“Executive functions as mediators of early educational disparities by SES, gender and birth month”. A Comment

Two days a go, a study was published which tested how executive functions mediates socio-Economic Status (SES), gender-differences, and which month of the years kids where born. SES means a household with very limited financial resources. I normal language a woman who for some reason fel out and not only divorsed the childrens father, but also started a custodial conflict to aqurire sole control over the children, and where social service personnel have promised to ensure that the single parent receives benefits from the state (other tax payers). In a broader sense: EFs are a set of cognitive abilities that allow individuals to plan, organize, guide, regulate, and evaluate goal-directed behavior. And there's a father effect. Kids who grow up with both parents or the father have better executive functions compared to kids who grow up with a single-mother.

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Two days a go, a study was published which tested how executive functions mediates socio-Economic Status (SES), gender-differences, and which month of the years kids where born.

Länk till source.

Socio-economic status (SES) means a household with very limited financial resources. In common parlance, usually a woman who for some reason fell out and not only divorced the children's father, but also initiated a custody dispute to gain sole control of the children, and where social services personnel promised to ensure that the single parent received support from the state (other taxpayers and the excluded father).

But allocating effort on a conflict means there's less effort for form a normal life.

Gender differences. Boys and girls are different from a biological and a psycho-physisiologial point of view (Baron-Cohen, 2003).

Birth month. Kids who are born during spring, typically have an advantage over kids who are born at the end of the year. That's because of brain and mind maturation.

In the study, the authors define EFs as cognitive processes supporting goal-directed behavior. That is consistent with:

• The capacities for formulating goals, planning, and carrying out plans effectively (Lezak (1982)
  
  
• a set of higher-level cognitive processes that enable flexible, goal-directed behavior (Elliott (2003)
  
  
• a set of cognitive abilities that allow individuals to plan, organize, guide, regulate, and evaluate goal-directed behavior (Ardila (2008).

One commonality in all four definitions are goal-oriented behavior, which implies goal-oriented thinking, that is prospection, (Atance and O'Neill, 2001, 2005; ; Galistel, 2017; Gilbert och Wilson, 2007; Gallister, 2017; Kaku, 2014; ; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pluck, Cerone and Villagomez-Pacheco, 2023; Schacter och Addis, 2007; Suddendorf, Bulley, and Miloyan, 2018; Szpunar et al. 2014), which unpacks at early age (from 10 month) (Barkley et al. 2001; Liu et al. 2017).

The study show that all three factors are mediated by nurturing childrens' executive functions (EFs) before they start going to school.

To get a second opinion of the study's result, I asked on of the Large Language Models(LLM; Chat Gtp) to summaries the study.

Here's the answer:

But a large part of these differences is explained by executive functions (EF):

• about 23% of SES differences
  
  
• about 39% of gender differences
  
  
• about 51% of differences linked to birth month

But, which is not part of the study, there's a father effect. Kids who grow up with both parents or the father have better executive functions compared to kids who grow up with a single-mother.

It is good that the father is at home with the children (LaFlamme et al. 2012). A research team at Imperial College has published a study showing that children who interact with their father at three months of age have better cognitive ability at two years of age (Sethna et al. 2017). A systematic review shows a positive effect of the father-child relationship on the cognitive development of schoolchildren (Rolle et al. 2019). The father relationship favors children's emotional and social adjustment (Vieno et al. 2009, 2014). Children who grow up with both parents, or with a father, have better emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development compared to children who grow up with a mother (Österberg, 2004):

“A compilation of 28 studies on the effects of father absence on children’s cognitive ability (Shinn, 1978) indicates that father absence as a function of divorce is negatively related to intellectual competence in children; which has also been demonstrated in previous studies (Blanchard & Biller, 1971; Crescimbeni, 1965; Ferri, 1976; Hetherington et al., 1978, 1982; Radin, 1976; Radin et al., 1994; Santrock, 1972; Sutton–Smith et al., 1978). Shinn (1978) argues that the results of the compilation study are consistent with the hypothesis that children's interaction with their parents forms a platform for cognitive development, and that a reduction in this interaction inhibits cognitive development” (p.2).

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