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Compared to their peers from more affluent families, pre-school-aged children from poorer families are at risk of multiple, short- and long-term low developmental outcomes. Strong empirical support suggests these effects are mediated by families’ investment in their child’s education and learning, with a high-quality early Home Learning Environment (HLE) conceptualised an important family investment which can act as a protective factor against the developmental risks associated with poverty. While the quality of HLE varies substantially within groups, factors predicting high-quality HLE in ‘low socio-economic status’ (low-SES) families are scarcely researched. The present work proposes a rigorous theory-based model which expands the focus on economic resources present in the Family Investment Model (FIM), by including three dimensions of SES-capital and family beliefs. In addition to material-capital which represents the FIM’s focus, the value of variables which capture human-capital, social-capital and maternal (educational) beliefs is empirically tested using regression equations with a European sample of 536 mothers living in relatively deprived areas who have both (i) a preschool-age child and (ii) no recent immigration background. Results suggest added predictor-categories significantly relate to the pre-school-HLE of these families and explain significantly more variance than the typically used SES-indicators (income and education).
Warnatsch et al. (Mon,) studied this question.