Poverty could effect a child’s cognitive development even more than family stability and structure, according to a new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers at the University of London and King’s College London used the massive Millennium Cohort Study to look at complete data on the cognitive development of almost 15,000 U.K. children.
Most of the families in the study (62.1 percent) did not identify as being poor, while 13 percent of the families experienced consistent poverty throughout the five years of follow-up. Most parents were married (56.6 percent) or lived with the same partner (12.7 percent) for the duration of the study. Only 7.8 percent of parents remained continuously single.
While children living in stable two-parent families performed better on cognitive tests than those raised by single parents, the largest gap in scores was seen between children raised in poverty and their more affluent peers, where there was a seven point difference on the test for vocabulary skills.
"Persistent poverty is a crucial risk factor undermining children’s cognitive development – more so than family instability," concluded the researchers.