Language and communication development and school readiness of children raised by grandparents or in...

One in ten U.S. children lives with a grandparent, and more foster children are being placed in kinship care.

Our objective was to compare early language and communication development and school readiness among children raised by grandparents (alone or in multigenerational households) to children raised by parents.

We included in this cross-sectional study children ages 1-5 years from the 2016-2020 National Survey of Children's Health to examine healthy and ready to learn school readiness outcomes and binary language and communication development (2018-2020 data only) by caregiver type (parent, multigenerational, and grandparent-only) with survey-weighted log-binomial regression adjusted for confounders. We stratified by survey years pre-COVID-19 pandemic versus during.

Among 33,342 children, 86.0% (SE = 0.51) of children were 'On-Track' for language and communication development; only 37.2% (SE = 0.68) were 'On-Track' overall for school readiness. Children raised by grandparents or in multigenerational households were more often 'On-Track' for school readiness than children raised by parents, but only upon adjustment for covariates (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) for grandparent-only 1.13, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.11, 1.15; aPR for multigenerational 1.13, CI 1.12, 1.15). Smaller and less consistent differences in prevalence were observed for the other outcomes (language and communication development, school readiness domains of early learning skills, social-emotional development, self-regulation development and physical well-being and motor development). A disparity in school readiness may have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic; children in grandparent-only households had a lower prevalence of being 'On-Track' for school readiness (aPR 0.71, 95% CI 0.69, 0.73) compared to children in parent households, whereas children in multigenerational households continued to be more often school-ready than children in parent households.

Large proportions of children across caregiver types were not fully prepared for school. Consideration of key covariates is important because socio-economic disadvantage may mask other advantages grandparent-led and multigenerational households offer children's early development.