Figure 2b
Figure 2c
Figure 3 illustrates how exogenous increases in parental investments at different ages affect cognitive development in various ways. This highlights that understanding the complex dynamics of child development is not only an academic exercise; grasping how different inputs and their effects change with age is crucial for designing and implementing effective, scalable policies.
Figure 3Parental Behavior, Social Norms
Parents clearly play key roles in shaping the early years of development. But what drives parental behaviors? Simple models point to some of the key drivers, including parents’ tastes, resources, and perceptions of the child development process. If parents do not spend much time stimulating their children, it may be because they underestimate the usefulness of such activities — an explanation that is consistent with the anthropological and sociological evidence.19
Flávio Cunha, Jervis, and I provide quantitative evidence on the role of parental beliefs using data from Colombia collected as part of the RULe evaluation mentioned earlier.20 We elicit parental beliefs about the returns to parental investments in child development and compare those subjective beliefs to objective data. Parents in the sample systematically underestimate the productivity of parental investment. This is clearly visible when it is assumed the productivity of parental investment does not depend on the initial level of child development. If investment productivity changes with initial conditions, we again find that parents underestimate productivity, particularly at high levels of initial conditions. Similar research has been conducted using data from Guatemala21 and the US22 while another recent paper23 explores how residential sorting can result in distorted beliefs about child development.
In addition to subjective beliefs about child development, other factors are likely important for determining parental behavior and the inputs children receive. Ingvild Almås, Jervis, and I have analyzed the dynamics within families and found that the relative position of husbands and wives might be relevant for determining parenting choices.24 Poor families might also have to allocate limited resources among several children.25 Likewise, gender and other social norms absorbed during the early years might be key, as recently shown using the British 1958 birth cohort.26
Childcare, Preschool Centers, Primary Schools
Parental inputs in the first years of life are not the only factors affecting individual development. My research also looks at inputs children start receiving as they age, including from childcare centers, preschool teachers, and peers. In work with Ricardo Paes de Barros, Pedro Carneiro, David K. Evans, Lycia Lima, Pedro Olinto, and Norbert Schady, I look at the impact of Brazilian childcare centers on children aged 0 to 3 as well as on their parents or caregivers. With data from Rio de Janeiro following an opt-in lottery program, we show that the average time in daycare for the city’s children increased by 34 percent during the first four years of life — giving parents and caregivers more time to work, resulting in higher incomes for beneficiary households.27 Beneficiary children saw sustained gains in height-for-age and weight-for-age (likely due to the better nutritional intake in daycare) as well as shorter-term gains in cognitive development. We also find that childcare-center quality is likely to interact with the quality of early-years inputs that children receive at home: the cognitive benefits, for example, were primarily driven by short-term improvements in home resources and environments due to increased household incomes.
Recent research also suggests that the ways in which different interventions affect the quantity and quality of childcare centers and preschools can be extremely important. In work with Andrew, Bernal, Cardona-Sosa, Sonya Krutikova, and Rubio-Codina, I evaluate two strategies to improve the quality of public preschools in Colombia: providing extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants, and offering low-cost training for existing teachers.28 The first intervention had no effect on child development, largely because it reduced the time that existing teachers focused on teaching. The second intervention, however, improved children’s cognitive development, especially for more disadvantaged children. Similar research on preschool quality has used data from Ghana29 and Mexico30 while other studies have focused on primary schools in a variety of countries. Later-childhood interventions are, of course, important too as highlighted in several contributions.
Challenges
While this growing evidence reflects significant progress, the research on early childhood development and interventions to support it still faces several key challenges. First, we need a deeper understanding of child development over the early years. Second, as parents are so key in the early years, we need a better understanding of what drives parenting practices and choices about resources like childcare centers, preschools, and schools as well as subjective beliefs, the balance of power within households, and social norms. Third, we need to understand what determines teachers’ behaviors, including their interactions with parents.
For this research to be influential, we also need to understand how to design interventions that are sustainable and effective at scale. As many of these policies aim to change individual behaviors of parents and possibly teachers, the design of the interventions is critical. It is important to convey the relevant messages in ways that can be understood and consistently acted upon. To address these challenges, it is necessary to develop richer and better measurement tools to allow better assessment of child development processes and their drivers.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Yale’s Economic Growth Center for support with the editing of this article. Greg Larson offered invaluable editing support.
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 03:29:00
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