Building toward Effectiveess JoAnn Hsueh (bio), Barbara Condliffe (bio), William Corrin (bio), Samantha Steimle (bio), Rekha Balu (bio), Margaret Hennessy (bio), Sharon Huang (bio), Vianny Lugo-Aracena (bio), Michelle Maier (bio), Shira Mattera (bio), Shay O'Brien (bio), Amena Sengal (bio), Jed Teres (bio), Samantha Wulfsohn (bio), and Jennifer Yeaton (bio) Researchers, as well as school districts and other providers, all share the goal of ensuring that early childhood education positively affects young children's social, emotional, and academic development. Because they align practice with the best knowledge available, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are one of the strongest hopes for bringing the varied perspectives and expertise of these players together and thus maximizing potential benefits for children.1 Many RPPs bring together talented university-based researchers with school districts and providers. Yet they can be challenging to sustain, and some last longer than others. RPPs, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, can vary widely in terms of their initial lines of inquiry, goals, and the kinds of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers who constitute them. Indeed, to meet the needs, interests, and circumstances of districts and providers, relationships in an RPP need to be flexible. Researchers can find it quite challenging to adjust as real-world contexts and circumstances change. An RPP in which an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization like MDRC is the research partner serves as an example of one RPP model, and in this commentary, we describe our experiences and how we've been able to use our infrastructure and diverse expertise to meet the changing scope and needs of different phases of long-standing partnerships. In doing so, we aim to illuminate key principles and offer potential strategies that other researchers can adopt to establish long-standing, collaborative partnerships of their own. Partnering with a Research Organization What does a partner like MDRC bring to RPPs? MDRC is a mission-driven social policy research organization with a 47-year [End Page 161] history of developing and evaluating policies and programs that seek to improve the lives of low-income families, children, and communities. Supported by a blend of philanthropic grants and public funding, our work is informed by a deep institutional history of integrating impact and implementation research and of providing technical assistance and feedback to our partners, including school districts, government agencies, and nonprofits. We focus on supporting the use of data in decision making to strengthen program operations and implementation and to guide continuous program improvement. Historically, MDRC has been best known for large-scale demonstrations and program evaluations that often employ random assignment. Usually, our projects involve years of research, during which we work closely with government agencies, schools, and program providers. In these partnerships, we've not only conducted research but also advised partners on their programming or provided technical assistance to them, thus both generating new knowledge and helping to apply it in practice. In fact, a significant portion of MDRC researchers have experience as program administrators, teachers, and frontline staff, meaning we have a strong understanding of how programs operate in the real world. We're also trained in multiple disciplines, including developmental and implementation science, applied behavioral sciences, and predictive analytics. School districts and providers join RPPs because they want to be sure their programs are making a difference. As an organization known for assessing the impacts that programs achieve, MDRC focuses on understanding the value that an intervention produces compared with the business-as-usual approach. Thus we start from a philosophy of wanting to create value beyond the status quo. To establish mutually beneficial RPPs in early childhood education, the members of each group that makes up an RPP must play a variety of research roles to supply information needed by their partners. Our work as an intermediary, in which we draw on evidence-based insights to ground and support program implementation with practice partners, has spanned multiple partnerships with public school districts, Head Start, and community-based childcare centers. One sustained partnership has been with the New York City's Department of Education (DOE), which has been eager to learn through interactive evidence-building and program improvement. Relying on both public and private funding raised collaboratively...
