Study: Mother's reading skill greatest determinant of academic success

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded that programs to boost the academic achievement of children from low-income neighborhoods might be more successful if they also provided adult literacy education to parents. The researchers based this conclusion on their finding that a mother's reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children's future academic success, outweighing other factors, such as neighborhood and family income.

The study, appearing in Demography, was supported by NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

"The findings indicate that programs to improve maternal literacy skills may provide an effective means to overcome the disparity in academic achievement between children in poor and affluent neighborhoods," said Rebecca Clark, chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute that funded the study. After mother's reading level, neighborhood income level was the largest determinant of children's academic achievement.

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