As I mentioned above, one of the premises I’m working from here is that childhood is a continuum, and if we want to help improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, we need to look for opportunities to intervene in positive ways at many different points along that continuum. Still, there is overwhelming evidence that early childhood—the years before a child’s sixth birthday, and especially before her third—is a remarkable time of both opportunity and potential peril in a child’s development. Children’s brains in those early years are at their most malleable, more sensitive than at any other point to influences and cues from the surrounding environment. The neurological infrastructure is being formed that will support all of a child’s future capacities, including not only her intellectual abilities—how to decipher and calculate and compare and infer—but also those emotional and psychological habits and abilities and mindsets that will enable her to negotiate life inside and outside school. The effect of the environment is amplified during the early years: When children are in a good environment, it is very good for their future development, and when they are in a bad environment, it is very bad.
The United States does not do a good job of reflecting this growing scientific understanding of early childhood, and especially early brain development, in its policies toward disadvantaged children. We dedicate only a small fraction of the public money we spend on children to the earliest years; in one recent international ranking, the United States placed 31st out of a group of 32 developed nations in the proportion of total public spending on social services that goes to early childhood. And what we do spend on early childhood goes mostly to prekindergarten, which generally means programs for four-year-olds (and a few three-year-olds) that are focused on academic skill building.
The data on the effectiveness of pre-K is somewhat mixed. A growing number of statewide pre-K programs are universal, meaning that they are offered not only to disadvantaged children but also to children from better-off families. There are good political and social reasons behind making pre-K available to everyone, including the benefits to all children of socioeconomic integration and the fact that middle-class voters are more likely to be invested in programs that aren’t narrowly targeted at the poor. But the educational value of pre-K for children who aren’t poor is still in dispute; studies have found little or no positive effect (or even a negative effect) of universal pre-K programs on the skills of well-off children. That said, pre-K does seem to reliably help disadvantaged four-year-olds develop the skills they need for kindergarten, as long as the programs they are enrolled in are considered high-quality.
Still, the practice of devoting so much of our limited supply of early-childhood public dollars to pre-K means that we have very little left to spend on programs that support parents and children in the first three years of life. According to one estimate, only 6 percent of public early-childhood dollars in the United States go to programs for children who have not yet reached their third birthday. The remaining 94 percent go to programs for three-, four-, and five-year-olds. The problem with this lopsided division of resources is that we are now coming to understand with increasing clarity how much of the brain development that affects later success takes place in those first three years. The capacities that develop in the earliest years may be harder to measure on tests of kindergarten readiness than abilities like number and letter recognition, but they are precisely the skills, closely related to executive functions, that researchers have recently determined to be so valuable in kindergarten and beyond: the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students.
The challenge for anyone who wants to help nurture the noncognitive abilities of low-income children in these early years is that the kind of deliberate practice children experience in pre-K doesn’t do much to help develop their executive functions. Instead, those capacities are formed through their daily interactions with their environment, including, most centrally, the relationships they have with their parents and other adults in their lives. This leads to a dilemma for policy makers: The science tells us that parents and caregivers, and the environment they create for a child, are probably the most effective tool we have in early childhood for improving that child’s future. But parental behavior, especially on the private, intimate level where baby talk and screen time and serve-and-return interactions dwell, is not something that most of us are entirely comfortable targeting with government interventions.
This dilemma is real, and solutions won’t be easy to find. But in my recent reporting, I have encountered a number of organizations focused on enhancing the early-childhood environment—and especially what we might call the early-early-childhood environment, in the first three years of life. In the next three sections, I’m going to briefly describe a few of the most promising interventions they have developed. Some target parents; others work to build supportive and nurturing environments outside the home. None is perfect, but together they may point the way to a new approach to intervening early in the lives of disadvantaged children.