Socioeconomic gradients in child development: Evidence from a Chilean longitudinal study 2010–2017

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Abstract

Empirical evidence shows that lack of resources during infancy and the process of accumulating disadvantages throughout childhood have important consequences for cognitive and socio-emotional development. This paper examines socioeconomic gradients across language and socio-emotional measures. Using longitudinal data from 7-year, three-wave panel data, we study the patterns of socioeconomic status and child development in Chile and estimate how much of the wealth gap can be explained by different mediators like maternal educational and skills, child attendance of preschool and school, possession of books, or domestic violence indicators. We show that there are strong associations between household wealth and child development, and that, as the child grows, the gap between the most extreme quintiles of the distribution, both in cognitive and socio-emotional skills, persists but decreases in magnitude. Taking advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data, we calculate a permanent skill for each child and each skill dimension in this 7-year period. The analysis for the permanent component shows that wealth gaps are important to determine language, but not socio-emotional skills, and that the gap is larger for girls than for boys in the early childhood period. While mediators account for some of the associations, there is still a large socioeconomic gap that persists in receptive language among children. The most important factors that mediate the wealth gaps are inherited from maternal characteristics. By understanding the dynamism of social and cognitive vulnerability experienced during childhood and employing longitudinal data and methods, this study contributes to and extends the existing literature on socioeconomic gaps and child development in the Latin American context.

Introduction

Evidence indicates that experiencing a lack of resources in critical periods during infancy and the process of accumulation of disadvantages throughout childhood have important consequences in different domains across the life course (Cunha and Heckman, 2008, Kelly et al., 2011). Family socioeconomic status (SES) has been recognised as one of the primary factors that determine educational gaps during the life course (Agupusi, 2019, Duncan and Magnuson, 2011, Poon, 2020). Evidence shows that language and cognitive gaps emerge very early in the life course, that is, even before children enter the educational system (Aughinbaugh and Gittleman, 2003, Blau, 1999, Rubio-Codina et al., 2015). This evidence is available for developed countries (Currie, 2009), developing countries (Galasso et al., 2019, Lopez Boo, 2016), Latin American countries (Fernald et al., 2012, Paxson and Schady, 2007, Rubio-Codina et al., 2015, Schady et al., 2015), and for Chile (Behrman, Contreras, Palma, & Puentes, 2017).

The early cognitive and non-cognitive gaps generated in early childhood can adversely affect future development, resulting in consequences such as fewer years of schooling (Currie, 2009, Walker et al., 2011), a higher probability of early pregnancy (Cunha and Heckman, 2008, Kelly et al., 2011), lower skills to enrol in high school (Reardon, Valentino, Kalogrides, Shores, & Greenberg, 2013). In addition, these early gaps affect future performances in social and labour outcomes, such as lower probability of employment and lower earnings (Heckman, Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006), worse adult health (Campbell et al., 2014), and a higher probability of participation in criminal activities (Heckman et al., 2006). As cumulative inequality theory posits that childhood conditions are important to adulthood, childhood conditions structure the life course not only in terms of personality formation and stability, but also in terms of achievement and well-being (Ferraro, Shippee, & Schafer, 2009).

This evidence points to the fact that disadvantages found at an early age will result in the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, perpetuating and deepening the inequalities in the development of children and having important consequences during the life course if they are not addressed in time by policymakers. Different theoretical models are used to explain this transmission of disadvantage. Specifically, the life-course framework with the critical period perspective assumes that there are particular life-course stages where exposure to certain socioeconomic circumstances and life experiences might be particularly harmful for an individual’s later life (Kuh, Ben-Shlomo, Lynch, Hallqvist, & Power, 2003; Madero-Cabib, Azar, & Perez-Cruz, 2019). In this specific case, the critical period is early childhood. Early childhood is a sensitive and critical stage of life. Research in neurobiology and developmental psychology argues that the initial years of life offer an opportunity to alter neural circuits before they mature and become more difficult to modify (Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2010). Critical aspects of the brain architecture begin to be shaped by experience before and soon after birth. Many fundamental aspects of that architecture are established well before a child enters school (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2007). Consequently, the significant role that the early-life environment has on later-life development and well-being are key determinants for the process of expected life trajectories.

Section snippets

The gap: timing of formation and changes over time

Empirical evidence that explores socioeconomic gradients in cognitive and/or non-cognitive outcomes has explored the magnitude of the gap in different life domains and for different contexts (Aughinbaugh and Gittleman, 2003, Berger et al., 2009, Blau, 1999, Bradley and Corwyn, 2002, Guo and Harris, 2000, Paxson and Schady, 2007, Rubio-Codina et al., 2015; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Schady et al., 2015; Duncan & Magnuson, 2011), but only a few have explored the timing

Potential mediators linking wealth and children’s development

The existing literature has proposed a variety of potential mechanisms linking SES and children’s abilities. The parental investment perspective (Becker and Tomes, 1986, Haveman and Wolfe, 1994) theorises that income enables families to invest in building the human capital of their children through the purchase of goods and services. According to this perspective, higher income and education enable parents to provide more and better food, education, medical care, and neighbourhood environment,

Timing of the gaps, mediators and permanent effects across the life course

In this paper we look at the effect of wealth disparities on cognitive and socio-emotional skills in children between 18 months and 12 years of age in Chile, performing a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. In particular, we: (1) identify, using cross-sectional data, the existence of wealth gaps and their magnitude in receptive language and socio-emotional skills in infants; (2) show when the gaps are generated in the life course and how these gaps change over time; (3) determine,

Data

The data used in this paper come from the Chilean Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood (ELPI), a nationwide representative survey. This face-to-face survey collects two types of information: a sociodemographic survey applied to all mothers and a battery of tests for evaluating cognitive, socio-emotional, and anthropometric development in children and their mothers. The sample for the 2010 wave was randomly drawn from official administrative birth records of children born between January 2006

Empirical strategy

The empirical strategy consists of four sets of analyses. First, the analyses of the selection of the mediators. Second, a cross-sectional analysis is performed for each wave of the ELPI to determine the existence and magnitude of wealth disparities in the development of receptive vocabulary and socio-emotional skills in each cohort. This is a descriptive analysis and we do not claim that the relationship is causal. It contributes to show how important these disparities are and what mediators

Wealth gaps and their magnitude in language and socio-emotional skills

To identify the existence of the wealth gap and its magnitude in cognitive and socio-emotional skills in children, the first set of results explore the bivariate association between the wealth gradients and the children’s outcomes without any controls, in order to understand the unadjusted gap. Means of the standardized test scores for children by wealth quintiles in each period were calculated using the cross-sectional data. This means that in 2010 there were children between 6 months and 5

Discussion

This paper presents evidence of strong associations between household wealth and cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes during childhood. Using longitudinal data from Chile and using several methods and measures of skills, we show that there is an important socioeconomic gap that persists in language and socio-emotional skills among children. In particular, in the cross-sectional analysis we find that there are significant inequalities in the scores obtained by children who belong to households

Acknowledgments

Alejandra Abufhele and Amanda Telias acknowledges the financial support provided by ANID PIA CIE160007. Dante Contreras, Alejandra Abufhele and Amanda Telias acknowledges the financial support provided by the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies ANID/FONDAP/15130009. Esteban Puentes, Natalia Valdebenito and Dante Contreras acknowledges the funding of the ANID - Millennium Science Initiative Program – Code: NCS17_015.

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