September 27, 2023
"Early childhood environments' impacts on learning are believed to have lasting, perhaps even cascading, consequences for children's achievement through their school years."
Main takeaways from this research, as they apply to African American families in the U.S.:
- The quality of early childhood home environments is strongly associated with achievement, controlling for the influence of early care and education and neighborhood contexts
- The length of exposure to high quality early care and education shows little correlation to achievement, which may reflect a problem of diminished access to higher quality programs
- In contrast to the researchers' prediction, neighborhood affluence does not positively correlate with achievement. Rather, those living in the least affluent neighborhoods showed greater achievement than those in more affluent neighborhoods
- Racially integrated neighborhoods revealed a greater association with achievement when compared with more segregated (primarily White or primarily Black) neighborhoods
Although many researchers have investigated childhood impacts on African American children's successes later in life, studies on the development of Black children have been consistently framed through comparisons with children of other races, particularly White children. Through an intersectional, strength-based lens that centers Black children and considers multiple early childhood influences on their long-term verbal and mathematics achievement, LRDC Research Scientist, Daphne A. Henry, and her colleagues at Boston College examined the factors shaping African American children's academic achievement in "Early Childhood Predictors of Black Children's Achievement: Home, Early Care and Education, and Neighborhood Contexts." The goal of this work was to provide a detailed analysis of the factors - parenting quality and practices, neighborhood characteristics, and early care and education (ECE) - that support achievement among Black children.
In this study, the researchers used a within-group approach, exploring variations in the early childhood experiences of Black children with different, to identify the key forces that promote academic achievement for African American children. To do this, they employed data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). Using these data, they analyzed the academic and cognitive development of 138 African American children alongside assessment of their familial characteristics, parents' childrearing values, home environment, early care and education experiences, and neighborhood characteristics.
The researchers focused primarily on how home, early care and education, and neighborhood influences were related to achievement from early childhood through adolescence. They predicted that high-quality learning support at home and in early care and education settings would improve academic achievement. They also anticipated that Black children raised in more economically disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods would evince lower levels of achievement when compared to those raised in more privileged and diverse settings.
As a result of their analysis, the researchers found "robust, long-lasting associations between early childhood home environments and achievement," wherein high quality early home environments were linked to greater academic achievement later on. In contrast, the researchers were surprised to find a negative association between neighborhood affluence and achievement. Specifically, African American children showed significantly stronger achievement when living in neighborhoods at the lower end of the affluence scale. This counterintuitive finding may be driven by greater levels of social isolation and exclusion that African American families experience in highly economically advantaged but extremely segregated neighborhoods. However, the researchers could not test this hypothesis with these data. The study also revealed a positive correlation between racially integrated neighborhoods and achievement. However, of the three primary contexts of interest, early childhood care and education showed no significant associations with achievement, something the authors attribute to Black families' limited access to high quality child care programs.
Despite its limitations, this study advances the research base on Black children's achievement trajectories with its adoption of a strengths-based approach and focus on three critical aspects of young children's environments, home, ECE, and neighborhoods. These results suggest that some early childhood factors, such as quality of one's home environment and neighborhood socioeconomic status and racial composition, play pivotal roles in shaping the academic development of African American children. The researchers call for greater study of this topic through an in-group lens that draws comparisons and connections between children of the same race. Read the full study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.