A Dean's Perspective Robert C. Pianta (bio) I write this commentary from two perspectives: that of an academic researcher who for several decades has relied on partnerships with practitioners and agencies in the field, and that of a dean of a school of education. From both perspectives, it's clear that research-practice partnerships are essential if research in the social and educational sciences is to be both strong and relevant—that is, if research is to have impact. I come to this belief from experience in a wide array of research-practice partnerships, most of which, fortunately, have been constructive. Here I reflect on the benefits and challenges of these experiences and the types of support that higher education institutions must provide to sustain these essential components of research infrastructure and career development. Research-practice partnerships are also critical to a university's service mission and to advancing practice and professional education. Three themes frame my comments: that partnerships are strategically important for strong and relevant social science, that effective partnerships require explicit investment and development strategies, and that partnerships are developmental contexts for scholars. An Essential Tool The value of scholarship in social and educational science is most often described in terms of the metrics employed in academia—journal impact factors, citations, peer review. Although these factors clearly help determine the value or strength of research from the perspective of the scientific community, they don't fully indicate the value of scientific research for parents, community leaders, policy makers, and the public at large. At times, people outside academia criticize social and educational science research for not yielding results that can help them in their work and for the ways that scholars communicate their results. Thus it's not surprising that we're paying closer attention to increasing our research's relevance. Scholarship is relevant to the extent that it can answer questions that are important to interested people outside academia, can be understood and used by those people, or can influence the decisions and actions of practitioners and policy makers. Because partnerships across the research-practice boundary enable the exchange of experience, information, and perspectives among academics and stakeholders, they are an [End Page 151] indispensable resource for individual scholars and institutions under pressure to produce social science that is both strong and relevant. Stronger Science From the point of view of the traditional metrics of academia, effective partnerships with practitioners (either individuals or organizations) add value in a number of ways. First, partnerships provide insights into questions, processes, mechanisms, and variables of interest to investigators—insights we can't get without the information and perspectives of field partners. These insights and this information help scholars create more refined measurement tools, develop data collection plans and protocols that are more likely to capture the phenomena we want to study, and advance a much more informed and comprehensive interpretation of the results we obtain. Second, partnerships can help researchers take advantage of scale. For many research questions in the social sciences and particularly in education, sample size is a critical factor in designing and interpreting research. Many of our research questions involve malleable factors in education systems that fall into the framework of "what works for whom under what conditions." By their very nature, such questions require a sample that draws from populations larger and more diverse than, say, the set of local fourth-grade math classrooms. To make the science strong enough to yield interpretable results, it's essential to investigate processes and mechanisms across cultural, racial, economic, or other background characteristics of students or across assorted school or classroom features. The power of our statistical analyses, our ability to understand mediating and moderating processes, and our ability to follow a sample over time are all enhanced by increased scale. Scientific work that takes place at the level of school divisions (or districts, as they're called in many states), or that is representative of regions or populations of interest, is crucial to building knowledge that reflects reality. Research-practice partnerships that allow access to scale and to variation can thus strengthen a program of research and dramatically enhance the scientific value of a single study...
Introducing the Issue Daphna Bassok (bio), Anna Markowitz (bio), and Pamela Morris (bio) High-quality early childhood education programs can have lasting impacts, particularly for children in low-income families or families that have been historically marginalized.1 Beyond their direct benefits for children, early childhood education (ECE) programs also support families and the economy by providing safe, warm environments for young children while their parents work—an attribute that recently gained new significance when COVID-19 upended in-person instruction. But even though the promise of early education—for children, for families, for equity, and for society—is widely recognized, delivering effective ECE programming at scale remains elusive. Findings from promising research studies rarely make their way into early childhood practice; at the same time, policy and practice decisions are often made without research evidence to guide them. Many large-scale ECE programs don't consistently offer the types of high-quality experiences that research suggests support development, and thus they don't deliver on their promise to ameliorate poverty-related and other inequalities.2 The discrepancies between what we know, what decision makers need, and the reality of children's experiences have caused many researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to wonder if there's a better or faster way to produce change. To build a system of high-quality early care accessible to all children, some early education research must pivot to questions, methods, and timelines that align with the needs of policy makers and practitioners who are making high-stakes, systems-level decisions. At the same time, research must stay firmly rooted in the science of how children develop.3 This issue of the Future of Children argues that