More complex modelling
The authors argue that this demonstrates that much of poverty’s impact on children’s
intellectual development operates along this pathway.
To a lesser extent, parenting style and physical environment in the home are also
mediating factors. The mediating mechanism of child health is more complicated.
Child health status was measured separately at birth and in childhood. Pre-natal
poverty had a significant effect on ill-health at birth, which in turn has a significant
effect on both intellectual development and childhood ill-health. However, while ill-
health in childhood influenced intellectual development it was not influenced by
family poverty. Interestingly, family poverty did not exert a significant or sizeable
effect on the quality of pre-school. Moreover, the quality of pre-school was not found
to have a statistically significant or sizable effect on intellectual development.
6.3.2 The role of education
Guo and Harris’s model also estimated the channels for effects of a number of other
distal factors entered as controls. For example, mothers’ education, number of siblings
and ethnicity also exert a significant effect on cognitive stimulation in the home. It is
interesting to note here that mothers’ education does not directly affect intellectual
development. Rather it has an indirect effect on intellectual development that operates
through cognitive stimulation. Mothers’ cognitive ability not only has a very strong
association with cognitive stimulation in the home but also a direct effect on the
child’s cognitive attainment unmediated by any of the five mechanisms. Although the
focus of the paper is on income and poverty, mothers’ cognitive abilities are by far the
most important factor.
6.4. How money matters for young children’s development:
Parental investment and family processes
6.4.1 Overview of the paper
Yeung et al. (2002) also used data from a large US dataset (PSID-CDS) to investigate
how family income matters for young children’s development. Two sets of mediating
factors were examined reflecting the two dominant perspectives outlined above (6.2):
i. the parental investment perspective;
ii. the family process perspective.
Their conceptual model separates out elements of these two perspectives but
highlights that these might interact and so should not be analysed in isolation (see Box
13 below). In addition, the authors hypothesise that the mediating pathways for
achievement and behaviour problems are different. They posit that family stress
constructs are likely to be more salient mediators of children’s own emotional
development, whereas parental investment mediators may be more directly relevant to
children’s cognitive achievement.
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