Families’ social backgrounds matter: socio-economic factors, home learning and young children’s language, literacy and social outcomes

Abstract

Parental support with children’s learning is considered to be one pathway through which socio-economic factors influence child competencies. Utilising a national longitudinal sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, this study examined the relationship between home learning and parents’ socio-economic status and their impact on young children’s language/literacy and socio-emotional competence. The findings consistently showed that, irrespective of socio-economic status, parents engaged with various learning activities (except reading) roughly equally. The socio-economic factors examined in this study, i.e., family income and maternal educational qualifications, were found to have a stronger effect on children’s language/literacy than on social-emotional competence. Socio-economic disadvantage, lack of maternal educational qualifications in particular, remained powerful in influencing competencies in children aged three and at the start of primary school. For children in the first decade of this century in England, these findings have equity implications, especially as the socio-economic gap in our society widens.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, and the UK Data Archive for their support and advice on working with the MCS. Many thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. Due to large sample sizes, a number of chi-square analyses were statistically significant; however, the effects sizes (Crammer’s V) were weak with the exception of some analyses, i.e. reading at three and five and Reading Homework at five, for which the effect sizes were modest.

2. In Tables 2, 3, 4, horizontally, the percentages of parents involved with learning activities do not add to 100 because the very small percentage of parents who rated the frequency of involvement with home learning as ‘not at all’ was not included.