Teil eines Buches,
The emergence of social disparities - Evidence on early mother-child interaction and infant development from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)
Kapitel 5, Seite 89-108. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar., (2017)
Zusammenfassung
The acquisition of educationally relevant competencies starts very early in life and well before formal schooling (Damon and Lerner 2006). From early on children acquire cognitive, language, and socio-emotional skills relevant to future educational and developmental processes in school and across the life span. In fact, important foundations of future developmental progress and educational attainment are already laid in the first years of life (Parks and Bradley 1991). Bioecological models of development highlight the interaction between (the developing) child characteristics, skills, and competencies on the one hand and, on the other hand, the stimulation of child development by structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment and educational institutions together with their interactions (Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2006). The question how competencies and educational careers develop, how they are influenced by individual resources and prerequisites as well as by learning opportunities in different contexts, and not least, how all this impacts on lifelong learning, well-being, and participation in society is of great theoretical as well as practical importance. Because education and the development of competencies are key driving forces for individual success and participation in modern societies (for example, Blossfeld et al. 2011), the fact that social disparities in various cognitive, language, and socio-emotional domains arise rather early in development is alarming from a developmental and educational point of view.
How these disparities emerge on the basis of individual prerequisites of the child and characteristics of the (home-)learning environment as well as how these early disparities impact on future development and educational careers are important questions that need to be addressed in longitudinal studies. Both the newborns' cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), which started when children were six to eight months of age, and the NEPS kindergarten cohort study, which started when children were five years of age, are designed to shed light on these topics. In the present chapter, we focus on the first assessment wave of the newborns' cohort study in order to analyse the very early roots of social disparities in child development. Drawing on a bioecological and cumulative model of development together with existing empirical evidence, we investigate the assumption that social disparities in early child characteristics and development are still rather negligible at that young age, whereas potentially relevant disparities in the home-learning environment are to be expected from early on.
