Gender and Social Class Inequalities in Children's Psychomotor Development: A Sociological Approach.

Inès Malroux , INSERM
Lidia Panico, Center for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS) - Sciences Po; INED
Michelle Kelly-Irving, Université de Toulouse

Early childhood is a crucial period, determining the lifecourse in terms of development, health and the construction of gender and social class inequalities. This study explores child development from a sociological and demographic perspective and describes the social differences of children's skills in several developmental areas. Considering these differences as a consequence of both gender and class socialization processes. Adopting a sociological framework also implies paying attention to the socially constructed nature of the developmental paradigm. The following results are based on data from the French ELFE birth cohort, collected from children aged 3.5 years. These data provide a French adaptation of the Child Development Inventory, which consists of 8 subscales: social skills, self-help, spoken and understood language, writing, numbering, fine motor skills and global motor skills. Our results are descriptive statistics comparing the rate of high scores in each developmental area, and marginal effects measuring the effect of the interaction between gender and social class on the subscale-scores. The study highlights a developmental gradient in the areas of language, writing and numbering skills. This gradient is reversed for self-help skills. Girls outperform boys in almost every domain and in every social class. However, the female advantage is greater in the upper classes for self-help skills and in the working classes for language skills.

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 Presented in Session 84. Flash session Life Course