Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement: Developmental Pathways Through Parenting and Children’s Executive Functions

The influences of child, family, and socioeconomic factors on children’s early academic development are best understood within the context of one another. Yet, most existing studies have focused primarily on either family- or child-level factors, such as parental influences or child executive functions, in explaining socioeconomic inequalities in children’s academic achievement. In an attempt to integrate these two lines of research, the current investigation simultaneously examined the specific contextual and cognitive pathways that underlie associations between socioeconomic factors and children’s early academic achievement using data from a prospective longitudinal study conducted at 10 sites across the United States (N = 1,364). Findings revealed that after controlling for a host of potentially confounding influences, parent education, but not family income-to-needs, was linked to children’s math achievement indirectly via sequential paths that included both parenting factors—maternal sensitivity and cognitive stimulation—and children’s working memory skills. Likewise, parent education was predictive of children’s reading achievement indirectly via paths that included cognitive stimulation and working memory. Finally, independent of child executive functions, parent education was also indirectly related to children’s reading achievement via cognitive stimulation and to children’s math achievement via maternal sensitivity. Together, these findings shed light on the specific contextual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie socioeconomic-related differences in children’s early academic skills and provide potential insights for policies and interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap.