Neighborhood and Child Development at Age Five: A UK–US Comparison

Abstract

Early childhood is a critical period in the life course, setting the foundation for future life. Early life contexts—neighborhoods and families—influence developmental outcomes, especially when children are exposed to economic and social disadvantage. Residential mobility, frequent among families with pre-school children, may reduce or increase exposure to adverse surroundings. We examine children’s cognitive and behavioral outcomes at age five, in relation to neighborhood composition, family circumstances and residential moves, using two longitudinal micro datasets: an urban subsample of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (N up to 7967), and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study in the US (N up to 1820). Each is linked to an index of neighborhood advantage, created to make UK/US comparisons, based on census and administrative information. A series of estimates indicate a strong association, in both countries, between cognitive scores and neighborhood advantage, attenuated but not eliminated by family circumstances. Children’s behavior problems, on the other hand, show less association with neighborhood advantage. There are minor and mixed differences by residential mobility particularly when neighborhood disadvantage changes. Notwithstanding the primacy of the family in predicting preschool development, the findings support the notion of neighborhood as potentially advantageous at least in relation to cognitive outcomes.

Placing context in longitudinal research

“…Family hardship, albeit concentrated in poor places, emerges as the main predictor of poor child development. This was also the conclusion of a number of other geographically informed analyses of the early years of the Millennium Cohort, many of which were led by Eirini Flouri (see references in Buttaro et al, 2021).…”

“…Example 2: neighbourhood patterns in early child development, US and UK Does where young children live make a difference to their development in early childhood? A project started in 2013, with Mary Clare Lennon (CUNY), compared two cohorts born around the millennium -one in the UK and the other in the US (Buttaro et al, 2021;Gambaro et al, 2022). In this project we looked at outcomes in children of residential mobility, neighbourhood prosperity and family circumstances.…”

“…The score for a given area did not change between our two dates, four years apart, but we did allow for families changing area score if they moved -as did 40% of British and 63% of the US children between ages one and five years. We looked at three outcomes of the children at age five: a verbal score, and externalising and internalising problems expressed as country-specific percentiles (Buttaro et al, 2021). Results are illustrated in Figure 1 for verbal scores.…”