SOCIOECONOMIC

STATUS AND CHILD

DEVELOPMENT
ANGELA TANG-TAN
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
2
1.
INTRODUCTION
Educational systems are in need of new and compelling
strategies to best foster development in children at all
socioeconomic levels.

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 1 IN 5 CHILDREN
in the United States live below the poverty line (Duncan et al.
2017).

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KEY TERMS
◈ Socioeconomic status
◆ Defined as “contrasting contexts of scarcity” (Duncan et al.
2017).
◆ Measured through surveying parents' income levels,
occupations, and educational backgrounds.
◈ Child development
◆ Quantified by testing a child's mastery of language, reading
comprehension, vocabulary, mathematics, and other
functional skills.
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THE STATE OF CURRENT RESEARCH
◈ A lack of consensus within the field
◆ Some studies found strong relationships between
socioeconomic status and child development.
◆ Others observed weaker correlations, or correlations only
apparent in certain groups or under certain conditions.
◈ The need for further research
◆ Further study could help guide pedagogical approaches to
help children from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed
alongside their more privileged peers
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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
7
2.
STRONG CORRELATIONS
Evidence for a strong relationship between family
socioeconomic status and child developmental outcomes.

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ROWE (2008) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Parents’ interactions with children had a strong
impact on child vocabulary development.
◈ Parent interaction quality had much to do with
the parent’s educational background.
◈ Parents who talked to their children more and
used language of greater complexity raised
children with more vocabulary skill. Thus,
parents from more educated backgrounds
passed advantage along to their children.
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SOHR-PRESTON ET AL. (2013) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Experimenters studied 3 generations in a
family to find the relationship between
socioeconomic status, parental education,
parental investment in children, and child
developmental outcomes.
◈ Parental income and educational level
were excellent predictors of children’s
development and eventual educational
attainment.
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FERNALD ET AL. (2011) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Sampled 3-6-year-old children in 150
communities in Madagascar, where child
development has been little studied.
◈ Found that socioeconomic factors had a
strong association with child
performance, and developmental
disparities between wealthier and poorer
children grew more pronounced as they
grew older.
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WEALTH GAP IN MADAGASCAR

Fig. 1. Reprinted from Fernald et al. 2011.

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NAJMAN ET AL. (2004) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Cohort included 8556 pregnant women in
Australia
◆ They are their children were
followed until the children reached
14 years.
◈ Found that children from low-income
families had higher incidence of problems
when it came to mental health and
language and reasoning ability.
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“
The script for these children’s lives
has been substantially written by the
time they reach the age of 14.”
- Najman et al.

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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
15
3.
WEAK CORRELATIONS
Evidence for weak or no relationship between family
socioeconomic status and child developmental outcomes.

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LETOURNEAU ET AL. (2013) KEY FINDINGS
◈ “a meta-analysis of research on… SES
and developmental outcomes.”
◈ Found that socioeconomic status was
only weakly correlated with academic
achievement.
◈ Other factors related to socioeconomic
level, like parental interaction with
children and family cohesion, might be
more causal to child development.
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HASSAN ET AL. (2019) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Investigated the relationship between
socioeconomic status and a child’s mental
inhibitory control.
◈ Found that good attention focusing skills
could mitigate low socioeconomic status.
◈ Children with certain internal and
external advantages experienced the
impact of socioeconomic status
differently.
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WEALTH AND INHIBITION

Fig. 2. Reprinted from Hassan et al. 2019.

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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
20
4.
SURPRISING TRENDS
Evidence implying that there is more nuance to the
relationship between socioeconomic status and child
development than meets the eye.

