The Effects of Socio-Economic Background and Parental Involvement on Children's Early Cognitive Development: The Case of Chile

Children's development has been demonstrated to be an important factor in later life outcomes. Studies have also shown that income and parenting style, engagement and relationships are important predictors of the level of cognitive skills at earlier stages of life. Using data from the First Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood (ELPI in Spanish), this study implements regression models to estimate the effect that socio-economic conditions and parental involvement have on the scores obtained by Chilean children aged between 36 and 60 months in the Spanish version of Peabody Picture and Vocabulary test, also controlling for parents' and children's characteristics as well as geographical location of the household.

Results show that parental involvement, which is a threefold indicator composed by positive parenting, parental stimulation and ineffective parenting, does make a significant difference, where positive parenting and parental stimulation are positively associated with the cognitive development scores, while ineffective parenting is negatively associated with the scores. On the other hand, results show that cognitive development scores are significantly higher for children living in the wealthiest households with respect to those in the poorest ones. Furthermore income can moderate the effect of parental involvement, where a high level of positive parenting has a stronger positive impact on poor children, while the negative impact of ineffective parenting is stronger on children from the higher quintiles, and finally, parental stimulation has a stronger impact on the wealthier children.

From these results, it is possible to assert that parental involvement has the potential to contribute to reduce the gap in the cognitive skills achieved by children according to the level of income of the households they live in, which can be of particular relevance for reducing the inequality-related gap in later life outcomes.