Children born to immigrant Latinas are generally born healthy, but by age 2 or 3, they tend to lag behind in basic-language and cognitive skills, a new University of California, Berkeley study shows.
“We’ve known, for the last 10 years… that Latino kids on average are beginning kindergarten with preliteracy skills that fall below middle-class White kids,” said Dr. Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy who led the study. “But we didn’t know when it emerged. The new breakthrough is that we can now identify this fall-off in cognitive growth between 9 months and 3 years of age.”
The findings, based on a nationwide tracking study of 8,114 infants born in 2001, appeared in the Maternal and Child Health Journal, and a companion report will be published this winter in the medical journal Pediatrics.
Though Latinas tend to give birth to “fat and happy babies,” meaning the children are healthy and not starting life at a disadvantage, social and cultural factors begin to take their toll on the children quickly, particularly in poorer, Mexican immigrant families, Fuller said.
By the time children are 2 or 3 years of age, researchers found they lag behind their White counterparts by up to half a year in terms of word comprehension, complexity of their sentences and working with their mothers on simple learning tasks. Children were assessed in either Spanish or English and language was not a factor in the results, Fuller said.
Family structure, particularly family size, is a key factor, Fuller said. As the ratio of young children to adults in a household increases, so does the probability of decreased cognitive skills.
“It’s probably a function of each individual child receiving less one-on-one education,” he said, “less language, less time, less playing with puzzles.”
