Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social -emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N = 21,255), this study examined dual components of family income and material hardship along with parent mediators of stress, positive parenting, and investment as predictors of 6-year-old children's cognitive skills and social -emotional competence. Support was found for a model that identified unique parent-mediated paths from income to cognitive skills and from income and material hardship to social -emotional competence. The findings have implications for future study of family income and child development and for identification of promising targets for policy intervention.Several decades of research leave little doubt that family income matters for children. With increases in family income, children's cognitive abilities and social -emotional competence improve (for reviews and examples, see: Dahl & Lochner, 2005;Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997;Gershoff, 2003b;Gershoff, Aber, & Raver, 2003;Mayer, 2002;McLoyd, 1998;Seccombe, 2000). While the size of these effects remains subject to debate (Mayer, 1997), there is clear evidence from both natural experiments (Costello, Compton, Keeler, & Angold, 2003) and randomized experiments (Morris & Gennetian, 2003) that increases in family income, particularly among poor families, have positive impacts on children.With such associations established through both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, researchers have focused on the processes by which family income affects children. Such research posits that family income is unlikely to have direct effects on children; after all, young children have few opportunities or responsibilities to spend money themselves. Instead, it is expected that the effects of family income on children are mediated through its effects on Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elizabeth T. Gershoff, School of Social Work, University of Michigan, 1080 S. University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. liztg@umich.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 March 10. Published in final edited form as:Child Dev. 2007 ; 78(1): 70-95. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00986.x. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript parents. The stress of raising a family on a low income is posited to negatively affect parents' mental health and behavior, and, in turn, to negatively affect children.Potential parent mediators of family income effects have included (but are not limited to) parent stress (Linver, Grooks-Gunn, & Kohen, 2002;Mistry, Vandewater, Huston, & McLoyd, 2002;Mistry, Biesanz, Taylor, Burchinal, & Cox, 2004;Yeung, Linver, & Brooks-Gunn, 2002), parent investment of money or time in children (Guo & Harris, 2000;Linver et al., 2002;Yeung et al., 2002), and aspects of...

Research on the development of self-regulation in young children provides a unifying framework for the study of school readiness. Self-regulation abilities allow for engagement in learning activities and provide the foundation for adjustment to school. A focus on readiness as self-regulation does not supplant interest in the development of acquired ability, such as early knowledge of letters and numbers; it sets the stage for it. In this article, we review research and theory indicating that self-regulation and consequently school readiness are the product of integrated developmental processes at the biological and behavioral levels that are shaped by the contexts in which development is occurring. In doing so, we illustrate the idea that research on self-regulation powerfully highlights ways in which gaps in school readiness and later achievement are linked to poverty and social and economic inequality and points the way to effective approaches to counteract these conditions.

Based on theoretically driven models, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) targeted low-income children’s school readiness through the mediating mechanism of self-regulation. The CSRP is a multicomponent, cluster-randomized efficacy trial implemented in 35 Head Start–funded classrooms (N = 602 children). The analyses confirm that the CSRP improved low-income children’s self-regulation skills (as indexed by attention/impulse control and executive function) from fall to spring of the Head Start year. Analyses also suggest significant benefits of CSRP for children’s preacademic skills, as measured by vocabulary, letter-naming, and math skills. Partial support was found for improvement in children’s self-regulation as a hypothesized mediator for children’s gains in academic readiness. Implications for programs and policies that support young children’s behavioral health and academic success are discussed.

The authors examine the effects of poverty-related adversity on child development, drawing upon psychobiological principles of experiential canalization and the biological embedding of experience. They integrate findings from research on stress physiology, neurocognitive function, and self-regulation to consider adaptive processes in response to adversity as an aspect of children’s development. Recent research on early caregiving is paired with research in prevention science to provide a reorientation of thinking about the ways in which psychosocial and economic adversity are related to continuity in human development.

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This Social Policy Report considers the importance of young children's emotional development for their school readiness, suggesting that social scientists can provide policy makers with concrete ways to conceptualize, measure and target young children's emotional adjustment in early educational and child care settings. This Report then reviews a recent and persuasive body of rigorous research, to determine whether children's emotional adjustment can be signifi cantly affected by interventions implemented in the preschool and early school years. Results of this review suggest that family, early educational, and clinical interventions offer policy makers a wide array of choices in ways that they can make sound investments in young children's emotional development and school readiness. This research suggests that, while young children's emotional and behavioral problems are costly to their chances of school success, these problems are identifi able early, are amenable to change, and can be reduced over time. What kinds of investments should policy makers be advised to make, at what point in young children's development, and in what settings? While modest investments in low-cost interventions initially may seem appealing, this report suggests that there are few bargains to be had when investing in young children's emotional adjustment. With this caveat in mind, the fi ndings of this report suggest that policy makers should broaden early elementary educational mandates for school readiness to include children's emotional and behavioral adjustment as key programmatic goals. Policy makers should consider targeting young children's emotional adjustment prior to school entry, in diverse settings such as Head Start, child care settings, as well as in the fi rst few years of school. Finally, young children's emotional adjustment can serve as an important

In their review, Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue) relied on a valuable set of empirical examples of emotion regulation in infancy, toddlerhood, and the preschool period to make their case. These examples can be extended to include an emergent body of published research examining normative emotional regulatory processes among low-income and ethnic minority children using similar experimental methods. The following article considers emotion regulation across differing income, risk, and sociocultural contexts. Review of this literature points to ways these broader contexts are likely to influence children's development of emotional self-regulation. This review also points to innovative analytic approaches that might be useful in inferring causal mechanisms in emotion regulation research.

In recent years, researchers and policy makers have focused attention on the emotional climate of the preschool classroom as an important predictor of young children's socioemotional adjustment and early learning (Goldstein,