Poverty and Children’s Cognitive Trajectories

Abstract

Existing evidence is inconclusive on whether a socio-economic gradient in children’s cognitive ability widens, narrows or remains stable over time and there is little research on the extent of ‘cognitive mobility’ of children who had a poor start in life compared to their peers. Using data from five sweeps of the United Kingdom (UK) Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) at the ages of 9 months, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years and 11 years, this paper explores the cognitive ability trajectory of children in the bottom decile of the distribution at a given age, and the factors that drive or hinder their progress relative to their peers. Using discrete-time event history analysis methods, the paper analyses children’s risks of moving in and out of the bottom decile of the cognitive ability distribution. The findings indicate a relatively high level of cognitive mobility between ages 3 and 11, especially in the pre-school period (between ages 3 and 5), with children from income-poor households more likely to get ‘trapped’ in the bottom of the age-specific cognitive ability distribution. Parental education plays a dual buffer role: it protects children from falling behind their peers as well as increasing the chances of moving up the ability distribution. Parental involvement, such as reading to a child and regular bedtimes at the age of 3, was found to protect children from falling into the bottom group of cognitive distribution but not necessarily helping lower scoring children to move up.