Medium‐term effects of household poverty on child well‐being: A study in a subsample of pre‐school children in rural Mexico

This paper examines the medium-term effects of poverty and infant care practices on well‐being indicators of pre‐school children in rural Mexico. The results of a survey that used Structural Equation Modelling show that household poverty adversely affects cognitive outcomes. Care, proxied by breast feeding and vaccinations, has significant positive effects on cognitive outcomes and it is positively affected maternal education. When socio‐demographic controls are included, ethnicity is a stronger predictor of well‐being than early household poverty, evoking the long‐term systemic deprivation associated with having an indigenous background. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.