research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a particularly promising strategy for doing both well, and thus offer another critical tool to support high-quality early childhood education. RPPs are long-term collaborations between researchers and policy makers and/or practitioners that are designed to improve educational outcomes through sustained collaboration and commitment.4 These partnerships are defined by their longevity, mutual decision-making and compromise, and the commitment of both parties to larger-scale, systems-level problem-solving, [End Page 3] rather than a single project or research question.5 When done well, RPPs can produce research that's both more relevant and useful to policy makers and more rigorous and/or innovative than the studies that researchers could undertake outside of a formal partnership. But this work isn't easy. Researchers and policy makers are used to operating with very different timelines, goals, and incentive structures, and these differences can present challenges for effective partnership. A clear understanding of what partnership work requires, and strategies for overcoming these hurdles, are essential for creating the kind of long-term, open relationship that results in better policy and stronger scholarship. This issue explores these challenges as well as the potential of partnership work for helping to transform ECE systems. Unlike a typical Future of Children issue, which describes what's already known about a topic that affects children's lives, this issue focuses on an approach to research and practice. We aim to distill lessons from existing ECE partnerships and to provide a road map for researchers and policy/practice leaders who want to collaborate. The articles examine both the challenges and the opportunities of partnership work, and show how partnerships may, in some instances and when carefully designed, pave the way for systems-level change. Each article is centered on a major challenge or opportunity, such as creating a research or funding agenda, developing tools, taking innovation to scale, navigating different timelines, finding a balance between rigor and feasibility, and building capacity. Three commentaries, written by a university dean, a practice leader, and policy organization researchers, describe how the contexts in which policy makers and researchers work—universities, state systems, and research firms, respectively—can effectively support RPP work. As a whole, the issue sets the stage for strengthening and investing in partnership work in early education. Historical Role of RPPs in Early Education ECE research has its roots in RPPs. The three major studies whose results have driven much of the public investment in ECE—the Perry Preschool...
In this article, Rachel Abenavoli, Natalia Rojas, Rebecca Unterman, Elise Cappella, Josh Wallack, and Pamela Morris argue that research-practice partnerships make it possible to rigorously study relevant policy questions in ways that would otherwise be infeasible. Randomized controlled trials of small-scale programs have shown us that early childhood interventions can yield sizable benefits. But when we move from relatively small, tightly controlled studies to scaled-up initiatives, the results are often disappointing. Here the authors describe how their partnership with New York City's Department of Education, as the city rapidly rolled out its universal pre-K initiative, gave them opportunities to collect experimental and quasi-experimental evidence while placing a minimal burden on educators. They argue that this type of research can answer the most pressing ECE questions, which are less about whether ECE can make a difference and more about the conditions under which early interventions are effective at scale. They offer three recommendations for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners who are considering partnership work: build a foundation of trust and openness; carefully consider whether rigorous causal research or descriptive research is the right choice in a given situation; and be flexible, seeking opportunities for rigorous research designs that may already be embedded in early childhood education systems.
A Unique Opportunity for Education Policy Makers Jenna Conway (bio) When it comes to solving problems and measuring impact, public education organizations primarily rely on two approaches—using civil service to hire personnel directly or using competitive procurement to hire outside experts on contract. These two approaches can limit such organizations' efforts to gain insights, to incorporate cutting-edge research into policy and practice, and to develop innovative solutions quickly, nimbly and affordably. In this commentary, I discuss how public education organizations can use research-practice partnerships (RPPs), especially partnerships with public higher education institutions, to tackle new, unique, and complicated education problems and thereby help children. Consider how traditional approaches can inadvertently limit public education organizations. In civil service, most jobs are full-time, classified positions with very specific descriptions that are subject to a range of restrictions to protect the rights of employees. It can be hard to gain new insights without procuring outside experts whose rates are significantly higher than most government pay scales. Similarly, public education organizations may have a research director or team, but they usually don't have the capacity to analyze all the available data or measure the impact of everything the organization does. For new initiatives or pilot programs, public education organizations rarely have the internal research or analytical capacity to conduct rigorous, real-time research on interventions as they are implementing them. Instead, they typically rely on outside research. Doing so entails a lengthy grant application or procurement process and requires an extended time period to collect and analyze data and produce findings. Finally, with procurement, a public organization must specify both the problem and proposed solution up front, establish constraints, and require bidders to define precisely what they will do and provide and how much it will cost. This can inhibit an iterative design process where prototypes can be tested and improved. To top it off, the procurement process itself can take a year or more. Procurement may work well for well-established projects