Widening Socioeconomic Inequalities  in Early Childhood Language Milestone  Attainment in Israel, 2016-2022
Creators: name: Akiva, Pinchas
name: Amit, Guy
name: Girshovitz, Irena
name: Navon, Yael
name: Sadaka, Yair
name: Shavit, Yossi
name: Silverman, Sarit
Publisher: name: The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel
Year: 2024

description: Despite Israel's high fertility rate and the high poverty rates among young children, the relationship between children's familial socioeconomic backgrounds and developmental indicators has not yet been extensively studied in a broad and representative Israeli sample. A new Taub Center study, conducted in collaboration with KI, the Israeli Institute for Applied Research in Computational Health, aims to fill these knowledge gaps. The study utilizes the Ministry of Health's Tipat Halav database, which includes approximately 70% of children born between 2014 and 2022. The findings reveal a positive relationship between maternal education and early childhood language development, highlighting disparities in language skills among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Furthermore, the study shows that these gaps widen with age and have been increasing in recent years. This study builds on an in-depth literature review recently published by the Taub Center, titled "The Roots of Disparity: Exploring Socioeconomic Influences on Early Childhood Development.” Authored by Taub Center senior researcher Dr. Sarit Silverman, the review examines the effects of socioeconomic background on various domains of early childhood development. The findings indicate that socioeconomic disparities in language skills emerge as early as the second year of life, leading to divergent language development trajectories. These early differences can contribute to academic achievement and to long-term life course outcomes. In light of the study’s findings and the literature review, the researchers propose several steps to promote policies aimed at early detection of language development delays and reducing socioeconomic disparities. Maternal education is linked to delays in children’s language-milestone attainmentDevelopmental milestones assess whether children are developing key skills at the expected age to ensure they are on track developmentally. The current study found that the percentage of children with delayed language-milestone attainment increases inversely with maternal education level (academic, post-secondary, non-academic, secondary, or elementary). In other words, the higher the mother's education level, the higher the percentage of children who achieve language milestones on time.The study also revealed that these gaps widen as children grow older, with differences according to maternal education being more pronounced among children aged 2-3 years compared to those aged 0-1 and 1-2 years. Additionally, the data indicate a growing trend over time (from 2016 to 2022) in the percentage of children with delayed language-milestone attainment. This means that with each passing year, the percentage of children delayed in reaching language milestones increases across all age groups. The trend of growth over time is sharper and more pronounced among children of mothers with primary and secondary education compared to those with post-secondary and academic education. This finding indicates widening gaps between socioeconomic strata in Israel.