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Parents and Caregivers Are Vital to Children’s Early Learning and Development

K.C. Compton — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:01:19 +0000

Tune in, talk more, take turns is good advice for anyone hoping to build their conversational skills. It is also the name of an enrichment program created by the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health to promote equity in children’s language acquisition and to reduce disparities in developmental outcomes for children from low-income families.

Pediatric surgeon Dr. Dana Suskind, who specializes in cochlear implants and has authored books on brain development and early childhood development, founded the research initiative that would evolve into the in 2010 after observing the degree to which differences in her patients’ early language exposure led to inequalities in their ability to learn and thrive. These disparities often fell along socio-economic lines. Parents across the board want to help their children get the best possible start in life, Suskind knew, but she saw that they often lack basic knowledge about how to foster early learning. Envisioning a population-level shift in parents’ and caregivers’ knowledge and behavior, Suskind and her team created an asset-based, parent-centered curriculum — Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns — also known as the .��

The program has been in existence long enough now for researchers to study its long-term effectiveness. The conclusion? It works, and it keeps on working.��

When Parents Know More, They Do More

shows that frequent conversational exchanges with adult caregivers promotes children’s language and vocabulary skills, cognitive performance, brain function and even the . A by researchers with the LENA Foundation (Language ENvironment Analysis), for example, confirmed that the number of two-way conversations with adults that babies experience in their first three years is related to their verbal abilities and IQ in .��

While all families communicate with their children, studies have shown that children in low-income families generally hear fewer words, shorter sentences and phrases, and are less likely to have books in their homes, setting up disparities that lead to later deficits in academic and social achievement. There’s a lack of consensus around this “word gap” though. Some researchers have the validity of these findings, while call for more exploration of them, but encourage the idea of supporting families with specialized programs to help their children develop early language skills — which is what Suskind and her team are doing.

The TMW Center has been focused on developing resources and programs to help parents and caregivers understand more about brain development — and the 3Ts have been core. There’s a 3T curriculum for families, a 3T curriculum centered on home visiting, and an online professional development course for educators who want to engage with families about the science of brain development, which are all free to use.��

These resources provide parents and adult caregivers evidence-based information about how their kids’ brains are developing, and the vital role caregivers play in their child’s cognitive and language development.��

The 3Ts Home Visiting (3Ts-HV) curriculum, for example, is a six-month program for caregivers of 13- to 16-month-old toddlers from low-income families that coaches parents in their homes through 12 tutoring modules. One module discusses executive function and presents strategies for using talk to regulate children’s behavior, particularly during tantrums — and offers guidance to help parents recognize their own emotions and tone of voice. Another addresses the difference between issuing directives versus using explanations to foster young children’s ability to think things through. (Think: “Don’t throw the football in the house because you might break something,” rather than “Don’t throw the #$%$# football in the house” — though the latter is a communication style to which any parent can relate.) Other modules discuss how caregivers can use encouragement, storytelling, numbers and patterns when engaging with babies and toddlers.

Through relatable videos (featuring beyond-adorable infants), parents learn that their young children’s brains are like sponges, soaking up words and ideas, then using them to make billions of neural connections. One lesson describes their verbal interactions like a piggy bank, with every word like a penny in their account. “The more you invest now, the richer they’ll be later.” Parents are encouraged to be in the moment with their child and to talk about what they’re focused on and to look for opportunities to talk and interact. The subtext: language learning isn’t something that exists in isolation, but rather it’s a part of daily life. Everything a child sees and hears shapes their experience, and caregivers are the facilitators who help make that happen.

Evaluating the 3Ts Curriculum

A 2018 study published in the evaluated the 3Ts-HV curriculum and found that caregivers who participated in the twice-monthly visits were significantly more knowledgeable about early childhood development and engaged more with their children in the conversational turn-taking that builds language. These caregivers praised and encouraged their children more, explained more, asked more open-ended questions, and used less critical language and physical control in their interactions with their children.