and services, but it proves more challenging when a state is [End Page 157] designing a new service, intervention, or tool, especially one that will be used by a large and diverse set of users. In contrast, RPPs, particularly those involving public higher education institutions, offer a unique opportunity for policy makers to expediently and cost-effectively gain expertise, integrate real-time research into their policies and practices, and design and build innovative solutions in an iterative manner that better meets their needs. First, RPPs allow public education organizations to gain cutting-edge expertise without having to hire full-time staff or procure expensive consultants, which may not be economically feasible. When I was assistant superintendent of early childhood for the Louisiana Department of Education, we established a multi-year partnership with Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia School of Education. In an ambitious transformation of its birth-to-five early childhood system, Louisiana unified its child care, Head Start, and school-based prekindergarten systems. Specifically, over five years, Louisiana established uniform expectations across programs, supported local networks in every community, measured interactions in every classroom, offered incentives for quality improvement at the classroom level, and coordinated enrollment locally to make it easier for families to choose the best option for their children. Louisiana's approach, which was different from that of most other states, entailed significant change for early childhood educators and for the department. Operating from the hypothesis that teacher-child interactions are what matters most for child outcomes, Louisiana rapidly gathered classroom data from thousands of child care, Head Start, and school sites across the state. It would have been hard to hire staff or craft a contract with specific targets when we were unsure what the data would reveal and when no other state or entity had done what we were doing. In exchange for our collaborating on research projects (and the grant proposals that preceded them), helping them safely and securely access appropriate data, and offering their graduate students valuable internship opportunities, UVA helped Louisiana make sense of large volumes of new classroom data, offered insights on how to encourage improvement, designed new approaches to engage families through enrollment, and...
One of the first steps in developing a research-practice partnership is forming a joint research agenda. In this article, Michael Strambler, Joanna L. Meyer, Clare Waterman Irwin, and George A. Coleman describe the collaborative process that Connecticut's Partnership for Early Education Research (PEER) used to develop an agenda driven by practitioners' interests and concerns. The authors describe three challenges that often arise during the agenda-setting process: responding to partners' priorities, partners' research readiness, and the researchers' content expertise. Policy makers' priorities often shift rapidly in response to changing contextual factors, especially the leadership changes endemic to education. The authors show that to strengthen the partnership and its ability to withstand such personnel changes, researchers must take a flexible approach to agenda-setting and build relationships with multiple agency personnel. Another challenge is the policy makers' readiness to engage in the research process, with respect both to their understanding and buy-in for research, and to their capacity to support the research in key ways (such as data sharing). The authors describe how researchers can build this capacity over time by showing partners the concrete ways research can be useful, both in general and in a specific context. A third challenge is that researchers may lack expertise in the areas their partners view as priorities. The authors show how research partners can link their partners to resources and expertise they may not otherwise be able to access.
In this article, Amanda Williford, Jason Downer, Kate Miller-Bains, Jenna Conway, and Lisa Howard tell us how a university research center, an early education advocacy group, and a state department of education joined forces in a research-practice partnership to develop and implement a more comprehensive assessment of young Virginia children's readiness for kindergarten. The Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program, or VKRP, as the assessment they built is called, added measures of math, self-regulation, and social skills to complement Virginia's existing statewide assessment of prekindergarten children's literacy. The aim was not only to better assess children's readiness to enter school, but also to guide teachers' instructional practice and help the state target support. The partnership produced many benefits: for policy makers, a statewide snapshot of children's readiness; for researchers, on-the-ground feedback from teachers; and for the education department, joint review and interpretation of data patterns to aid decision-making. But at times, the fast pace of statewide implementation affected the university partners' ability to pursue their research aims, at least in the short term, highlighting a recurring theme of this issue-the challenges of balancing researchers' and partners' needs.
Research-practice partnerships often face a fundamental tension: well-designed, high-quality research takes time, but practitioners and policy makers need answers to pressing questions as soon as possible. In this article, Jason Sachs, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, and Catherine Snow discuss this mismatch between the tight timelines of educational decision makers and the typically longer timelines of researchers who are pursuing rigorous analyses. They tell us how, in a partnership between researchers and the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood, they've worked to make fast-turnaround research as rigorous as they can, while also conducting longer-term causal studies. Because policy makers and practitioners typically aren't highly trained in study design and causal inference, a key responsibility for researchers is communicating the strengths and limitations of fast-turnaround work in ways that can be easily understood by their partners-and making it clear that fast-response analyses should be viewed as only one piece of evidence for guiding a decision.