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KIEFFER ET AL. (2011) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Dataset consisted of 9,189 students,
who were followed from kindergarten
through the eighth grade.
◈ Found that, under some circumstances,
low socioeconomic status improved
child development outcomes.
◈ The achievement gap decreased, and
then increased again as the children
aged.
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STRANG AND PIASTA (2016) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Examined the relationship between
family socioeconomic status and
literacy in children enrolled at a
single early childhood center.
◈ Found that socioeconomic status
strongly influences where children
start in development, but does not
have so much of an effect on their
educational progress.
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RAFFINGTON ET AL. (2018) KEY FINDINGS
◈ Examined longitudinal dynamics
between family income and child
cognitive dynamics.
◈ Found that a child’s cognitive
score predicted income gain for the
family.
◈ This may be due to children with
low cognitive scores diverting
resources from parents.
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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
25
5.
CONCLUSION
Although socioeconomic status is associated with child
developmental outcomes, the nature and strength of this
linkage remains unclear and requires further study.

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FLAWS IN THE RESEARCH
◈ Lack of generalizability
◆ Study samples were not representative of the general
population
◆ Most samples were primarily white and middle class.
◆ Several longitudinal studies also suffered from participants
dropping out over time.
◈ Lack of established causation
◆ It is difficult to establish an ethical experimental
manipulation when the test subjects are human children.
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
◈ Causal manipulations
◆ Examining child development before and after a new law
has been implemented, impacting a community's
socioeconomic landscape (Duncan et al. 2017).
◈ Gendered differences
◆ Looking at differences in parental communication styles in
relation to a child’s gender.
◈ Other parts of the world
◆ Examining child rearing in non-Western cultures and
countries that suffer from systemic poverty.
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POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
◈ Early childhood educational
interventions provide a means of
mitigating inequality in children’s
socioeconomic backgrounds.
◈ Addressing developmental gaps
early in childhood can help to
ameliorate the effects of familial
socioeconomic disparity.

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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Strong correlations
3. Weak correlations
4. Surprising trends
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited &
Acknowledgements
30
REFERENCES
◈ Duncan, Greg J., et al. (2017). Moving Beyond Correlations in Assessing the Consequences of

Poverty. The Annual Review of Psychology, 68(68), pp. 10.1-10.22

◈ Fernald, L. C., Weber, A., Galasso, E., Ratsifandrihamanana, L. (2011). Socioeconomic gradients and

child development in a very low income population: Evidence from Madagascar. Developmental

Science, 14(4), pp. 832-847.

◈ Hassan, R., Mills, A. S., Day, K. L., Van Lieshout, R. J., Schmidt, L. A. (2019). Relations among

Temperament, Familial Socioeconomic Status, and Inhibitory Control in Typically Developing

Four-Year-Old Children. Journal of Child and Family Studies, pp. 1-9.

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REFERENCES
◈ Kieffer, M. J. (2011). Before and after third grade: Longitudinal evidence for the shifting role of

socioeconomic status in reading growth. Reading and Writing, 25(7), pp. 1725-1746.

◈ Letourneau, N. L., Duffett-Leger, L., Levac, L., Watson, B., Young-Morris, C. (2013). Socioeconomic

status and child development: A meta-analysis. Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, 21(3),

pp. 211-224.

◈ Najman, J. M., Aird, R., Bor, W., O’Callaghan, M., Williams, G. M., Shuttlewood, G. J. (2004). The

generational transmission of socioeconomic inequalities in child cognitive development and emotional

health. Social Science & Medicine, 58(6), pp. 1147-1158.

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REFERENCES
◈ Raffington, L., Prindle, J. J., Shing, Y. L. (2018). Income gains predict cognitive functioning

longitudinally throughout later childhood in poor children. Developmental Psychology, 54(7), pp.

1232-1243.

◈ Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child

development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35(1), pp. 185-205.

◈ Sohr-Preston, S. L., Scaramella, L. V., Martin, M. J., Neppl, T. K., Ontai, L., Conger, R. (2013).

Parental socioeconomic status, communication, and children's vocabulary development: A

third‐generation test of the family investment model. Child Development, 84(3), pp. 1046-1062.

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REFERENCES
◈ Strang, T. M. and Piasta, S. B. (2016). Socioeconomic differences in code-focused emergent literacy

skills. Reading and Writing, 29(7), pp. 1337-1362.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
◈ Special thanks to my PI, Dr. Kimberly Freeman, and my peer editors.

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