Investing in Early Years and Parenting Are Key for Lifelong Success
If you follow the KIPS Blogs, you know that we are big fans of James Heckman (1, 2), from the University of Chicago Center for the Economics of Human Development, who is a tireless advocate for investing in early intervention to gain greater returns for children, families, and communities.
In a previous blog, we took a look at his small book entitled Giving Kids a Fair Chance (A Strategy that Works). As a Nobel Prize winning economist, Heckman’s writing is often highly technical. However, he wrote this powerful little book in plain language to get his message out to the public. In Giving Kids a Fair Chance, Heckman makes 3 powerful points. For his website, he has distilled these 3 points into what is known as the Heckman Equation: invest + develop + sustain = gain. Heckman estimated a sevenfold return on quality investments in the preschool years for three and four-year-olds. There is no other known public investment that can make this claim.
Or is there?
Lifelong Benefits of Birth to Five Programs
Heckman and colleagues’ latest report, The Lifecycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program shifts the focus to Birth to Five programs and their long-term benefits. They conclude that high quality comprehensive early childhood programs serving disadvantaged children from Birth to Five can deliver an astounding 13% per year return on investment. Why is the return nearly double that estimated in Heckman’s earlier report on the Perry Preschool program? The Lifecyle Benefits report takes into account the children’s long-term health outcomes at age 35 years and their families’ economic outcomes when childcare enabled mothers to enter the workforce. This report shows the lasting effects of high quality comprehensive Birth to Five programs.
Children receiving ABC/CARE high quality early learning services showed a variety of significantly better outcomes than those enrolled in lower quality care (usually after age 3 years) or no center-based care.
Long-Term Benefits of ABC/CARE for Girls:
higher rate of high school graduation
more years of education
more employment as adults
higher employment income as adults
Long-Term Benefits of ABC/CARE for Boys:
lower drug use
lower blood pressure/hypertension
more years of education
higher employment income as adults
Benefits for Mothers of Children Enrolled in ABC/CARE:
more years of education
higher employment
higher employment income
ABC/CARE Studies. Heckman and his colleagues arrived at these conclusions after analyzing the long-term outcomes of the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC) and the Carolina Approach to Responsive Education (CARE), two randomly-controlled studies conducted in the 1970’s at the University of North Carolina. These programs enrolled African American children in comprehensive early learning services from birth to five. including healthcare, nutrition, and developmental services. The children in the control group were involved in lower quality center-based childcare or home care. To follow these children, a wide variety of outome data were collected annually from birth to age 8 years on cognitive and social-emotional skills, home environment, family structure and family economics. After age 8, outcomes were collected at ages 12, 15, 21 and 30 years on cognitive and social-emotional skills, education, and family economics. At age 35 years, an extensive medical survey and criminal activity records were collected.
What Contributes to a High Quality Program?
The strong life outcomes for children and their parents listed above are heartening and strong currency for advocates for funding many high quality comprehensive early learning programs today that are modeled after ABC and CARE. What contributed to the high quality of these programs? Professional early childhood staff were trained in a developmental education model and curriculum that encompassed a wide range of cognitive and social-emaotional skills. In addition, the programs attended to children’s nutrition and health, including elements such as nurses as team members, developmental screenings, and referrals for special needs. Do these sound familiar in your program? We have ABC/CARE to thank for that. While some argue that the costs of comprehensive programs are too high, this report proves that high quality Birth to Five programs are a powerful investment in health, education and employment for our children, parents and communities.
“The gains are significant because quality programs pay for themselves many times over. The cost of inaction is a tragic loss of human and economic potential that we cannot afford.”
(Heckman, Research Summary: The Lifecycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program)
Add Parenting Assessment!
In the graphic at the top of this blog, Heckman recommends that programs support parents in order to strenghten their family life and lifelong relationships with their children. Using a parenting assessment, like KIPS, can help practitioners and parents identify parenting strengths and areas for improvement within each family. In hindsight, there’s one measure we would add to the stellar ABC/CARE studies of the 1970’s. In current early childhood evaluation studies, parenting, measured by tools such as KIPS, is considered a valuable intermediate outcome. As you’ll note in a few of our previous KIPS blogs, after nearly 50 years of research, the early childhood field has established that parenting, especially the parent-child relationship, is key to the development of children’s brains, health, learning and social-emotional development. I wonder how Heckman and colleagues’ conclusions might have changed if parenting assessments had been added to the Birth to Five mix of data?