We can think of the world around us as a series of challenges: objects that quickly move toward us; people who talk to us; things that we want to do or possess. Each of these challenges involves the ability to learn, for example learning to navigate, to speak, and to plan.
Some children have an easier time to learn than others. Yet, all children learn — some just need more time and support. A straightforward consequence of children’s differences in the ability to learn are their differences in school grades. Some children come top of their class and quickly master the curriculum, while others need extra tutoring and have to practice harder and then they may still get lower grades.
An important factor that explains why some children have an easier time to learn than others is the family they grow up in. At the Hungry Mind Lab, we have shown that families’ differences in their access to resources, which are for example the income that a family has to spend and the quality and type of schooling that they can afford for their children, strongly predict their educational differences.
There are many theories as to why family background has a strong influence on children’s educational achievement. A key one focuses on language: Some kids learn to speak faster and have broader vocabulary than others, which makes it easier for them, for example, to understand and respond to teachers in school.
At the Hungry Mind Lab, we found that the language experiences that children have in their family homes matter for their cognitive development in early life. We have also shown that children’s preschool language abilities mediate much of the influence of their family background on their later school performance. We are now working to extend this work and test if children’s early life language experiences predict their cognitive development throughout childhood and into adolescence in E-Risk, a longitudinal cohort study from the United Kingdom.