The effectiveness of early head start for 3-year-old children and their parents: lessons for policy and programs.

By J. Love, E. Kisker, C. Ross, H. Raikes, J. Constantine, K. Boller, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Rachel Chazan-Cohen, L. Tarullo, C. Brady-Smith and 4 more. Developmental Psychology, 2005

848 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education

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Citations in the corpus

Inequality begins at home: The role of parenting in the diverging destinies of rich and poor children. (2015, positive): “The typical Early Head Start program achieved only modest impacts on parenting behavior with effect sizes in the range of .10 to .22 (Love et al., 2005).”
Mother–Child Interactions in Early Head Start: Age and Ethnic Differences in Low-Income Dyads (2013, methodology): “…both treatment and control groups were visited in their homes for interviews, observations, and assessments when children were approximately 1, 2, and 3 years of age (Love et al., 2001, 2002, 2005, in press) and again before the child entered kindergarten, at approximately 5 years of age (Table 1).”
Mother-child conversations at 36 months and at pre-kindergarten: Relations to children's school readiness (2012, background): “Early Head Start, which originated in 1995, is a federally supported programme for families from low-income backgrounds with infants, toddlers and pregnant women; Early Head Start programmes support the healthy growth of the child and family as a unit (e.g. Love et al., 2005).”
Mother-child bookreading in low-income families: correlates and outcomes during the first three years of life. (2006, background): “Consistent with previously reported impacts (ACF, 2002b; Love et al., 2005), Early Head Start was expected to predict daily bookreading, but only after 14 months, given that many children enrolled in the program late in the 1st year of life.”
Investing in Young Children: An Early Childhood Development Guide for Policy Dialogue and Project Preparation (2010, result): “2000); other studies found that these programs yielded positive outcomes in only two situations: when combined with center-based activities for children (Wasik et al. 1990; Love et al. 2005) or among particular subsets of beneficiaries or geographical locations.”
Executive function in the first three years of life: precursors, predictors and patterns (2016, result): “…targeting parents and infants from a low-income background showed increases in infant sustained attention and reductions in aggressive behaviour (Love et al., 2005), whilst a smaller-scale pilot study showed provisional indications that parent-training interaction therapy can improve emotion…”
Early home learning environment predicts children’s 5th grade academic skills (2019, methodology): “During the coding process, weekly inter-rater reliability checks were performed on a randomly selected 15% to 20% of each coder’s assignments; average inter-rater agreement (within one point) was above 90% (Love et al., 2005).”
Early mathematics assessment: validation of the short form of a prekindergarten and kindergarten mathematics measure (2012, methodology): “Children’s receptive vocabulary was measured using the PPVT-III (Dunn & Dunn, 1997), a nationally normed measure that has been widely used in diverse samples of young children (Love et al., 2005; US Department of Health & Human Services, 2010; Wong et al., 2008).”
Telling Stories and Making Books: Evidence for an Intervention to Help Parents in Migrant Head Start Families Support Their Children's Language and Literacy (2010, background): “The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project, for example, showed that positive impacts on parenting behavior at age 2 contributed to positive impacts on a variety of children’s outcomes at age 3, including vocabulary (Love et al., 2005).”
Do Effects of Early Child Care Extend to Age 15 Years? Results From the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (2010, background): “…early intervention programs have demonstrated that these programs can enhance social, cognitive, and academic development of economically disadvantaged children (Campbell, Pungello, Miller-Johnson, Burchinal, & Ramey, 2001; Love et al., 2005; Reynolds, 2000; Schweinhart, Weikart, & Larner, 1986).”
Are there long-term effects of early child care? (2007, background): “Moreover, synergistic effects may emerge when both avenues of intervention are pursued simultaneously (Love et al., 2005).”
Children's schooling and parents' behavior: Evidence from the Head Start Impact Study (2013, methodology): “…Copeland, Keeler, Angold, and Costello 2010; Løken, Mogstad, and Wiswall 2012; Macours, Schady, and Vakis 2012; and Gelber and Weinzierl 2012, who use a very similar empirical strategy to Dahl and Lochner). methods (e.g. Zhai et al. 2011; Magnuson and Waldfogel 2005; Love et al. 2005; Castro et al.”