Allison Sidle Fuligni

The Effectiveness of Early Head Start for 3-Year-Old Children and Their Parents: Lessons for Policy and Programs

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early.

Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention: Early Childhood Intervention Programs: What About the Family?

Early childhood development (defined as occurring from birth, or before birth, through ages 6 to 7) is increasingly being viewed as the foundation of adolescent and young adult cognitive and emotional functioning. In the first half of the 1990s, evidence of the interest in enhancing early development included the Carnegie Corporations pair of reports, Starting Points (1994) and Years of Promise (1996), the creation in 1990 of a National Goals Panel and the Goals 2000 legislation of 1994 (centering on the goal that “by the year 2000 all children will start school ready to learn”), and President Clintons Early Childhood Initiative. A theme common to each of these endeavors is the importance of early experiences – especially supportive relationships and intellectual stimulation – for later development (Brooks-Gunn, 1997). By the fall of 1997, excitement surrounding the early childhood years was palpable. The President and First Lady had just completed two White House Conferences on early childhood, the first on early development, with a focus on brain growth and the importance of stimulation and relationships, and the second on child care, with a focus on the need for quality care. An entire issue of Newsweek was devoted to the early years. Scholars who usually toiled in relative anonymity were showing up on television talk shows, becoming, if only for a moment, famed “talking heads.” A documentary on early development by actor and director Rob Reiner was aired on prime-time television.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers: Current National Data Initiatives and Developmental Research

This article provides a brief review of current large-scale, longitudinal data collection initiatives focusing on children. These studies will be available for secondary data analyses in the twenty-first century. In addition to child outcome data, process-oriented information is being collected on child-parent interactions, quality of child care, elementary school teacher reports and classroom observations, accessibility and use of health, educational and social services, parental mental health, family violence, fathering, parental residence patterns, income and income sources, child support, employment patterns, and community characteristics. Several of these studies are randomized trials of the efficacy of early childhood intervention services and housing mobility programs. The usefulness of these efforts for exploring policy-relevant issues (child support enforcement, work requirements for welfare recipients, antipoverty strategies, housing subsidies and relocation, availability of child care, child-care subsidies) are discussed.