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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Early Head Start is a two-generation program that provides child and family development services to low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers. It also blends these services with a focus on staff development and a commitment to community partnerships. Early Head Start began with 68 new programs in 1995 in response to the recommendations of the 1993 Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers. The program continued to build on its bipartisan mandate embodied in the 1994 Head Start reauthorizing legislation, with impetus added by the 1998 reauthorization. Today, almost 650 programs serve more than 55,000 low-income families with infants and toddlers. A rigorous national evaluation, including about 3,000 children and families across 17 sites, also began in 1995. This report, Building Their Futures, describes the interim impact findings emerging from the analysis of child and family outcomes through the first two years of the children's lives.
The national evaluation, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., and Columbia University's Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, in collaboration with the Early Head Start Research Consortium, finds that a year or more after program enrollment, when compared with a randomly assigned control group, 2-year-old Early Head Start children performed significantly better on a range of measures of cognitive, language, and social-emotional development. Their parents scored significantly higher than control group parents on many aspects of the home environment, parenting behavior, and knowledge of infant-toddler development. Early Head Start families were more likely to attend school or job training and experienced reductions in parenting stress and family conflict.
Although these impacts are generally modest in size, the pattern of positive findings across a wide range of key domains important for children's well-being and future development is promising. For example:
- At 2 years of age, Early Head Start children scored higher on a standardized assessment of infant cognitive development than the control children and were reported by their parents to have larger vocabularies and to use more grammatically complex sentences. On the assessment of cognitive development, Early Head Start children were less likely to score in the at-risk range of developmental functioning. Thus, Early Head Start programs have decreased by 16 percent the proportion of children in the lowest-functioning group, perhaps reducing their need for special services later on.
- Early Head Start 2-year-olds lived in home environments that were more likely to support and stimulate cognitive development, language, and early literacy, based on researchers' observations using a standard scale. Early Head Start children lived in homes that also showed lower levels of parenting stress and family conflict when compared with the homes of control children. However, according to parent reports, safety practices in the homes of Early Head Start children were no better than those of control families.
- When interacting with their 2-year-olds, Early Head Start mothers were more supportive, more sensitive, less detached, and were more likely to stimulate cognitive and language development during play, based on researchers' observations of semistructured parent-child interactions. Program parents were more likely than control parents to read to their children daily and at bedtime.
- Early Head Start mothers were less likely than control mothers to report spanking their child in the past week and were more likely to describe milder and more-positive discipline strategies in response to hypothetical parent-child conflict situations (such as distracting the child, talking to the child, and suggesting ways to prevent conflicts).
- In the short term, Early Head Start parents were more likely than control parents to participate in education and job training, but they were no more likely to be employed and no less likely to be receiving welfare cash assistance during the evaluation period.
The Early Head Start programs were successful in providing child development and parenting services to nearly all program families. Programs also provided families with a greater intensity of services than the control group families obtained in their communities. Data from the implementation study show that the child development services provided by the Early Head Start programs were usually of good quality and improved over time.
Programs choosing different approaches to providing services, to meet the unique needs of children and families in particular communities, achieved different patterns of success. While all center-based, home-based, and mixed-approach programs produced positive impacts on children, they did so differently, with the center-based programs significantly enhancing cognitive development, the home-based programs improving one dimension of language development, and the mixed-approach programs consistently enhancing children's language and social-emotional development. With some exceptions, Early Head Start impacts on parenting and the home environment were concentrated in the home-based and mixed-approach programs, as were the impacts on parent participation in education or job-training. These differences reflect variations in the services provided under each approach as well as other differences among programs and communities choosing each approach.
Earlier attainment of full implementation of key elements of the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards was important to success in enhancing child and family outcomes. Programs that implemented the standards early had larger impacts on families' use of services, children's development, parenting, and family development than did programs that fully implemented the performance standards later or never implemented them completely. While other differences among programs and communities may be contributing to these associations, it appears that full implementation of the standards contributes to better outcomes for both children and their parents.
The impacts of the Early Head Start research programs were fairly broad-based. The programs had some significant impacts in most of the subgroups of families we examined, although patterns of impacts varied. The programs were generally more effective with families in which the primary caregiver had greater need for the social and other program supports, and families with moderate risks rather than low or high ones. The Early Head Start research programs also showed patterns of significant impacts in several policy-relevant subgroups: welfare families, working families, and families headed by teenage mothers. For these families, Early Head Start programs appear to have provided a foundation of support for parenting and child development while families coped with new work requirements and time limits on TANF cash assistance, balanced the demands of work and family, or attended to their own developmental needs.
These analyses incorporating program implementation data show that, in addition to the overall impacts on children and their families already noted, two important messages emerge from these findings:
- More completely implementing the Head Start program performance standards is an important key to the success Early Head Start programs have in enhancing the lives of the children and families.
- All program approaches for delivering services can be successful, but their benefits manifest themselves in different ways when programs choose their service approach based on families' needs. The mixed-approach programs, which provide both center- and home-based services, generally achieved a stronger pattern of impacts on children and families.
The early impacts reported here are promising, because the pattern of positive findings is consistent across multiple domains of child and family functioning that are known to be associated with later child outcomes, including social abilities, literacy, and school readiness. The final report on program impacts, due to Congress in June 2002, will assess whether these effects are sustained as the children reach their third birthdays and families complete their program participation.
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