Background: Early childhood is essential for a child’s overall development. Twenty to 30%of children are impaired by a lack of needed social and emotional skills when starting school. Children living in socioeconomic deprivation are particularly affected. Early childhood development is determined by family socioeconomic status (SES) and regional socioeconomic aspects. In a preventive early childhood development support program for preschool children in social hotspots,an annual standardized developmental screening (Dortmunder Entwicklungsscreening für den Kindergarten - DESK 3–6 R) was carried out. This study aimed to investigate the association between the prevalence ofpreschool children at risk of social-emotional problems and socioeconomic deprivation in northeast Germany.
Methods: Screening data from DESK 3–6 R were linked with the German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation (GISD) for 2019. For the social-emotional domains ‘social behaviour’, ‘social competence’ and ‘social interaction’ as dependent variables and the GISD score as explanatory variable Generalized Linear Regressions (GLR) and to model spatially varying relationships Local Bivariate Relationships (LBR) were performed within ArcGIS pro 3.1.
Results: A total of 147preschools participated, with atotal of 7,836 three- to six-year-old children in 2019. The prevalence of developmental risks for ‘social behavior’ was 14 % (standard deviation (SD) = 13 %), for ‘social competence’ 13 % (SD=12 %) and for ‘social interaction’ 10 % (SD=10 %). For ‘social behavior’ and ‘social interaction’, GLR showed statistically significant coefficients of approximately0.5 but low data fit (explaining only 6.3% of thevariance at max). LBR revealed no relevant association.
Conclusions: Contrary to our expectation, we did not observe consistent significant associations between social-emotional developmental risks (measured with DESK) and regional deprivation (operationalized with GISD) of 3- to 6-year-olds attending preschools in social hotspots in Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania. Although the GISD was available on the level of five-digit postal zip codes, due to the relatively low population density, the relatively large administrative units, and the modifiable area unit problem (MAUP), differences in the degree of deprivation are evened out. To reflect the effect of regional differences on individual children, small-scale data with high geographical resolution are needed.