Socio-Economic Status and Child Behaviour: Evidencefrom a contemporary UK cohort

This paper examines whether and how socio-economic status is associated withchildren’s behavioural development in today’s children. Using a large cohort ofEnglish children born in the early 1990s we find significant social inequalities inseveral dimensions of child behaviour at age 7. We examine whether theseinequalities are associated with characteristics of the child’s early home environmentand parental behaviours. These include the material quality of the child’s home,maternal mental health, parental conflict and child diet. Most of these factors aresocially graded and so could potentially account for the gradient in behaviours, butnone singly account for a large part of the gradient in behavioural outcomes.However, taken together, these differences in the home environment can explain up tohalf the social gradients in child behaviours.[...]