The gap between white and Mexican-American children in cognitive skills such as oral language is apparent at age 2, according to a recent study from UC Berkeley.
The gap is largest between white children and the children of immigrant parents, the researchers found in their report, Differing Cognitive Trajectories of Mexican American Toddlers: The Role of Class, Nativity and Maternal Practices.
Young children from immigrant families are healthy and have about the same level of social and emotional skills as white children, the researchers found. And at age 9 months, they perform about the same as white infants.
“Our findings send up a red flag that we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in the pre-K basket,” said lead author Bruce Fuller. “These findings occur by age 2 or 3 before children reach pre-K.”
But by the time they reach age 2, four out of five Mexican-American toddlers have weaker pre-literacy skills, less complex oral language skills in either English or Spanish and less familiarity with print materials than the average white toddler, the researchers found. They lagged behind their white peers by three to five months.
“Our findings send up a red flag that we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in the pre-K basket,” said lead author Bruce Fuller. “These findings occur by age 2 or 3 before children reach pre-K.”
The study, published last week in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, followed a nationally representative sample of 4,550 children from birth to 30 months.
Maternal educational background and socioeconomic class were shown to be risk factors, the researchers said. Close to two-thirds of the white mothers had some college background compared to a quarter of Mexican-American mothers in English-speaking households. About one in six mothers in Spanish-speaking households had gone to college.
There were also differences in how often mothers read to their children. Altogether, 59 percent of the white mothers reported reading to their toddlers every day compared to 28 percent of Mexican-American mothers in English-speaking households and 18 percent of Spanish-speaking mothers.
“Those are the basic drivers,” Fuller said. “There has been a lot of conversation about vocabulary and reading.”
But the study was also “trying to go a bit deeper,” he said, looking at the relationships between mothers and their children. The study found that white mothers offered more praise and encouragement in videotaped interactions with their infants and toddlers.
“A lot of this is rich language embedded in close relationships between the child and the mother,” he said. “Some of these processes are pretty subtle.”
For example, white mothers asked their children more questions and were more likely to invite their toddlers to express their feelings in words, Fuller said. This approach to talking with children “is more embedded in the white, middle-class experience than in low-income, Mexican-American communities,” he said.
White and Mexican-American mothers whose children displayed strong cognitive growth were also more likely to work outside the home. This finding occurred regardless of the mother’s educational background, according to the study.
Fuller called this finding “a little mysterious,” hypothesizing that interactions outside the home with other parents exposed these women to more novel ideas about parenting.
Overall, Fuller said, the expansion of quality preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds is important in closing the achievement gap. But more support is needed for younger children, he said.
Fuller said the Local Control Funding Formula – California’s new school finance system that gives districts flexibility to spend extra money on low-income children and English learners – offers “a rare opportunity to invest more heavily in early childhood programs.”
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