Abstract
The objective of this qualitative study was to address existing gaps in the literature by gathering parent perspectives on both health and school readiness in regard to neighborhood context, specifically parents’ perceived level of neighborhood safety and support, on physical health and the behavioral and cognitive domains of school readiness. Focus groups were conducted with a total of 28 parents or caregivers whose children attended Early Head Start/Head Start Centers or who received Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) services in New Orleans, Louisiana during fall 2015. Parents discussed concepts of school readiness, neighborhood, the intersection between the two, and parental stress; however, few expressed a clear connection between their concerns about safety, their own stress, and their child’s readiness for school. Disparities in both health and school readiness exist between both racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States, and this study offers a unique and enhanced understanding of the impact of non-academic factors on the well-being and development of young children.
Highlights
Life conditions that are disadvantageous, either socially or economically, have been linked to poorer behavioral and cognitive outcomes in young children, which are associated with health across the life course [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The relationship between early learning and life conditions and health in adulthood is compounded for children of low socioeconomic status due to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in child health, neighborhood stress, and child development [9]
While research on disparities in school readiness has focused on factors such as early care and education environments and quality of the home environment, an additional factor that may be contributing to school readiness disparities is the neighborhood in which a child lives [2,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
Summary
Life conditions that are disadvantageous, either socially or economically, have been linked to poorer behavioral and cognitive outcomes in young children, which are associated with health across the life course [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. There is a substantive body of evidence demonstrating the association between neighborhood and child health and development, even when controlling for family-level characteristics such as income or parent involvement [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. While extensive theoretical literature exists outlining the hypothesized associations between neighborhood and child outcomes, little empirical
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