The initial study showed the effectiveness of the 3Ts-HV intervention in fostering changes in parents’ interactions with their children within six months of their participation. A recent published in October in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics shows that the program not only improves children’s language learning in their toddler years, but offers sustained benefits to their vocabulary and literacy skills when they reach kindergarten and beyond.

According to Christy Leung, the TMW Center’s director of research who co-authored the most recent study with Suskind, this simple intervention with a group of families increased parental knowledge when the child was 26 months old, contributed to more frequent parent-child conversational turns at 38 months, and promoted children’s language skills at 50 months. The study provides empirical evidence that increasing parents’ knowledge and enriching parent-child linguistic interactions during their toddler years promotes language development at preschool age. Mothers who received the intervention continued to provide their young children with enriched language input without showing significant declines even after the intervention’s “honeymoon phase” ended, Leung says.

When designing the curriculum, Leung notes, “We wanted to emphasize that the parent is the best person to educate their small children. They struggled to realize that they are their child’s first teacher, and they don’t have to wait until their child goes to school [for them] to start learning.”

One of the hardest things, Leung says, is to change parents’ minds about the idea that educational TV is better than they are at teaching their children, especially at an early age. They think they don’t have a good enough vocabulary or education to do so.��

Leung adds: “But we emphasized that they are exactly the best resource for their children, and they know their child best. Once they saw that their child learns best from a real person — and that they’re learning all the time, even if they may not be verbal yet — that was a big realization for them.”

Simply put: What parents know matters, and it shows up in their children’s learning readiness.��

Prevent, Don’t Remediate

Brain development research has shown that the first years of life are when the brain is growing and developing most rapidly and that the . Early deficits in language learning often accumulate and can affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life. We know this. But that knowledge doesn’t jibe with what the U.S. , to help develop those brains.��

Prevention, rather than remediation, is the battle cry for Suskind and her team at the TMW Center, who view parents as an untapped resource in this equation. Their studies point to a doable and easily replicated way of using the to support families in building the healthy foundations for lifelong learning. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the public health approach as one rooted in the scientific method that strives to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people.)

According to the TMW Center, 3Ts programs are on course to reach 15,000 families across the U.S. by the end of 2024. Communities and individuals can sign up on the and receive free resources to implement the curriculum in their schools, museums, libraries, community centers and other organizations.��

“We’ve gotten such positive feedback from the parents, who say having this experience is unique and valuable,” Leung says. “We heard from our curriculum team that one of the moms receiving the intervention saw another mom in the laundromat and said, ‘This is something you really should sign up for. It changed my life.’”

“That touches us so much it brings us to tears,” she says. “It also gives us another idea for how we can spread the word.”

Opinion: Has the 2024 Election Cycle Set the Stage for a National Consensus on Child Care?

Elliot Haspel — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:01:11 +0000

A famous theory in political science asserts that windows for major policy reforms come along only every so often, and there’s usually a fair amount of luck involved. Political scientist John Kingdon’s “multiple streams” — a model designed to explain why certain policies pass — posits that three conditions need to be in place in order to set the stage for what he calls “policy windows,” or opportunities for decision-making: widespread recognition that a problem exists and needs government action, a political configuration willing to take it on, and policy solutions popular enough to be adopted.��

In word and action, the 2024 election cycle has shown that child care may be closer to an open window than our bitterly divided politics would suggest possible — if the parties are willing to accept that they now broadly agree on child care more than they disagree.

This convergence has been brewing for some time, and it represents a meaningful shift. For decades following President Richard Nixon’s of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a nationally-funded, locally-run network of child care programs, most Republicans wanted little to do with broad-based child care reform. In his 2009 book “The Tragedy of Child Care in America,” eminent child care expert Edward Zigler that since Nixon’s veto, “a powerful social conservative movement has thwarted efforts by child advocates to create a [federally-supported] system of child care.” Instead, child care has been lumped into welfare policy, an area with low levels of government support where benefits are typically limited to low-income families.

