About Early Head Start
The Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) initiated the Early Head Start program in response to the 1994 Head Start reauthorization, which established a special initiative for services to families with infants and toddlers. This comprehensive, two-generation program includes intensive services that begin before the child is born and concentrate on enhancing the child's development and supporting the family during the critical first three years of the child's life.
Since its inception, Early Head Start has grown to over 700 programs serving over 70,000 children and families around the country. For more information on the Early Head Start program, see: http://www.headstartinfo.org/infocenter/ehs_tkit3.htm.
The Secretary's Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers was convened in 1994 in order to design the new program. They outlined four cornerstones or areas of intended outcomes for Early Head Start:
- Children's development (including health, resiliency, social competence, and cognitive and language development);
- Family development (including parenting and relationships with children, the home environment and family functioning, family health, parent involvement, and economic self-sufficiency);
- Staff development (including professional development and relationships with parents); and
- Community development (including enhanced child care quality, community collaboration, and integration of services to support families with young children).
The committee also further explicated the role of research, charging that research be used for continuous program improvement at the national and local level. In the words of the Committee:
Evaluation of Early Head Start is essential for determining the effectiveness of the initiative and for advancing our understanding about which services work best for different types of families under different circumstances... The Advisory Committee believes that the Secretary must approach evaluation not just as a mechanism for producing summary statistics and reports about the changes in child and family development as a result of these new efforts, but as a tool for individual programs so that they can continuously refine their practices based on feedback from their own program evaluation . . .In keeping with the Head Start national laboratory role, we encourage research that examines variations in Early Head Start experiences on child development to learn more about the effectiveness of different interventions for very young children and their families.
Research has been an integral component of the program from the very beginning. As part of the initial authorization, it was stipulated that Early Head Start be studied using a randomized trial design. The final report, detailing the impacts Early Head Start had for children and families when children were three years old, was published in June 2003, and a pre-kindergarten followup of these children and families is now underway.
When children were three years old, the research shows that:
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There was a broad pattern of effects for children and families who were in Early Head Start. Children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional development were all enhanced by Early Head Start, and Early Head Start parents were more supportive of children's emotional, cognitive, and language development. A notable impact was on parents' reading to their children. There were also improvements in self-sufficiency activities. Early Head Start parents were more likely to be in education or in job training.
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Those programs that fully implemented key aspects of the Head Start Program Performance Standards early had the broadest pattern of impacts—across child, parent-child interaction, parenting, and parent mental health and self-sufficiency outcomes.
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All program approaches had positive impacts, but those that provided a mix of home - and center-based services had a broader pattern of impacts.
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Of the 27 subgroups of families studied, nearly all had positive impacts. The strongest impacts were found for parents who enrolled while pregnant, parents with a moderate level of demographic risk factors, and African American parents.
The findings have been used in a variety of ways, including congressional reports and briefings, conference presentations to both research and practice audiences, and information packets aimed at the practitioner audiences. The results were also used to design a performance measures framework for Head Start programs serving infants and toddlers.