A child who can read well and has good comprehension benefits from this for the rest of his or her life. But why are some children better at this than others? Researchers Yu and colleagues mapped out for a group of Chinese rural children how their family’s socio-economic status (SES) is related to their reading comprehension skills one year later. Their conclusion? It is not so much the money that counts, but what parents do with it.
The study followed over 680 third-grade children (mean age 9 years) from rural areas in China. The researchers collected data on the parents’ education level, family income, number of children’s books at home, quality of the parent-child relationship, the child’s reading interest, and language skills. A year later, they measured how well the children could understand texts. Based on these data, they reconstructed the path from SES to reading comprehension.
It is striking that family income hardly predicted anything. What mattered was the parents’ level of education. Parents with more education appeared to have more children’s books in the house and a more positive relationship with their child. Both factors contributed to stronger language skills in the child, greatly influencing reading comprehension. The children’s interest in reading played a mediating role in this, but the crucial intermediate step remained: good language skills.
This picture supports two classic models of how SES works: the ‘family investment model’ (parents with more education invest more in learning materials) and the ‘family process model’ (they also provide a more stable, stimulating parenting environment). The latter translates not only into coziness at home, but also into more open communication and reading-promoting behavior. Think of talking together about books or a listening ear for children’s questions – small things, big effects.
Interestingly, the study also looked at the effect of migration: almost half of the children had one or both parents who had moved to the city for work. You might expect this absence would change the pattern, but it did not: the mechanisms remained the same. This suggests that investing in books and relationships can also be done from a distance, or that other family members (such as grandparents) partly take over that role.
This study is important for education policy and parental involvement. It underlines how essential the home situation is, even if you cannot influence the classroom. At the same time, it points out that investing in reading materials and parent-child relationships offers tangible starting points to reduce the gap between privileged and disadvantaged children, even when there is little money.
Abstract of the study :