Environmental Determinants of Early Literacy: Do Food Security and Neighborhood Safety Influence Reading Scores at Kindergarten Entry?

Background/Purpose: Research has shown the benefits of literacy development at a young age, with early academic interest and and skills leading to later achievement. Food insecurity is predictive of poor developmental trajectories in children. There is compelling evidence that a child’s surroundings, both within the home and within the broader community, have a significant impact on brain development, yet gaps remain.  The literature on food insecurity and children’s cognitive trajectories in the United States appears to be limited. The aim of this study is to assesses whether reading scores at Kindergarten entry are associated with micro- and meso- level attributes within a child’s environment, namely food security and neighborhood safely.  Methods: Using public data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K: 2011), we examined the extent to which neighborhood safety and food security affect reading scores in children at Kindergarten entry.  Our final analytic sample size is 10,300. Measurements: Dependent Variable: Child’s reading IRT scores Child’s reading IRT score (mean of 100, standard deviation of 15).  Predictors: Neighborhood Safety (categorical variable) and Food Security (categorical variable). Controls: Child age (continuous variable), child gender, child race/ethnicity, child low birth weight, family type, primary home language, household socioeconomic status (continuous variable). Results: a multivariate regression model confirmed that both neighborhood safety and food security were both significantly associated with child reading scores.  However, after controlling for confounding variables, including gender, race, family characteristics, and socio-economic status, food insecurity (coef -1.027, p<0.001) remained significant while adverse effects of an unsafe neighborhood no longer met the threshold for significance.  When applying the regression model with interactions for ethnicity, results showed Asian children (coef -5.599, p<0.005) negatively affected to a greater extent than their white counterparts. This model also confirms the detrimental effects of food insecurity on children’s reading scores (coef -0.978, p<0.010). Conclusions and implications: Since it is determined that food security has a more substantial impact on reading scores than does neighborhood safety, programs to increase food security among vulnerable families may be effective for increasing early literacy, with potentially differential effects by ethnic classification. Community outreach efforts can use this data to target particularly vulnerable children in order to enhance academic reading performance. More effective policies are needed to adequately mitigate academic implications for children with limited access to food. Further research is needed to understand racial disparities and the experiences and cultural beliefs of families who are living in food insecure households.