Building a research-practice partnership that spans two or more organizations can be challenging. University researchers, for instance, may find themselves in schools or departments where the incentives and culture favor more individualistic, single-discipline research projects. Practitioners and policy makers may not see the value of investing in research and evaluation, or they may hesitate to prioritize this work above more pressing operational and strategic aims. In this article, Maia Connors, Debra M. Pacchiano, Amanda G. Stein, and Mallary I. Swartz show how an "embedded partnership" between the program implementation and research teams within a single nonprofit organization (Start Early, formerly the Ounce of Prevention Fund) can help overcome such challenges and build important capacities that researchpractice partnerships need in order to be effective: an organizational culture that values research evidence, sound measurement, and continuous learning; interdisciplinary expertise; and sustainable infrastructure, including administrative support, technology, and financial resources.
In 2014, New York City launched its Pre-K for All program, which rapidly tripled the number of children in free, full-day prekindergarten. Two years later, the city rolled out ThriveNYC, a citywide mental health initiative with a focus on early childhood. By this time, a team from New York University's medical school had partnered for nearly two decades with the city's Division of Early Childhood Education, during which time they developed, tested, and refined ParentCorps, an intervention aimed at supporting the parents and teachers of prekindergarten children. They were thus well positioned to take on the citywide scale-up of their proven intervention. Nonetheless, the partnership was challenged by the scope of the scale-up and by the need to modify the intervention, which had been developed and tested in schools, for use in the community-based organizations that house many of the city's prekindergarten programs. In this article, Laurie Brotman and colleagues describe how their long-established partnership principles-for example, ParentCorps's commitments to racial equity, centering parents' voices, and continuous learning- helped guide their actions, their strategy development, and ultimately their plan for scaling ParentCorps locally and nationally.
Many if not most research-practice partnerships depend to at least some degree on funding from philanthropic organizations. In this article, Jacqueline Jones discusses how and why the Foundation for Child Development decided to invest in such a partnership, the New York City Early Childhood Research Network, as the city was building its universal prekindergarten program. She also explains why the foundation chose the type of partnership known as a research alliance-a long-term, mutually beneficial collaboration that promotes the production and use of rigorous research about problems of practice. Funders, Jones writes, are primarily concerned with the impact of the work they support. Yet traditional research activities may take years to be complete, and it may take even longer to determine whether the research had any impact on policy or practice. In a place-based research-practice partnership, collaborative construction of research questions ensures that the work is relevant, and rapid response research models mean that policy makers and practitioners begin to get answers to their questions-and funders begin to see the impact of their investment-much sooner. In this way, Jones writes, research-practice partnerships provide context-relevant data that can lead to quick policy changes, making them rewarding investments for funders.
Health care reaches more children under age three in the United States than any other family-facing system and represents the most common entry point for developmental assessment of and services for children. In this article, Adam Schickedanz and Neal Halfon examine how well the child health care system promotes healthy child development early in life. They also review children's access to health care through insurance coverage, the health care system's evolution in response to scientific and technical advances, and the shifting epidemiology of health and developmental risk. The authors find that the health care system is significantly underperforming because it is constrained by antiquated conventions, insufficient resources, and outmoded incentive structures inherent in the traditional medical model that still dominates pediatric care. These structural barriers, organization challenges, and financial constraints limit the system's ability to adequately recognize, respond to, and, most importantly, prevent adverse developmental outcomes at the population level. To achieve population-level progress in healthy child development, Schickedanz and Halfon argue that pediatric care will need to transform itself and go beyond simply instituting incremental clinical process improvement. This will require taking advantage of opportunities to deliver coordinated services that bridge sectors and focusing not only on reducing developmental risk and responding to established developmental disability but also on optimizing healthy child development before developmental vulnerabilities arise. New imperatives for improved population health, along with the growing recognition among policy makers and practitioners of the social and developmental determinants of health, have driven recent innovations in care models, service coordination, and coverage designs. Yet the available resources and infrastructure are static or shrinking, crowded out by rising overall health care costs and other policy priorities. The authors conclude that child health systems are at a crossroads of conflicting priorities and incentives, and they explore how the health system might successfully respond to this impasse.
