ARTICLE Does Disadvantage Start at Home? Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health-Related Early Childhood Home Routines and Safety Practices

Background: Little is known about whether racial/ ethnic differences exist in household family activities, safety practices, and educational opportunities known to impact young children’s healthy development and school success. Objective: To examine whether racial/ethnic dispari-ties exist in early childhood home routines, safety mea-sures, and educational practices/resources. Methods: The 2000 National Survey of Early Child-hood Health is a telephone survey of a nationwide sample of parents of 2608 children aged 4 to 35 months. Differ-ences in family activities, safety measures, and educa-tional practices/resources were examined for white, black, and Hispanic children. Results: Minority children are less likely than white chil-dren to have consistent daily mealtimes and bedtimes, and more frequently never eat lunch or dinner with their fam-ily. Minority parents are less likely to install stair gates or cabinet safety locks and to turn down hot water settings. Minority parents less often read daily to their child, His-panic parents more often never read to their child, and mi-nority households average fewer children’s books. Black children average more hours watching television daily. Dis-parities persisting in multivariate analyses included: mi-nority children having increased odds of never eating lunch or dinner with their family, black children not having regu-lar mealtimes (odds ratio, 1.8; 95 % confidence interval, 1.2-2.7) and watching 1 more hour of television daily, black parents not installing cabinet locks, minority parents hav-ing twice the odds of not installing stair gates and not read-ing to their child daily, and minority homes having fewer children’s books (black homes, −30; and Hispanic homes, −20). Children whose parents completed surveys in Span-ish also experienced several disparities. Conclusions: Young minority children experience mul-tiple disparities in home routines, safety measures, and educational practices/resources that have the potential to impede their healthy development and future school success. Such disparities might be reduced or elimi-nated through targeted education and intervention by pe-diatric providers