i
Healthy and Ready to Learn: Prevalence and Correlates of School Readiness among United States Preschoolers
-
7 2021
-
-
Source: Acad Pediatr. 21(5):818-829
[PDF-883.89 KB]
Details:
-
Alternative Title:Acad Pediatr
-
Personal Author:
-
Description:Objective:
To assess the national and state prevalence of being “Healthy and Ready to Learn” (HRL) and associated sociodemographic, health, family and neighborhood factors.
Methods:
Cross-sectional analysis of the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, a nationally representative parent-reported survey administered by web and paper June 2016 to February 2017. Four domains were constructed from 18 items through confirmatory factor analyses: “Early Learning Skills”, “Social-Emotional Development”, “Self-Regulation”, and “Physical Well-being and Motor Development.” Each item and domain were scored according to age-specific standards as “On-Track”, “Needs Support”, and “At Risk” with overall HRL defined as “On-Track” in all domains for 7565 randomly selected children ages 3 to 5 years.
Results:
In 2016, 42.2% of children ages 3 to 5 years were considered HRL with the proportion considered “On-Track” ranging from 58.4% for Early Learning Skills to 85.5% for Physical Well-being and Motor Development”; approximately 80% of children were considered “On-Track” in Social-Emotional Development and Self-Regulation, respectively. Sociodemographic differences were mostly non-significant in multivariable analyses. Health, family, and neighborhood factors (ie, special health care needs status/type, parental mental health, reading, singing and storytelling, screen time, adverse childhood experiences, and neighborhood amenities) were associated with HRL. HRL prevalence ranged from 25.5% (NV) to 58.7% (NY), but only 4 states were significantly different from the U.S. overall.
Conclusions:
Based on this pilot measure, only about 4 in 10 US children ages 3 to 5 years may be considered “Healthy and Ready to Learn.” Improvement opportunities exist for multiple, modifiable factors to affect young children’s readiness to start school.
-
Subjects:
-
Keywords:
-
Source:
-
Pubmed ID:33667721
-
Pubmed Central ID:PMC10947794
-
Document Type:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
