Socioeconomic Gaps in Early Childhood Experiences

By Daphna Bassok, Jenna E. Finch, RaeHyuck Lee, Sean F. Reardon, Jane Waldfogel. 2016

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study compares the early life experiences of kindergarteners in 1998 and 2010 using two nationally representative data sets. We find that (a) young children in the later period are exposed to more books and reading in the home, (b) they have more access to educational games on computers, and (c) they engage with their parents more, inside and outside the home. Although these increases occurred among low- and high-income children, in many cases the biggest changes were seen among the lowest-income children. Our results indicate narrowing but still large early childhood parental investment gaps. In addition, socioeconomic gaps in preschool participation grew over this period, despite substantial investments in public preschool. Implications for early socioeconomic achievement gaps are discussed.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97934645921fc271f1a6d030dbbb306db50b7caf

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Citations in the corpus

• Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments (2018, background): “Research harmonizing multiple datasets (including NLSY-CS, PSIDCDS, and ECLS) finds widening class gaps in formal childcare and book ownership (Bassok et al. 2016), as well as in daily reading; frequent teaching of letters, words, or numbers; frequent storytelling; and going to the zoo, a museum,…”