FRIDAY, Feb. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Children from low-income families who are good readers in first grade are less likely to develop aggressive behavior in later years, according to a study in the January/February issue of Child Development.
Deborah Stipek, Ph.D., and Sarah Miles, a Ph.D. student, at Stanford University in California, studied data from a cohort of 237 kindergarten children and another of 140 first-grade children from rural and urban communities in three U.S. states -- one on the west coast and two in the northeast. All of the children's families were low-income, and the cohorts were ethnically diverse.
The cohorts were assessed upon entry to the study, and again when they were in the third and fifth grades. There was a consistent association between social skills and literacy achievement in the first, third and fifth grades, and the inverse association between aggression and literacy achievement increased over time. However, the association between pro-social behavior and literacy achievement declined over time.
"The findings of this study point clearly to the importance of attending to the 'whole' child. Children do not develop in particular domains independently of other domains. To the contrary, social development and academic development are inextricably connected," the authors conclude. "The developmental differences in the findings suggest that attention to particular domains may be more important during some periods of development than others."
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