Families' social backgrounds matter: socio-economic factors, home learning and young children's language, literacy and social outcomes

Parental support with children's learning is considered to be one pathway through which socioeconomic factors influence child competencies. Utilising a national longitudinal sample from the Millennium Cohort Study, this study examined the relationship between home learning and parents' socio-economic status and their impact on young children's language/ literacy and socio-emotional competence. The findings consistently showed that, irrespective of socio-economic status, parents engaged with various learning activities (except reading) roughly equally. The socio-economic factors examined in this study, i.e., family income and maternal educational qualifications, were found to have a stronger effect on children's language/ literacy than on social-emotional competence. Socio-economic disadvantage, lack of maternal educational qualifications in particular, remained powerful in influencing competencies in children aged three and at the start of primary school. For children in the first decade of this century in England, these findings have equity implications, especially as the socio-economic gap in our society widens.