[UK] Bedtime stories can help alleviate poverty, says study

from The Guardian

Matthew Taylor and Jacqueline Maley
Wednesday May 17, 2006

Children from deprived families have a dramatically increased chance of escaping poverty later in life if their parents read to them, according to a government study.

Boys whose fathers show little or no interest in their education are 25% less likely to have escaped poverty by the time they reach 30, while mothers' interest in their daughters' education also has a dramatic impact on their performance, according to the study by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Children from poor homes are almost three times as likely as others to grow up to be poor, with 16-year-olds in households where no parent works at the greatest risk of remaining in poverty as adults.

According to yesterday's report, early educational achievement is the best springboard for youngsters to "buck the trend" and lift themselves out of poverty.

Academic Jo Blanden, from the University of Surrey, looked at a group of 18,000 people born in Britain in April 1970, whose progress has been tracked at ages five, 10, 16 and 30 in the hope of discovering what influences affect their chances in life.

Of those who were poor at the age of 16 - about a quarter of the total - around 20% were in poverty when they hit 30, compared to 7% of those who came from wealthier backgrounds.

Dr Blanden found that it was the children who scored well in tests at the age of five, were read to at home and had parents who showed an interest in their school work who were most likely to escape poverty.

Dr Blanden said: "The most robust result found is that parental interest in children's education is very important," she said.

"This implies that parenting interventions such as Sure Start could have an important long-term effect if they encourage parents to become more involved in their children's education."

A separate report, which used household spending as a measure of deprivation as opposed to the household income measure used by the government, found that levels of poverty had increased since Labour came to power.

The report, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, argues that calculating how much households spend, not how much they earn, is the best indicator of long-term inequality.

Its findings show that although the government's benefit, tax credit and other policies have been relatively successful in bringing down the number of people who are income-poor, they have not made a dent on poverty measured in terms of spending.

The government currently defines as "poor" any household that has an income at least 60% less than the median income. But the report authors argue that incomes can change dramatically over a lifetime but spending tends to stay more level, as people supplement their pay with credit and other types of debt. As such, spending gives a better picture of the financial wellbeing of a household.

"When we use spending as a measure of poverty we get a completely different picture of what's happened to poverty in the last ten years," said report author Mike Brewer, a programme director at the IFS.

"How happy you are or how well you are depends on how much you are spending ... and inequalities in terms of spending have been growing since Labour came to power."