Yet child care has been a growing pain point, even in red states, with increasingly obvious impacts on families and economies making it more difficult for Republican legislators to ignore. And , according to Moriah Balingit, early education reporter at The Associated Press, who reported in February that, “In 2021, Congress passed $24 billion of pandemic aid for child care businesses, an unprecedented federal investment. Now, as that aid dries up, Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing plans to support child care — and even making it central to their policy agendas.”

This shift reached a new zenith during the , when Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said that when it comes to child care shortages, “look, we’re going to have to spend more money.” (In fact, JD Vance and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz agreed several times during the debate’s child care section.)

At the congressional level, we have seen Republican leaders accept certain premises that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. In 2022, Republican Sens. Tim Scott and Richard Burr to reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act that would have made child care free for all families making less than 75% of their State Median Income (SMI) and cost no more than 7% of income for families making under 150% of SMI. The legislation drew Republican co-sponsors. Similarly, this August, Republican Senator Deb Fischer of a reauthorization bill that allows states to apply to expand eligibility to serve more working families using subsidy funds, while boosting per-child reimbursement rates up to the true cost of quality.��

On the Democratic side, there has been substantial movement to better include family, friends & neighbor caregivers (FFNs) — who collectively — and even stay-at-home parents. For instance, Rep. Ro Khanna recently that would, among other things, create a robust payment system for FFNs and offer stay-at-home parents a $300 per month stipend until their child turns 3 years old. (Full disclosure: I advised Khanna’s office during the bill’s development).

It is important not to oversell the case. There are still enormous unresolved policy questions

related to the streams in Kingdon’s framework, particularly around funding levels. The bills introduced by Sens. Scott, Burr and Fischer contain no mandatory appropriations, making them essentially unfunded mandates that would go through a torturous appropriations process every year. For example, expanding eligibility to serve more families across a broader range of income levels does little good if child care subsidy applications are frozen due to underfunding, as they are in .��

Some Republicans, such as Wisconsin and South Dakota , continue to question whether there is any role for the government in child care funding. And there remains as well as drastically different visions for an ideal system (and the price tag that comes along with each one). It’s important to be clear-eyed: A divided government is highly unlikely to bring massive transformation.

Yet all that being true, 2024 has brought an opportunity to move the goalposts and spike the football. It would be a sign of enormous progress if both sides can agree upon certain principles — that governmental child care supports should no longer be considered only properly targeted toward low-income families, but instead seen as a need for families across a wide income range; that programs should be reimbursed at the true cost of quality so they can pay their staff well and run a strong operation; that parents should have access to inclusive child care options including FFNs.

There has been forward movement recently. In January, a bipartisan group of family policy experts convened by the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, a project run by , released a echoing many of these principles. Such agreement, of course, still leaves important unresolved arguments about funding levels and technical policy design, and the contours of those discussions will naturally be shaped by the election outcomes. But in any upcoming political configuration, child care as an issue isn’t going anywhere. The real question will be, can the parties stop sniping at each other long enough to realize the first steps toward a bipartisan solution may be closer than anyone realizes?

America Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Child Care

Elliot Haspel — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 11:01:45 +0000

I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect child care to be a major flashpoint in the 2024 election cycle. There are so many other topics — inflation, abortion, immigration — that regularly suck all the oxygen out of the room. Imagine my surprise, then, when child care suddenly erupted as an issue-of-the-week thanks to a series of by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. What the episode revealed to me, however, is that America lacks any agreed-upon framework for talking about child care, and it’s going to be tough to move forward until we step back.

Policy experts note that public opinion about a particular topic is deeply shaped by at the time. These frameworks are frequently contested through implicit and explicit messages that go out through media, as well as topical debates in the political arena. The political scientist Deborah Stone puts it this way: “Ideas are at the center of all political conflict. Policymaking, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification; the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.”