Beliefs about socioeconomic mobility have important consequences, writes Mesmin Destin, especially for young people. Moreover, research by psychologists shows that such beliefs are malleable, based on the information and circumstances people encounter. The consequences of beliefs about mobility can be quite positive. When young people perceive that they have opportunities and financial resources to help them reach their goals, they are more likely to take the steps that can lead to upward socioeconomic mobility. But the consequences can also be negative. Overemphasizing opportunities while de-emphasizing systematic barriers and inequality, Destin writes, makes it less likely that people will take collective action against discrimination and address inequality's structural roots. Destin proposes several ways that policymakers and others could navigate this tension. One, for example, is to convey a more balanced notion to young people: that opportunities are available, but unfair barriers exist that particularly affect members of certain groups. In the end, though, he concludes, perhaps the most effective way to shape people's perceptions of opportunity is to expand the pathways to upward socioeconomic mobility and make them more accessible to all young people.
Parental sensitivity and nurturance are important mechanisms for establishing biological, emotional, and social functioning in childhood. Sensitive, nurturing care is most critical during the first three years of life, when attachment relationships form and parental care shapes foundational neural and physiological systems, with lifelong consequences. Sensitive, nurturing care also buffers children from the negative effects of growing up in difficult circumstances such as poverty. In this article, Carrie DePasquale and Megan Gunnar examine several interventions that directly or indirectly target parental sensitivity and nurturance, and demonstrate the causal role that this type of care plays in children's development, especially during the first three years of life. They note that even though sensitive, nurturing care is still helpful after infancy and early childhood, it doesn't completely mitigate the effects of not receiving this type of care early in life. And because sensitive care involves knowing when to respond and when to let the child manage more independently, excessive responsiveness, overinvolvement, and intrusiveness are also forms of insensitive care. Sensitive and nurturing parent behaviors vary across cultures, and numerous other factors influence parental sensitivity as well. For example, children's temperament and emotional reactivity may affect parents' behavior and/or alter the effects of parenting behavior on children's development. Physiological, cognitive, and emotional self-regulatory capabilities, as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors, can also affect a parent's ability to provide sensitive, nurturing care. Based on the expansive research related to parental sensitivity and nurturance, the authors recommend that policy makers should aim to increase family and community access to programs that enhance sensitive, nurturing care and support parents so they can provide high-quality care to their children.
Compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave may better help working parents balance the competing needs of job and family early in a child's life, among other advantages. Yet the United States remains one of only two countries in the world without a statutory national paid maternity leave policy, and one of the only high-income countries that doesn't provide access to paid paternity leave for new fathers at the federal level. In theory, Maya Rossin-Slater and Jenna Stearns write, paid leave can benefit families in two ways: by changing the amount of income available in the household (and the amount of resources available for the child), and by increasing the amount of time parents spend with their children. Despite the lack of paid leave at the federal level, several US states have their own paid family leave programs, all of which provide partial wage replacement during leave to care for a newborn or newly adopted child, and aim to cover a broad segment of the workforce through minimal eligibility requirements. Rossin-Slater and Stearns review research about the effects of these state-level programs, as well as paid leave programs in other countries. The authors find that paid family leave has a number of benefits. For one, compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave increases leave-taking rates and leave duration, especially among disadvantaged parents. Paid leave programs that range from a few months to up to a year in length also appear to improve both infants' health and mothers' outcomes in the job market. At the same time, the research finds that existing paid leave programs have minimal impacts on businesses, suggesting that these programs confer benefits to workers and their families at little to no cost to their employers. Finally, because rising economic inequality in the United States is in part driven by disparities in early childhood, the authors argue that paid family leave may be one way to level the playing field for children from all backgrounds and help improve intergenerational mobility.
