Early impacts of Room to Grow: A multifaceted intervention supporting parents and children age zero to three

Abstract

Children experiencing poverty or low incomes fare worse than their more advantaged peers on a host of developmental and educational outcomes. Interventions have focused on strengthening parenting in families with young children, when supports appear to be most critical. But most parenting programs for low-income families fail to address parents’ economic needs, which almost always take precedence relative to broader educational or developmental goals. In this article, we describe the early results of a multifaceted intervention aimed at supporting parents, infants, and toddlers in the first three years of life. The Room to Grow program provides parents, primarily mothers, with support from a clinical social worker, connections to community referrals, and up to $10,000 in material support for the baby in the form of in-kind assistance such as clothes, books, toys, strollers, and other necessities. The current study examines proximal outcomes of the intervention after one year using a randomized controlled trial evaluation design. The study finds that early impacts on proximal outcomes are uniformly positive, especially with regards to the presence of books and developmental goods in the home, developmentally-oriented parenting outcomes, and reduced stress and aggravation in the domain of parenting.