A classic example . When nuclear power was primarily seen as a new source of cheap energy, it drew a great deal of support. When it became seen as an environmental danger — influenced by real-life accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as fictional media portrayals — public support cratered. Today, some environmentalists are trying to intentionally insert a third frame whereby nuclear power is seen as in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change; they face an uphill battle.

Or take a question closer to child care’s wheelhouse: public schools. While schools inarguably serve a child care function (sorry, ), that is not generally seen as their primary purpose. Instead, schools are defined by their educational impact. Whether that education is at successful careers, civic engagement, personal self-actualization or something else certainly remains contested, but the overarching frame of schools = education is set.

When it comes to child care, America seems to be experiencing what psychologist William James described as the first moments of an infant’s life: a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Particularly in an era when child care is finally getting widespread attention instead of being relegated to a component of welfare, we have yet to answer the questions: what is child care and who is it for? In many cases, we have yet to even ask those questions.

Is child care primarily a work support for parents? Is it child development that helps kids with early learning and growth? Is it a way to reduce family stress and increase family functioning? Is it social infrastructure that connects parents, a la libraries and parks? Is it intended to promote gender equity? Who counts as a valid child care provider? Is the goal to have a minimum level of adequate child care that keeps costs low or to have abundant, first-rate child care settings with well-compensated educators? Heck, we can’t even agree on definitions: is child care policy about ages birth to 5? Birth to 8? Birth to 13? Birth to 18?

You’re probably thinking that child care is not just one thing, and that much of the above list is not mutually exclusive. You’d of course be correct. But ‘not just one thing’ doesn’t obviate the need, again, for a primary frame. Right now, we’re not even trying to hash out what that primary frame is, and so we often end up talking past one another.

Comments regarding child care made by Vance and Kamala Harris in recent months illustrate this societal confusion.

In an August Face the Nation , Vance responded to questions about his opposition to universal child care proposals: “what I’ve opposed is one model of child care. We, of course, want to give everybody access to child care. But look, in my family, I grew up in a poor family where the child care was my grandparents, and a lot of these child care proposals do nothing for grandparents. If you look at some of these proposals, they do nothing for stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home dads. I want us to have a child care policy that’s good for all families, not just a particular model of family, and that’s what I’ve said.”

Harris, meanwhile, the following during an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists: “the state of affairs in our country that working people often have to decide to either be able to work or be able to afford childcare … they can’t afford childcare and actually do the work that they want to do because it’s too expensive, and it doesn’t actually level out in terms of the expense versus the income. My plan is that no family — no working family should pay more than 7 percent of their income in childcare, because I know that when you talk about the return on that investment, allowing people to work, allowing people to pursue their dreams in terms of how they want to work, where they want to work, benefits us all. It strengthens the entire economy.”

As you can see, these are not two sides of a coin. This isn’t, ‘I think public schools should get more money, you think we should universalize school vouchers’ or ‘I think there should be a single-payer health care system, you think we should deregulate health care and let the market work it out’. This is one side emphasizing child care as a form of broad-based family support and one side emphasizing child care as a way to strengthen parents’ preferred attachment to the labor force. (I do want to emphasize that actions speak louder than words: Vance skipped a Senate vote where his GOP colleagues a bipartisan House-passed expansion of the Child Tax Credit, whereas Harris is second-in-command of an administration that proposed , including child care, in American history — one that was, again, blocked by Republicans.)

Partially because of child care’s history, it has been subject to markedly less philosophical scrutiny than other issue areas. Frequently, we hear advocacy groups wanting debate moderators or journalists about their plans for child care. That’s fine as far as it goes (the recent Vice Presidential debate was on care issues) but I think we’d get a lot further if we first asked political candidates: Why do you think child care is important? What is your vision for an ideal child care system? I think we’d get a lot further, in fact, if we first asked ourselves those questions.

This article was published in partnership with ��.