| Jen-Hao Chen
University of Chicago
Healthy start, growing smart: Health and the development of academic and behavioral skills in early childhood
FINAL REPORT:
In the United States, nearly 7% of children under the age of five have ever been diagnosed withasthma. However, the developmental consequences of early childhood asthma remain poorlyunderstood due to the fact that the social process is overlooked in extant research. This study proposes two revised theoretical perspectives that consider how social and biological forces are intertwined to predict the cognitive and behavioral skills of asthmatic children. The double disadvantages hypothesis suggests that asthma may harm young children’s brain and neurological development as well as lead to the deterioration of family environment. Together, these processes jointly produce negative effects on child outcomes. The compensation model
suggests that parents may set up to overcome the potentially negative biological consequences of childhood asthma. Because of parental compensation behaviors, asthma does not necessarily translate to worse developmental outcomes. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), I find support for the compensation
model. Fixed-effects estimates show that hospitalization due to asthma is statistically, significantly related to higher language and mathematics scores. Furthermore, the observed positive association is more pronounced for children with college-educated mothers. An analysis of children’s behavioral skills displays similar patterns. While asthma hospitalization is positively related to externalizing problem behaviors in children with low-educated mothers, the hospitalization experience is negatively associated with problem behaviors in children with college-educated mothers. The observed optimistic outcomes for asthmatic children with
college-educated mothers illustrate the role of maternal education in moderating the potentially negative consequences of childhood illness, and furthermore imply the inadequacy of a purely biomedical explanation and the importance of social dimension in shaping the development of asthmatic children.
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