The Impact of the Early Childhood Programs on Life Outcomes
The past two decades have been characterized by a growing body of research from diverse disciplines — child development, psychology, neuroscience, and economics, among others — demonstrating the importance of establishing a strong foundation in the early years of life.
How can we establish the effectiveness of such programs and what metrics should we be looking at?
Some domains we might want to consider with regards to effectiveness are:
Physical Health
Cognition
Language
Social and emotional development
As well as other factors like behaviour and emotion; cognitive achievement; child health; developmental delay; child welfare; crime; educational attainment; and employment and earnings, family formation, and uses of social services in adulthood.
But of course, not all outcomes are tangible or can be measured in monetary terms or observed without later follow-up.
Possible impacts of a lack of early childhood programs
Experiences in early childhood have long-term effects on brain function, cognition and psychosocial functioning.
Exposure to disadvantaged environments during the first few years of life predicts lower IQ and academic achievement, increased antisocial behaviour, lower economic productivity and poor health and chronic disease in adulthood.
Child characteristics of behaviour and self-control as early as age 3 years predict psychopathology, health, wealth and convictions in adulthood.
Hence, the foundations of adult physical and mental health, behaviour and achievement are laid during the early childhood years.
High quality early childhood education (ECE) interventions for disadvantaged children in the USA have shown long-term benefits to child schooling trajectories, cognitive development, antisocial behaviour, depression, economic productivity and/or health risk behaviours. These interventions vary in the mode of intervention delivery and include home visiting from pregnancy to age 2 years, educational day care from infancy to age 5 years and attendance at high quality preschool.
(more to come - lydia)
