UF Study: Kindergarten Readiness May Sometimes Hinge On Birth Weight

August 21, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A rough start in kindergarten most likely can be traced to low birth weight that gives the child a difficult beginning in life, a new University of Florida study finds.

The study of more than 100,000 Florida kindergarteners found that 13 risk factors affect a child’s readiness to start school. However, the study found that being very small at birth outweighs other significant causes, such as educational or economic disadvantage.

Children who weighed 2.3 pounds or less at birth were two to three times less likely than their peers of normal birth weight to be ready to begin kindergarten, said Christina Hayes, who did the research for her master’s degree in educational psychology.

“Typically, early intervention services such as Head Start have focused on children who live in poverty,” said Hayes, who also is a graduate research assistant at the Maternal Child Health and Education Research and Data Center in the pediatrics department of UF’s College of Medicine. “While that probably addresses the needs of many children who are at risk for not being ready to start school, it’s also important that children with health-related conditions be identified and offered these services specifically targeted to enhance school readiness.”

The study of 59,361 male and 55,413 female 5-year-old children who entered public school kindergarten during the 1998-99 school year found that 17 percent were not ready to start school. Individual teachers determined a child’s readiness by using a variety of measures, including language development and motor and social skills.

Results showed that children who had low birth weight, are male, black, have a birth defect, a mother with lower educational levels, a single-parent mother, or are living in poverty are at greatest risk for not being ready to start school.

“School readiness is a big issue right now as we move toward greater accountability in the educational system with the emphasis on standardized tests and school performance,” Hayes said. “If students are not ready to start school, as time goes on it becomes more and more difficult for them to catch up with their peers.”

“A child’s readiness to start school provides one of the earliest snapshots of educational development,” she said. “If we can identify students early who are likely to have problems, rather than waiting until third grade, we can increase the likelihood of academic success in areas such as reading, writing and math.”

Low birth weight is an impediment to school readiness because it is reflective of a child’s health status at birth and can impair mental and physical development, she said.

“(This study) is a critically important contribution to an emerging concern about the long-term impact of both extreme prematurity and very low birth weight status,” said Michael Msall, professor of pediatrics and human development at Brown University Medical School.

Another powerful influence on school readiness was a mother’s educational level, Hayes said. Children whose mothers had less than a high school education were about twice as likely not to be ready to start school as youngsters whose mothers had an education beyond high school, she said.

It may be that mothers with more education have a better idea how to prepare their children for school, can afford the best books and learning tools, and use health care, Hayes said. Mothers with less education may face the added stress of having to work multiple jobs, she said.

Nearly as important was gender. Boys were nearly twice as likely as girls to be unprepared for kindergarten at age 5, she said.

Also important were race, poverty status, marital status and other health factors. Children who were black, were living in poverty, or had a single mother had a 40 percent increase in being unprepared to start school, she said.

Children born with a birth defect, such as a neurological or cardiovascular defect, or who had a slightly higher but still low birth weight of 3.3 pounds or less were about 1 1/2 times as likely not to be ready to start school as their peers without these birth conditions, the study found.

By understanding that these birth factors place children at greatest risk for not being ready to start school, Hayes said, teachers, pediatricians, school psychologists and other early childhood experts can identify these children and intervene early with prevention and developmental programs.