Non-Technical Summary:
There is much research which shows that the type of environment we are born into influences how successful we are in adulthood. Children who experience poor family environments often have poorer health, education, and income later in life. In particular, research shows that the quality of parenting behavior and the how much stimulation parents provide for their children can influence children’s cognitive, social, and emotional skills. Finding effective ways to improve children’s environments may therefore help to reduce inequalities in society. This study explores the role of intensive and continued investment in parenting from pregnancy until entry into formal schooling, i.e. the first 2,000 days, within a highly disadvantaged community in Dublin, Ireland.
Preparing for Life (PFL) is a community-based program which works with families for 5 years. The program recruited and randomized 233 pregnant women into high or low treatment group. The high treatment included regular home visits delivered by a trained mentor, baby massage classes, and a group parenting course. The treatment aimed to promote children’s health and development by building a strong mentor-parent relationship and helping parents to identify developmental milestones, engage in appropriate parenting practices, and encourage greater parent stimulation. This paper looks at the impact of the program on children’s development when the children were 24, 36, 48, and 51 months of age.
The results show that the PFL program improved children’s development. Children who received the high treatment had better cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral skills than the children who received the low treatment. The program raised the children’s cognitive ability by 0.77 of a standard deviation. All types of cognitive skills were improved including spatial ability, pictorial reasoning, and language ability. The program also reduced how many children had below average cognitive ability and increased how many children had above average ability. While weaker, the program also had a positive effect on the children’s non-cognitive skills including externalizing problems such as aggressive behavior, and prosocial behavior such as helping other children. In particular, the program reduced the number of children scoring in the clinical range for behavioral problems by 15 percentage points. The program had the same effect on girls and boys, however, it had a bigger effect on first born children. By comparing the PFL children to a large representative group of children from all over Ireland, we can also show that the program narrowed the socioeconomic gap in children’s skills. The size of the PFL effects are larger than the effects in other similar early intervention programs. In sum, this study shows that providing support to parents from pregnancy until age five can have large effects on children’s development and help to reduce social inequalities.