Family Influences on Children's Verbal Ability

Using the 1958 British Birth Cohort dataset and its supplemental survey of biological children, the Children of the National Child Development Study, this paper investigates the influence of family attributes and behaviors on children’s verbal ability measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The hypothesis is that the child’s PPVT score is positively associated with the family’s resources – parent’s education level, parent’s own ability, family income – and is associated as well with other family characteristics including employment, religious participation, and number of siblings, as well as grandparent’s socioeconomic status a generation earlier. The paper hypotheses, additionally, that the family’s "culture" that reflects the parent’s willingness to invest in their children and their resolve to give nurturance and support to their children differs across families, is correlated across generations within the family, and has influence on the child’s PPVT score. The empirical evidence confirms a strong positive association of family resources with the PPVT, and using several proxy variables for family culture, also shows that the behavior of the mother toward her child in utero and in infancy has strong association with the child’s later PPVT test score, and also that the childrearing behaviors of the grandparents a generation earlier have influence on the grandchild’s test score. The mother’s behaviors include her smoking and drinking during the pregnancy and breastfeeding her child, the grandparent’s behaviors a generation earlier (with the child’s parent) includes breastfeeding, reading to the child, and the grandmother and grandfather’s engagement in the schooling of their child, the tested child’s parent. The evidence is interpreted as offering support of the notion of family culture and its influence on the child’s cognitive development.