Effects Of Early Childhood Intervention Research Articles

The Lasting Effects of Early Childhood Interventions: The National Vaccination Commando Program in Burkina Faso

The Lasting Effects of Early Childhood Interventions: The National Vaccination Commando Program in Burkina Faso

The Evidenced Effects of Early Childhood Interventions to Promote Mental Health and Parenting in the Nordic Countries: A Systematic Review

The first years of life and the family context are key to the promotion and protection of children’s health and wellbeing, emphasizing the need for interventions aimed to support families with young children. This review aimed to explore the effectiveness of early childhood interventions developed for promoting mental health and parenting among families with young children in the Nordic countries. Six electronic databases were systematically searched, and 20 articles covering 16 studies applying various quantitative and qualitative methods met the study inclusion criteria. The studied interventions were assessed as universal health-promoting interventions and health-promoting interventions with elements of prevention. Outcomes of interest encompassed mental health, related risk and protective factors among the parents and/or the children, or child-parent interaction. The results from studies applying statistical methods show significant improvements in parents’self-efficacy, self-esteem, and parental satisfaction, while few improvements in parents’ social support or parental relationship were identified. Improvements in social support and parental relationships were however reported in qualitative studies. Most quantitative studies reporting on parents’ mental health problems and stress found a significant decrease, and qualitative studies highlighted experienced positive effects on mental health and well-being. The majority of studies reporting on children’s mental health and/or development as well as strengths and difficulties indicated a statistically significant positive development. No significant changes were however found for existing behavioral problems. The majority of studies examining parenting strategies and/or parent-child interaction found signifi- cant positive changes after the interventions. In sum, although findings are heterogeneous, early childhood interventions show various positive effects on the parenting and mental health of both children and their parents. The fact that different types of initiatives have been developed and implemented can be seen as an advantage, considering the varying needs and expectations of different families.

Raising the Bar for Evaluating Effectiveness of Early Childhood Interventions.

Raising the Bar for Evaluating Effectiveness of Early Childhood Interventions.

Relationship between Socio-Economic Status, Interpersonal Communication, and School Climate with Parental Involvement in Early Childhood Education

Relationship between Socio-Economic Status, Interpersonal Communication, and School Climate with Parental Involvement in Early Childhood Education

Effects of early childhood intervention on fertility and maternal employment: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. Besides improving child health and development, a major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social security system and detailed telephone surveys to examine the effects of the intervention on maternal employment, welfare benefits, household composition, well-being, and fertility behavior. The study reveals that the intervention decreased maternal employment by 9.3 percentage points and increased subsequent births by 6.4 percentage points, in part through a reduction in abortions.

EHLS at School: school-age follow-up of the Early Home Learning Study cluster randomized controlled trial

BackgroundTargeted interventions during early childhood can assist families in providing strong foundations that promote children’s health and wellbeing across the life course. There is growing recognition that longer follow-up times are necessary to assess intervention outcomes, as effects may change as children develop. The Early Home Learning Study, or ‘EHLS’, comprised two cluster randomized controlled superiority trials of a brief parenting intervention, smalltalk, aimed at supporting parents to strengthen the early childhood home learning environment of infants (6–12 months) or toddlers (12–36 months). Results showed sustained improvements in parent-child interactions and the home environment at the 32 week follow-up for the toddler but not the infant trial. The current study will therefore follow up the EHLS toddler cohort to primary school age, with the aim of addressing a gap in literature concerning long-term effects of early childhood interventions focused on improving school readiness and later developmental outcomes.Methods‘EHLS at School’ is a school-aged follow-up study of the toddler cluster randomized controlled trial (n = 1226). Data will be collected by parent-, child- and teacher-report questionnaires, recorded observations of parent-child interactions, and direct child assessment when children are aged 7.5 years old. Data linkage will provide additional data on child health and academic functioning at ages 5, 8 and 10 years. Child outcomes will be compared for families allocated to standard/usual care (control) versus those allocated to the smalltalk program (group program only or group program with additional home coaching).DiscussionFindings from The Early Home Learning Study provided evidence of the benefits of the smalltalk intervention delivered via facilitated playgroups for parents of toddlers. The EHLS at School Study aims to examine the long-term outcomes of this initiative to determine whether improvements in the quality of the parent-child relationship persist over time and translate into benefits for children’s social, academic and behavioral skills that last into the school years.Trial registration8 September 2011; ACTRN12611000965909 (for the original EHLS)

Gender-specific effects of early childhood intervention: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial

This paper investigates the effects of an early childhood intervention in Germany that begins prenatally and continues until the child's second birthday. The intervention consists of home visits and targets socially disadvantaged first-time mothers to improve child development. The effects on child development were assessed via developmental tests in a randomized controlled trial. Home visits significantly improved girls' cognitive development during the first 24 months after birth. In contrast, the intervention had no effect on boys. These gender-specific outcomes can be explained by greater increases in parental investment (e.g. reading to the child) for girls than for boys. Our results demonstrate that early childhood interventions have an effect on early cognitive child development, although concentrated on girls, in a country where a wide range of additional support services are available for disadvantaged mothers with young children.

Maximizing Child Development: Three Principles for Policy-makers

The policy note advances three inter-related principles to guide policy-makers and agents in international development organizations to prioritize their actions. These principles are drawn from findings from two Early Childhood Development (ECD) reports recently completed by the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group—one on the World Bank support for ECD and the other a systematic review of the sustained effects of early childhood interventions. The principles are: Support the Early Development of Children, Starting from Birth; Support Parents Through Existing Services; Make Resources Available to Meet Needs of the Most Vulnerable. These principles imply a new emphasis on development beyond survival with effective, evidence-informed interventions. The policy implications also mean starting with what exists in services in health and protection for vulnerable families and augmenting these with parenting support and education components so that children’s risks are reduced and more poor children will be ready to enter primary school at the appropriate age and to persist through schooling and thrive in the labor market.

Generative Mechanisms in Early Childhood Interventions: A Confirmatory Research Framework for Prevention.

This article reviews methodological and analytic approaches and impact evidence for understanding the mechanisms of effects of early childhood interventions, including delinquency and violence prevention. Illustrations from longitudinal studies of preschool preventive interventions are provided. We restrict our attention to preventive interventions for children from birth to age 5, including evidence from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS), which investigates the impact of an established school-based early childhood intervention. Frameworks and evidence will be organized according to the Five-Hypothesis Model (5HM), which postulates that a variety of early childhood interventions impact later well-being through the promotion of cognitive and scholastic advantages, motivational advantages, social adjustment, family support behaviors, and school supports. Recommendations are made for advancing confirmatory approaches for identifying the most effective prevention programs using identification of generative mechanisms as a major methodological criterion.

Effects of Early Childhood Intervention on Fertility and Maternal Employment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Effects of Early Childhood Intervention on Fertility and Maternal Employment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Highlighting the evidence gap: how cost-effective are interventions to improve early childhood nutrition and development?

There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of early childhood interventions to improve the growth and development of children. Although, historically, nutrition and stimulation interventions may have been delivered separately, they are increasingly being tested as a package of early childhood interventions that synergistically improve outcomes over the life course. However, implementation at scale is seldom possible without first considering the relative cost and cost-effectiveness of these interventions. An evidence gap in this area may deter large-scale implementation, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. We conduct a literature review to establish what is known about the cost-effectiveness of early childhood nutrition and development interventions. A set of predefined search terms and exclusion criteria standardized the search across five databases. The search identified 15 relevant articles. Of these, nine were from studies set in high-income countries and six in low- and middle-income countries. The articles either calculated the cost-effectiveness of nutrition-specific interventions (n = 8) aimed at improving child growth, or parenting interventions (stimulation) to improve early childhood development (n = 7). No articles estimated the cost-effectiveness of combined interventions. Comparing results within nutrition or stimulation interventions, or between nutrition and stimulation interventions was largely prevented by the variety of outcome measures used in these analyses. This article highlights the need for further evidence relevant to low- and middle-income countries. To facilitate comparison of cost-effectiveness between studies, and between contexts where appropriate, a move towards a common outcome measure such as the cost per disability-adjusted life years averted is advocated. Finally, given the increasing number of combined nutrition and stimulation interventions being tested, there is a significant need for evidence of cost-effectiveness for combined programmes. This too would be facilitated by the use of a common outcome measure able to pool the impact of both nutrition and stimulation activities.

Systematic Reviews of the Effectiveness of Interventions Used in Occupational Therapy Early Childhood Services

This issue of AJOT presents five systematic review articles that examine the effectiveness of early childhood interventions used by occupational therapy practitioners.

Die besten Absichten zu haben ist notwendig, aber nicht hinreichend – Qualitätsdimensionen in den Frühen Hilfen

Early childhood interventions are a promising strategy to improve the development of children in socially disadvantaged families and to reduce their risk for abuse and neglect. However, proven effects are small with substantial variations between existing programs depending on differences in program planning and implementation. On the basis of international findings on the effectiveness of early childhood intervention, health promotion, and implementation research, we provide an overview of different quality aspects in the development, implementation, and evaluation of early childhood interventions, and a framework for future quality assessment of early childhood intervention programs in Germany. Scaling up of these programs should be accompanied by intensive quality assessment and development in order to achieve the intended outcomes.

Social and Emotional Learning in Schools: From Programs to Strategies and commentaries

Social and Emotional Learning in Schools: From Programs to Strategies and commentaries

Academic Performance of Subsequent Schools and Impacts of Early Interventions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Head Start Settings.

The role of subsequent school contexts in the long-term effects of early childhood interventions has received increasing attention, but has been understudied in the literature. Using data from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a cluster-randomized controlled trial conducted in Head Start programs, we investigate whether the intervention had differential effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten if children attended high- or low-performing schools subsequent to the preschool intervention year. To address the issue of selection bias, we adopt an innovative method, principal score matching, and control for a set of child, mother, and classroom covariates. We find that exposure to the CSRP intervention in the Head Start year had significant effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten for children who subsequently attended high-performing schools, but no significant effects on children attending low-performing schools. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Getting Education Right

Science has published three education special issues since I became Editor-in-Chief in 2008. We first focused on harnessing computer technologies for education (January 2009) and then highlighted the synergies between inquiry science teaching and the acquisition of literacy skills (April 2010). In this issue, we review the research on early childhood education. Especially informative are the long-term studies on the effects of early childhood interventions, which indicate that an appropriate schooling of children as young as 3 years old produces remarkably large benefits for society, even in cases where the children do not perform significantly better academically. A critical variable appears to be the effect of these early education programs on what neuroscientists call “executive function”: the brain activities that underlie each individual's mastery of self-control. * This finding raises critical questions about how nations educate their youth. For example, how can the programs that have thus far been used to enhance children's self-control be further improved? To what ages should these programs extend in school, and how can the most effective practices be scaled up to apply them universally? And why has so little of what we have learned from research about schooling been incorporated into the way that most school systems function? †

Evaluation of Small-sample Compromised Randomization: Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Intervention on Health and Addictive Behavior

Barros contribution to the literature of policy evaluation stems from advances in statistical methods applied to rigorous empirical analysis. Another central question of Barros research is the analysis of eficient policies for reducing economic inequality. In the pursue this question, Barros line of work has recently shifted towards the study of early childhood investment as a tool for promoting economic growth and improving the odds of children born in disadvantage families (Barros et al., 2011; Barros and Olinto, 2008). We follow Barros steps by developing a formal statistical evaluation of the Perry pre-school program, the oldest and most cited early childhood experiment in US. Evaluating the Perry program poses three statistical challenges. First, the small sample size cast doubts on standard inference methods that are based on asymptotic assumptions. Second, randomization compromises call into question the validity of the simple statistical procedures often applied to social experiments. Third, the large number of outcome variables gives rise to the danger of selectively reported signi cant estimates. We develop a statistical method that accounts for all these problems and is tailored to the problems we face in the Perry intervention. We focus on long-term impact on health and addictive behavior variables. We use new data at age 40 never analyzed before. We find that treated females have less negative effects of drug/alcohool usage in a range of later-life activities. For males, we find that treated participants use less hard drugs, such as heroine and hashish.

A rapid review of key strategies to improve the cognitive and social development of children in Scotland

Inequalities in health and educational outcomes in Scotland show a strong and persistent socioeconomic status gradient. Our aims were to provide policy-makers with a synthesis of international research evidence that assesses the effectiveness of early childhood interventions aimed at equitably promoting cognitive and social development and suggest potential areas for action in Scotland. A rapid review was conducted of review level studies of early childhood interventions with outcome measures relating to child cognitive-language or social-emotional development, subsequent academic and life achievement. Websites were searched and interviews were conducted to identify relevant interventions, policies and programmes delivered in Scotland. : Early childhood intervention programmes can reduce disadvantage due to social and environmental factors. Scottish health policy demonstrates a clear commitment to early childhood development but much work remains in terms of detail of policy implementation, identification of high risk children and families, and early childhood monitoring systems. Programmes should provide a universal seamless continuum of care and support from pregnancy through to school entry with the intensity of support graded according to need. The current information systems in Scotland would be inadequate for monitoring the effects of early childhood interventions especially in relation to cognitive-language and social-emotional development.

Measurement and Population Miss-Fits: A Case Study on the Importance of Using Appropriate Measures to Evaluate Early Childhood Interventions

This study explored the importance of using relevant measures when evaluating the effectiveness of early childhood interventions. Data from the federally-funded evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program were used to examine whether the behavior measure, the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), was an appropriate tool for the diverse community-based sample of young, low-income children. Results demonstrated no confirmation of the CBCL syndromes composing the Externalizing and Internalizing behavioral dimensions used to determine program impacts. Exploratory analyses revealed that two-thirds of the clinical behavior problems included in the CBCL were of very low prevalence in this community-based sample. These findings stress the importance of measurement fit in national evaluations of early childhood programs serving these vulnerable children.

Adult Mental Health Effects of Early Childhood Intervention

Adult Mental Health Effects of Early Childhood Intervention