Many children, especially those from lower-income families, face considerable instability early in their lives. This may include changes in family structure, irregular family routines, frequent moves, fluctuating daycare arrangements, and noisy, crowded, or generally chaotic environments. Moreover, instability and chaos affect young children's development both directly and, via their parents' and other caregivers' exposure to it, indirectly. Unstable, chaotic environments make it more difficult for children to acquire self-regulatory skills, including self-control and planning, that help them manage their emotions and behaviors, write Stacey Doan and Gary Evans. And when caregivers themselves confront unpredictable events and unreliable circumstances that strain their own adaptive capacities, their ability to provide sensitive, nurturing care may be compromised. In this article, Doan and Evans show us how social and physical chaos can influence early child development. They focus not only on micro-level factors in families and their immediate surroundings, but also on macro-level processes such as public policy. For example, social safety net programs that are designed to help families from disadvantaged backgrounds can sometimes inadvertently increase the instability and chaos in children's lives. The authors suggest how such programs could be redesigned to decrease rather than exacerbate instability. They also review promising interventions such as parenting programs that may help to reduce instability in children's home lives.
Summary:The early home language environment, and parents in particular, form the foundation of children’s language development. In this article, Dina Kapengut and Kimberly Noble explore the intersection of neuroscience and developmental psychology to explain how language experiences in the home, and the home learning environment more broadly, shape young children’s brains and, ultimately, their developmental and academic outcomes.Brain plasticity during childhood makes the brain particularly sensitive to environmental influence. Because socioeconomic inequality is associated with variation in environmental exposures and experiences that are particularly powerful in predicting children’s outcomes, the authors write, children from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds are at a profoundly increased risk for negative physical, socioemotional, cognitive, and academic outcomes. This harmful pattern emerges early, compounds over time, and persists into adulthood.Fortunately, a number of interventions show promise for helping parents improve the home learning environment. Kapengut and Noble highlight several evidence-based programs, most of which focus on the concept of language nutrition—a term created by pediatricians to explain to caregivers that exposure to language that’s rich in quality and quantity and delivered in the context of social interactions is crucial for children’s development and health. They also note the limitations of existing programs and of the research behind them, and they suggest where policy makers, practitioners, and researchers could look to narrow socioeconomic-related differences in home learning environments.
In this article, Ajay Chaudry and Heather Sandstrom review research on child care and early education for children under age three. They describe the array of early care and education arrangements families use for infants and toddlers; how these patterns have changed in recent decades; and differences by family socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity. Chaudry and Sandstrom note that families face many challenges both in getting access to child care and in finding care of more than mediocre quality. These challenges include limited supply and limited affordability relative to the needs of working parents and those pursuing education. Other challenges are based on families' and children's circumstances; for example, parents may work nontraditional or variable hours, or children may have special developmental needs. Although experts agree that the quality of children's care is important for their learning and development, the authors write, there is no consensus on how to best measure quality and what factors are most important. They review what we know about the quality of infant and toddler child care in the United States, why child care quality matters for children's learning and development, and how the federal government as well as the states are trying to improve child care quality. Chaudry and Sandstrom also examine the major public programs that support early care and education, primarily for children in low-income families-child care subsidies, tax credits, and the Early Head Start program. Overall, they note, the United States' public investment in quality child care and early education is relatively minimal, though bold proposals to bolster that investment are now on the table.
Summary:Nutrition is vitally important both during pregnancy and during a child’s early years. Inadequate nutrition during this critical period can harm children’s health and developmental outcomes throughout childhood and into adulthood. Thus, write Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Betsy Thorn, it’s particularly important that young children have adequate nutrition and resources.Yet many young children in the United States lack adequate nutrition. In this article, Schanzenbach and Thorn lay out the extent of the problem and review what the research tells us about inadequate nutrition’s detrimental effects on young children’s development. They report on the effectiveness of policies and programs that aim to improve nutrition among young children—especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)—as well as supplementation of nutrients (both mandatory and voluntary) by the manufacturers of food products, primarily grains. Finally, they suggest how policy makers and others could help more young children, especially the most vulnerable, get the nutrition they need.
