The most important factors for cognitive and behavioral development are determined in the first couple years of life. Many children in the U.S. are severely disadvantaged from the outset because they lack the basic inputs for healthy early childhood development that many of us take for granted. The problem is worldwide. In Latin America and the Caribbean, record-high enrollment rates in primary education are outstripped by the poor indicators of school progress and completion, suggesting the need to enhance children's school readiness before they enter primary school.
There are large positive externalities of investments in education for society as a whole through increased economic contribution, decreased gender inequality, reduced crime outcomes, lower welfare enrollment of better-educated persons, greater and better-informed political participation, and other avenues. These social benefits create the mandate for public funding to be directed toward the provision of a high-quality, effective, and equitable education system for all. Though education is one of the espoused key means for social mobility in the United States, a large number of children begin school at a significant disadvantage to their peers due to the negative effects of poverty on cognitive and emotional development. It is therefore on the shoulders of the U.S. government to ensure that each of these children has an equal opportunity to excel at school and in life through equal access to high-quality education. Adequate public spending on programs that provide the opportunities and tools for self-earned achievement and advancement through education without creating negative distortions in behavior incentives is particularly important.
Public funds should be directed to where they are needed most and are demonstrated to have the greatest impact. Research shows that intervention during early childhood has particularly strong positive effects on cognitive, academic, and social outcomes, compared to similar investments in older individuals. Interventions are relatively cost-efficient in early childhood due to the cognitive development during this stage (Heckman et. al 2005). Research shows that children are often at higher risk of low-school readiness among low-income households, which makes it particularly important to be providing quality education for these children. High quality pre-school programs are critical to correct for the disadvantages that poor families face in order to provide the optimal conditions that foster early learning in children to prepare them for school and success in later educational, economic, and life achievements.
But once we agree on the importance of investing in ealry childhood care and education, the more relevant question remains: what does it take to have "high quality pre-school programs"?
The views in this respect are divided.
(1) Some social scientists and practitioners emphasize that high-quality is achieved when children participate in a wide range of learning experiences and when they engage in a wide range of relationships including their interactions with adults, with older and younger children, and with their peers.
(2) Without discarding the need for these activities and interactions, others emphasize that programs achieve high-quality when the child has a strong and enriching interaction with the primary care-taker. The richness of this interaction is based not so much on the kinds of activities that are done but on the responsiveness of the care-taker to the needs of the child. Two features are identified as characteristic of a high-quality care-taker: the ability to communicate verbally with the child, and the motivation to recognize and respond to the child’s needs (Cohen 2001; Shonkoff and Philips 2000; Raver 2002; Hart and Risley 1995).
(3) A third group within the literature emphasizes that high-quality interventions are consistent interventions in the sense that a specific theory of cognitive development guides the attitudes of adults towards children, the activities in which children become involved, and the sequence of these activities throughout the different stages of development. Underlying this approach is the notion that what matters for development are clear and stable rules that guide the upbringing of children, more than the specific content of these rules.
(4) Finally, a fourth group emphasizes that high-quality programs are those that address the needs of the child in a holistic manner. The basic implication of this is that early childhood care and education programs as such cannot be successful; interventions that provide care and education for children must also address their nutritional and health care needs in order to have a positive impact on human development.
So, what does experience tell us? Practitioners and international donors have emphasized that, when it comes to designing activities that enhance children’s curiosity, learning ability and interpersonal skills, what matters is that the child become involved with materials which he can explore extensively but safely –holding objects, climbing on them, throwing, shaking, tasting, disbanding and reconstructing them. These objects need not be expensive toys –the child’s experience can be equally enriching if he can play with safe objects used in every-day life, including playing with messy materials (paint, dough, clay, soap, sand, etc.) and playing with household items (kitchen utensils, pails, brooms, brushes, etc.). In addition to play, reading books to children, singing with them, and engaging them to participate in physical activities can help enhance their linguistic skills as well as their bulk and fine motor abilities. It is also important that adults who are responsible for the caring and education of children structure activities into flexible routines. Routines bring stability to children’s learning experience and help them become increasingly independent in solving problems such as cleaning materials that have spilled, placing objects back where they are kept once play has finished, or putting their coats on when they go outdoors. At all times, routines and activities should be flexibly accommodated to respond to children’s needs.
But more than focusing on ensuring a wide range of activities and relationships in which the child can get involved, the empirical studies strongly support the view that what most matters when designing successful early childhood care and education policies is ensuring that the bond between the child and the primary care-taker be strong and enriching. In this sense, the importance of enhancing parental skills has been confirmed in both developed and developing countries. While Hart and Risley (1995) show that gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive development between children in the U.S. accrue from parents’ differential linguistic skills, Powell et. al. (2004) demonstrate that in an early childhood intervention in Jamaica, children whose mothers had better knowledge of childrearing and childbearing practices did better in terms of long-term cognitive development. Paxson and Schady (2005) confirm for Ecuador that programs can have very high returns when they improve parenting. This said, the holistic approach to childhood interventions is not supported by empirical research. Various studies of early childhood nutritional supplement and stimulation interventions in Jamaica have found out that while both the nutritional and educational components of the intervention enhanced children’s cognitive development in the short-term, nutritional supplements per se did not have any longer-term effect, whereas stimulation by itself did play a role in improving children’s performance at school (Grantham-McGregor et. al. 1997).
There are policy implications that arise from these findings. In order to ensure high-quality caretaking and education of young children, the emphasis in the design of programs should be placed on providing training and education to improve parenting skills; work with parents to engage in linguistically rich interactions with children; ensure that social workers, teachers or voluntaries involved with the care-taking of children have basic linguistic skills, and provide incentives so that they will remain motivated to engage in the upbringing of children. This also has implications for the timing of interventions: while the child’s exposure to a wide range of activities and interactions may be supportive of his cognitive and non-cognitive development between ages 3 to 6 years old, there is a strong need to ensure that before that, between birth and age 3 years, children are raised in a responsive and nurturing environment.
Manna Project International
