as well as their sensitivity towards positional constraints of radicals. Correlational analyses revealed that children’s radical awareness was significantly related to various SES factors and various home literacy practices, such as the age at which the child starts to read both English and Chinese books, and frequency of visits to the library. Other home language and literacy practices such as amount of mother tongue input from family members and total number of books owned by the child did not significantly correlate with the children’s radical awareness. Regression analyses showed after accounting for effects of SES, home Chinese literacy practices, specifically the age at which the child starts to read Chinese books, best predicted children’s radical awareness. Our findings highlight the importance of introducing mother tongue reading materials to children from a young age and demonstrate the crucial role that early parental home literacy decisions play in predicting literacy development in a L2/heritage language.