Study measures impact of home environment on children's development

The study by Essex University and University College London, which used data based from the Millennium Cohort Study, aimed to find out the impact of the home environment on children in the UK.

It found that there is a six point difference in verbal skills between rich and poor children aged three and a nine point difference aged five, and that children in the highest income group were seven times less likely to have serious social and emotional problems at age three than their less affluent peers.

The research, based on tests of cognitive ability in more than 15,000 three-year-old and five-year-old children, entitled What role for the home learning environment and parenting in reducing the socioeconomic gradient in child development?, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, found that the home environment accounts for around half the gap between poorer children and those from more affluent backgrounds.

Home environmental factors such as reading to children daily could reduce the number of children with socio-emotional problems by a fifth, the report says. However, children from poorer backgrounds are still four times more likely to have serious socio-economic difficulties than children from the highest income group.

Professor Yvonne Kelly from the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Essex University, said, ‘It would be easy to say that a loving, stable, warm environment where children are read to daily and played with all the time is the answer to inequality, but this study shows quite clearly that there is still an enormous gap that is unaccounted for.