Allochtone kinderen tijdens het eerste levensjaar: invloed van sociaaleconomische en etnische status op specifieke ontwikkelingsdomeinen

Summary

Immigrant children in the first year of life: influence of socio-economic and ethnic status on specific developmental domains A vast amount of research indicates that children from an ethnic minority, even those from the second and the third generation immigrants, show an increasing number of learning and developmental problems going from kindergarten to the first grades of elementary school. Therefore, early detection and prevention becomes increasingly crucial, in part to control the enormous costs of these problems. In our study (N=406), developmental profiles of non-western children from a lower and middle class socio-economic status (SES) were investigated. We looked at ethnicity, poverty and their interaction, because they lead to a considerable leeway in development from the first year of life. The vulnerabilities of these children are especially found in the cognitive and the linguistic/communicative sphere. But also their strengths, mainly on the socio-emotional domain, are shown. Next to ethnicity, poverty is another risk factor in child development. The influence of being from a low SES background is broader then that of ethnicity because it impedes all developmental lines: language, cognition, motor, self-management and socio-emotional development, and its negative effect size is significantly greater then that of ethnicity. A significant interaction effect means that poverty impedes immigrant children more severely than autochthon children. The main results from our study on development in the first year of life are translated into principles for early preventive developmental guidance programs, more specifically we introduce the need for developmental line specific prevention that starts in the period that precedes kindergarten.