Understanding How Neighborhood Poverty Impacts on Children's School Readiness

Background: Poverty has adverse effects on children’s developmental outcomes. Growing up both in poor families and poor neighborhoods may doubly disadvantage children, increasing the chances of perpetuating the cycle of poverty across generations. Holding family’s socioeconomic background constant, neighborhood poverty predicts children’s lower reading and math skills and more behavioral problems. But, how does neighborhood poverty affect young children?  Neighborhood poverty might affect children’s outcomes by not only exposing them to violence and reducing parents’ social networks, but also constraining families’ resources for learning and experiences. High-poverty neighborhoods likely have less institutional resources (e.g. libraries) that affect what activities parents do with their children than low-poverty neighborhoods. Our study examines whether neighborhood poverty is associated with children’s school readiness, and whether these associations are mediated by academic stimulation (e.g. library visit) they receive from parents. Understanding which pathways of influence are stronger is important for building policies and programs to support families and mitigate the effects of neighborhood poverty. 

Methods: Data were drawn from a Midwestern study of child care providers serving preschoolers. The sample includes 541 children and their parents. Parent’s information was collected by parent’s survey. We merged parents’ geocoded addresses with 2013 American Community Survey data to obtain neighborhood poverty rates at zip code level. Neighborhood poverty is measured as the percent of households living below the federal poverty threshold, and divided into three categories: low (<10%), moderate (10-19%), and high (≥20%) poverty neighborhoods. Academic stimulation includes in-home activities (number of children’s books at home, time spending in playing with toys, and television watching) and out-of-home activities (frequency of museum and library visits). Children’s school readiness is assessed by standardized measures of early literacy and math skills (Bracken School Readiness Assessment, Woodcock Johnson Applied Problems and Letter-Word Identification). Multinomial logistic regression with relative risk ratio (RRR) and multilevel modeling was used for analyses.

Results: Findings suggest that controlling for children’s characteristics and parental income, children in high-poverty neighborhoods have fewer books and spend less time playing at home than children in low-poverty neighborhoods. Specifically, a greater share of families living in high-poverty neighborhoods report having 10 books or less than families living in low-poverty neighborhoods (RRR=.05). Similarly, a greater share of children in high-poverty neighborhoods play for 1 hour or less a day at home (RRR=.19). Additionally, high-poverty neighborhoods are consistently associated with lower math scores (.47 SD) and basic concepts (.40 SD), but not pre-reading skills. Regression-based mediation analysis suggests that the number of children’s books mediates the association between neighborhood poverty and children’s math (17% of total effect) and basic concepts (24%), but not other learning activities.

Implications: Our results highlight the importance of neighborhood contexts in relation to children’s early academic skills. Identifying neighborhood poverty as one of the determinants in children’s outcomes has policy and practice implications for supporting families in high-poverty neighborhoods. Results also suggest interventions should increase access to community resources such as home visiting or young literacy programs to help families provide children with enriched learning environment.