Abstract
Neighborhood income and social capital are considered important for child development, but social capital has rarely been measured directly at an aggregate level. We used Canadian data to derive measures of social capital from aggregated parental judgments of neighborhood collective efficacy and neighborhood safety. Measures of neighborhood income came from Census data. Direct measures of preschoolers’ school readiness were predicted from neighborhood-level variables, with regional indicators and household/parental characteristics taken into account. Our findings show that (1) residing in Quebec, being Black, and having a parent who was born outside Canada are positively associated with children’s living in disadvantaged or low collective efficacy neighborhoods as well as with their living in low-income households. (2) Children’s odds of residential mobility were reduced when the origin neighborhood had higher collective efficacy but increased when the family rented rather than owned. (3) Both neighborhood collective efficacy and children’s ever having lived in a poor neighborhood were correlated with receptive vocabulary scores, but results were mixed for other cognitive dimensions. Children of younger mothers scored worse on receptive vocabulary. There were similar patterns for demographic predictors related to visible minority status, sibship size, and birth order. Neighborhood average income had no effect on cognitive outcomes when the region was controlled.
Highlights
It has been amply documented that working class and minority children do worse in school than otherwise comparable middle class children from dominant ethnic groups
One-fifth of the children had at least one parent who was born outside Canada. 43% of the children lived in large cities of 500,000 residents or more, 14% lived in cities of from 100,000 to under 500,000, and 43% lived in smaller cities, towns, or rural areas
We had expected to find that changing residence would be associated with cognitive outcomes at age 5, but this turned out not to be the case
Summary
It has been amply documented that working class and minority children do worse in school than otherwise comparable middle class children from dominant ethnic groups. Working class and minority children’s poorer school performance, in turn, leads them to worse jobs and lower income than they might otherwise have achieved. Focusing on a nationally representative, longitudinal sample of young children in Canada, we investigate how neighborhood characteristics affect cognitive dimensions of school readiness, independent from household characteristics, in the dimensions of both economic capital and social capital. We find that economic and social capital characteristics of neighborhoods have significant impacts on children’s vocabulary-related test performance in Canada’s official languages (English or French) but have no influence on their performance in tests that are not vocabulary based, such as copying, symbol manipulation, and mathematics
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