Low-Income Children’s Cumulative Developmental Opportunities and Educational Attainment and Earnings in Early Adulthood

• In Event: Long-Term Outcomes of Early Supporting Environments and Subsequent Developmental Contexts

Abstract

A literature stretching across the fields of developmental science, medicine, and public health has documented the harms of cumulative risk for child development. Evidence points to the compounding consequences of adverse experiences, for example. Little attention, however, has been given to the compounding positive consequences of opportunities for thriving and growth such as repeated exposure – across settings and time – to caring, enriched environments.
The present study is an investigation into cumulative developmental opportunities across early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. One of our primary goals was to examine cumulative opportunities as predictors of two early adulthood outcomes: college graduation and salary at age 26. In doing so, we gave special attention to the hypothesis that cumulative opportunities are of exceptional importance to the life chances of children exposed to economic disadvantage during early childhood. For these children, the accumulation of opportunity may be particularly valuable, given the risk early exposure to poverty otherwise poses for brain development, cognition, language, long-term achievement, educational attainment, and salary in adulthood (Duncan et al., 2012).
Data came from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD; n = 1,365); we used an analytic sample of 814 participants that participated from birth through age 26 (49.7% female; 10.6% African American, 5.6% Latino/a, 73.6% White). We created a Cumulative Developmental Opportunity Index (CDOI), summing children’s opportunities for growth in their homes, child care and preschools, schools, after-school activities, and neighborhoods. The index was formed using an approach similar to conventions for cumulative risk indices (e.g., Appleyard et al., 2005; Evans et al., 2007): using theoretical or empirical thresholds, we dichotomized measures of children’s contexts and experiences as being either high-quality positive developmental opportunities (1) or not (0). We then summed across 12 dichotomized variables such that cumulative opportunities ranged from 0-12 (participants with low-income early childhoods had an average of 2.06 opportunities, compared with an average of 4.26 for those with middle-income or wealthier early childhoods). A summary of the constructs, measures, and dichotomous coding decisions for the CDOI is provided in Table 1.
Three crucial findings are summarized in Table 2: (1) early childhood income significantly predicted college graduation and salary; (2) cumulative opportunities significantly mediated associations between early childhood income and age 26 outcomes; and (3) there were significant interactions between early childhood income and cumulative opportunities such that positive associations between opportunities and age 26 outcomes were much larger for those who were low-income during early childhood compared with those from more advantaged backgrounds (e.g., two additional opportunities increased graduation rates by 12-percentage-points for those with low-income early childhoods compared with a 5-percentage-point increase for other children). We also estimated stage-specific models (e.g., cumulative opportunities in early childhood versus those in middle childhood or adolescence). Cumulative opportunities in early childhood and adolescence were most strongly related to college graduation for those with low-income early childhoods; cumulative opportunities at each stage were predictive of salary for these children. Theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of these findings will be discussed.

Authors

• Eric Dearing, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Andres Sebastian Bustamante, University of California - Irvine

• Henrik D. Zachrisson, University of Oslo

• Deborah Lowe Vandell, University of California - Irvine