Girls lead boys at age five, says Millennium study

Researchers at the University of London's Institute of Education found that, at age five, girls are around two months ahead of boys on three of the most significant information-processing skills - visual, spatial and non-verbal.

The research, published on Friday by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, is the third survey of the Millennium Cohort Study, which is tracking the development of 15,460 children born in the UK during the first two years of the century.

Dr Kirstine Hansen, the study's research director, said, 'There was roughly the same number of boys as girls in the top 10 per cent of the ability range. However, there are fewer girls in the lower-scoring groups. Our age three assessments of the children showed the same trend, so the gender gap in learning is established early in life.'

The study also found that one in five of the children surveyed was either overweight or obese when they started school, and that obese five-year-olds were twice as likely not to eat breakfast as normal-weight children. Children whose parents were not employed were almost three times as likely to go without breakfast than those with two working parents.

The researchers found that single mother rates were much higher for teenage parents and certain ethnic groups. Almost half of the children born to teenage and black Caribbean mothers were in lone-mother families by the age of five, compared with only four per cent of children from Bangladeshi families.

The study's authors called for more policies to reduce the teenage pregnancy rate. Professor Shirley Dex, a member of the research team, said, 'This survey and other research show that lone-mother families have a high risk of poverty. The experience of living apart from natural fathers can also be associated with other negative outcomes for children. As these experiences are particularly concentrated among children of young mothers, these findings provide justification for policies to improve alternatives to early motherhood for the least-educated young women.'

Further information

'Millennium Cohort Study Third Survey: A User's Guide to Initial Findings' is at www.cls.ioe.ac.uk.