Poster #47 - Patterns of Children’s Early Deprivation Exposure in a National Sample of U.S. Kindergarteners

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Children draw on a range of skills in their transition and adjustment to school, including pre-academic, cognition and self-regulation, and social-emotional abilities (e.g., Blair, 2002). The family and community contexts powerfully shape children’s school readiness skills even before the start of the school year. As such, inequalities have been identified based on family disadvantages such as income (e.g., Reardon, 2011) and environmental disadvantages such as neighborhood safety (McCoy et al., 2015).

Dimensional models of adversity (McLaughlin & Sheridan, 2016) posit that exposure to early adversity lies on two distinct dimensions—threat and deprivation. Each dimension exerts a unique influence on brain development and learning (e.g., McLaughlin et al., 2014). Deprivation—the absence of positive relational, physical, social, and educational inputs—can limit children’s early opportunities to flourish and learn. Early life deprivation is widespread across the U.S., with 71% of kindergarteners exposed to at least one deprivation risk factor (Wolf & Suntheimer, 2019). According to the theory, higher-order learning skills, such as EF and academic achievement, would be the most sensitive to experiences of deprivation. Extant work has either examined one type of deprivation in isolation or examined the accumulation of experiences (i.e., cumulative risk). Yet typologies of deprivation, and their implications for child development, are not well-understood.

Data for this study comes from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:11; N=18,174; Mage=5.6 years old and 48.8% female in the fall of kindergarten). Comprehensive parent interviews were conducted at two time points during kindergarten and examined a range of important relational and environmental characteristics.

The current study employs Latent Profile Analysis to identify distinct patterns across nine relational, physical, and educational deprivation indicators experienced in kindergarten, including: (1) parent-school involvement; parental depression symptomology; (3) child reading behaviors; (4) parental stimulation; (5) child takes care of self; (6) household food security; (7) parental warmth; (8) receipt of medical/dental care; and (9) residential stability. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics in the ECLS-K:11 sample for each risk. To determine the best model, we will follow best practices (Masyn, 2013) and consider the following as part of our decision-making criteria: BIC, ABIC, ICL-BIC; LMRT; and BLRT. In addition, we will also be guided by the quality of classifications, including entropy and the odds of correct classification (Masyn, 2013), as well as parsimony and interpretability.

Next, we will test whether different latent patterns of deprivation exposure are differentially related to children’s concurrent EF, reading, math, and interpersonal skills. We will regress each outcome separately onto the latent classification variable and employ the BCH method to account for uncertainty in latent classifications and the potential instability of the latent profile solution (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2014).

Preliminary analyses are currently underway; results will be ready in advance of March 2023. Findings hold potential to contribute developmentally informed knowledge about how early deprivation experiences co-occur and shape key skills related to children’s school success, with direct implications for family- and school-based programs targeting vulnerable children and their families.

Authors

• Noelle Suntheimer, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania