Early childhood development programs can only do so much

Tuesday, February 6th, 2018

Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman’s four rules for raising successful children lean heavily on a 1980 program for growth-stunted toddlers in Jamaica:

Trained health aides visited mothers living in poverty for an hour a week and coached them in how to stimulate their children through play.

The intervention, run by British researcher Sally Grantham-McGregor, was simple but it changed those toddlers’ lives. Monitoring into adulthood shows they have gone on to do better at school, earn more money and enjoy better psychosocial skills than their origins would have predicted. They were also less prone to committing crime.

In short, training the parents while their children were still small seemed to be a magic bullet for a wide range of social problems. “Programmes like this are cheap, effective and don’t require large infrastructure,” says Prof Heckman, who, at 73, runs the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago in his hometown.

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Prof Heckman estimates that another ECD programme, the high-quality Perry pre-school for poor African-American children in Michigan in the 1960s, gave society a return of $7-$12 for every dollar invested. The participants went on to rely less on welfare, commit less crime and be more productive than their peers who didn’t follow the programme. In short, pre-school proved a lot more cost-effective than university or prison.

Do any of these amazing programs replicate their initial success when repeated elsewhere?

Let’s move on to his four rules:

Lesson one is to aim programmes only at disadvantaged children. Most privileged parents already know — from their own life experiences or from parenting books — that they should read to their children and play with them. They can afford to feed their children healthy food, and they start stimulating them before birth, explains Prof Heckman.

For many poorer parents, however, “reading to the child, stimulating a child, however commonsensical that is, comes as a revelation”, says Prof Heckman.

That’s a pretty damning image he’s painted, which suggests that some kind of even earlier intervention might be in order — maybe something a few years before preschool.

His second lesson: “It’s not about genetics. It’s about having input from parents who are engaged.” You can send children to the most expensive preschools and it won’t help much without good parenting, he says. The importance of hands-on parenting “has not fully made its way into the consciousness of some advocates, but it’s so obvious”.

Let’s ignore all the science and just assert that “it’s not about genetics.” Look, we can agree that it’s not all about genetics, but genes clearly play a huge role.

The corollary is lesson three: “You don’t need lots of money or MBAs.” Just sending relatively low-skilled people to train parents can be enough, as it was in Jamaica.

In fact, we spend twice as much on public education as we used to, and it has had no (positive) effect, so more money is not the answer.

Finally, lesson four: boys and girls are different. When Prof Heckman, his research assistant Jorge Luis Garcia and others evaluated two 1970s childcare programmes in North Carolina, they found that boys benefited more than girls from good childcare (largely because their health improved and their crime levels fell). However, boys also suffered more from bad preschools. “Girls are more resilient,” he concludes.

Fortunately the difference runs in the “correct” direction.

His model country for ECD is Denmark. By focusing on under-threes, the Danes have sharply boosted cognitive skills among disadvantaged children, he says. Even so, Prof Heckman adds, full equality has not been achieved. Children of less-educated Danish mothers still enter adulthood with considerably lower qualifications than their privileged peers. Even in the best of cases, ECD can only do so much.

Early childhood development programs can only do so much.

Comments

  1. Sam J. says:

    I read somewhere that head start programs worked for a while, but the end result was no change. Why is this different I wonder?

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