Lisa J. Berlin

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.

Examining Observational Measures of Emotional Support and Cognitive Stimulation in Black and White Mothers of Preschoolers

In this study we drew on the Infant Health and Development Program to examine two sets of observational measures of parenting behavior. First, correlations between the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Warmth subscale and a Supportive Presence scale, and between the HOME Learning subscale and a Quality of Assistance scale were examined. There were moderate correlations between the two emotional support scales and between the two cognitive stimulation scales. Second, the individual and collective predictive strengths of each parenting behavior measure were examined vis-à-vis two child outcomes: childrens behavior problems and childrens receptive language abilities. White and Black children were examined separately in all analyses. Analyses indicated some degree of association between the parenting behavior measures and the childhood outcomes. Some unanticipated racial differences in the regression models also emerged.

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.