The Association Between Socio-Economic Status and Child Development: A Study Among Preschool-Age Children in The Slum Area of Jakarta and Bekasi, Indonesia

[[abstract]]Background: Over the past century, studies have confirmed that socio-economic status (SES) is a primary underlying cause of differences in health across all age groups. It has been documented that SES-related material disadvantages have a great impact on measures of health outcomes among children. However, few studies have focused on the association between SES and preschool children's motoric and cognitive development. In this study, health and developmental measures of preschool children living in the slum areas of Jakarta were collected to explore the association between SES-related factors and the health and developmental measures among children aged 3 to 5 years old. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional study. Data were collected from 149 mother-child pairs between in 2016. Independent variables included social and demographic characteristics and SES-related factors (e.g. mother’s age, mother’s education, mother’s occupation status, household income, and house density). Child development such as adaptive behavior, cognitive, and motoric development were treating as outcome variables were measured by using the Battelle Developmental Inventory. Logistic regression was employed to investigate the associations between the variables. Results: Results showed that most of the mothers interviewed in this study were in a relatively low socioeconomic status. About 56.4% of the mothers entered the childbearing in young age and 79.9% of the mothers had a low education level. Most of them (72.5%) were unemployed and a great majority of them (76.5%) fell in the low household income category. Turning to the dependent variables, 56.4% of the children had a poor adaptive behavior performance and 50.3% of them had a poor cognitive development performance. About 17.4% of the children in this study were performing poorly in motoric development. Logistic regression results indicated that mother’s level of education was associated with a poor adaptive behavior among the children investigated in this study. Conclusion: Among the SES-related variables included in this study, it turned out that only mothers education was significantly associated with children’s poor adaptive performances. It is speculated that the sample size and other unknown factors might be confounding or mediating the effect of SES on preschool children’s development. Future studies should further investigate the reasons for the high risk of suspected child development