Giving Tots An Equal Start -- Experiments May Change How Child Is Raised

Apr 27, 1997

Carey Quan Gelernter

Seattle Times Staff Reporter

In a society that accepts so much inequality, we want to believe we still can give kids an even chance.

They may have bad housing, poor health care, gang- and drug-ridden neighborhoods. Yet we still cling to the idea that poor kids should start school as ready to learn and achieve as middle-class kids.

But what if the best chance for leveling the playing field means focusing on a child's first three years of life - and what if a child's brain growth is stunted because his home environment isn't stimulating or nurturing enough?

Does the government intervene? If so, how? Change the parents? Put babies and toddlers into intensive pre-preschool?

Those are some of the profound questions behind the debate as we embark on a new social experiment with potentially wide-ranging implications.

The 1960s gave us Head Start. Now get ready for Early Head Start.

Early Head Start: The origins

In the '60s, people had the idea they could cure poverty in one generation. When Head Start was launched in 1965, it was planned to be a six-week "booster shot" of enrichment and mainstream culture that would catch poor kids up with middle-class kids so they'd be at the same starting line by kindergarten.

We've learned a lot since then. Things are more complicated.

Poverty will not be cured in a generation. Head Start has been shown to have made a difference - to a point. But we can't catch poor kids up in six weeks, or even a year, of preschool.

Meanwhile, new research about the brain and early learning suggests it might be cheaper in the long run to put tax dollars into helping children earlier. The latest high-tech brain research shows the best window of opportunity for developing the capacity to learn takes place in the first few years of life. Head Start programs don't generally start until children are 4 years old.

Other new research shows that language development - cornerstone of the development of intellectual capacity - is directly related to how much children are talked to in the early years. One study showed the gap between the language experiences of privileged and underprivileged children was so great by age 3 that the poor kids could never catch up. On average, the privileged children had heard 20 million words more than the underprivileged.

The notion of early learning's importance is beginning to show up on the popular radar: splashy coverage in Time and Newsweek; a star-studded public campaign for kids led by director-actor Rob Reiner, capped by tomorrow's prime-time special "I Am Your Child," starring Tom Hanks. And last week, the White House hosted a conference on brain development in early childhood.

It's all about building public support for new initiatives to do something for our youngest citizens.

All this comes at a time when many are concerned about the growing number of poor children in this country; nearly a quarter of families with children under age 3 live in poverty. Experts are worried, too, about the potential impact of welfare reform, which will lead to thousands more babies being unleashed on a child-care market that now provides only limited and often poor-quality care for the children in those crucial infant and toddler years.

Which leads us to the government's new tack.

With little fanfare, a small but growing percentage of Head Start money is being shifted into experimental programs that help low-income children and their families in the first three years.

Pilot projects have been launched all over the country -two in Washington state - to see what works best.

Shorthand says Early Head Start is Head Start for the infant and toddler set, but that's not exactly right.

We know a lot, 30 years after Head Start began, about what a quality preschool program is. But we know a lot less about what kind of nationwide plan would best help poor kids in their first few years.

The plans: competing models?

Of the 143 pilots now under way - possibly 200 by October - all are required to cover "the four cornerstones":

-- Promote the health, intellectual and emotional growth of infants and toddlers;

-- Support parents to become self-sufficient, stable and equipped with good parenting skills;

-- Develop better-trained and paid child-care workers;

-- Spur communities to improve fragmented services for families of young children.

But the pilot projects are testing varying approaches: Some, for example, focus on training parents at home; others bring families into quality infant and toddler centers; some combine the two. Programs may create their own child-care centers, or help parents find suitable ones in the community. Various pilots concentrate on different ages of children, and are aimed at different populations - from Mormons in Utah to Hispanic farmworkers in Yakima.

With $160 million this year, and more next year, they'll serve 10,700 families. But the potential numbers, should Early Head Start became a nationwide plan, are huge: there are about 3 million poor children under 3, 100,000 in this state alone.

The two projects in Washington state are among 16 that are part of the most intensive national research study:

-- Parent-Child Communication Coaching: University of Washington professors Kathryn Barnard and Susan Spieker from the School of Nursing and the Center on Human Development and Disability are studying an intervention in South King County based on Barnard's work, in partnership with Children's Home Society. The goal: strengthen the relationship between mother and baby to boost the baby's intellectual and language development.

-- Children of Farmworkers: The needs of low-income farmworker families in the Yakima Valley are the focus of research headed by UW education professor Joe Stowitschek, in partnership with the Migrant Child Institute. A lending library of toys and books, as well encouragement of parents' talking to children, are among the approaches.

Meanwhile, the city of Seattle is applying to start its own Early Head Start program, to cover Southwest, Southeast and Central Seattle. The city believes it has a good chance of getting the money and beginning this fall.

The unknowns

The projects deal with a lot of unknowns, because research on infants and toddlers is limited.

But John Love, of Mathematica Policy Research, who is directing the evaluation of the national project, says "We'll build on what we do know: Infants given care that is sensitive and responsive, with lots of talk and interaction, lots of activities, leads kids to do better in intellectual and language development."

Urging caution is Jean Layzer, senior associate at Abt Associates Inc., a research and consulting firm. Abt evaluated more than 200 family-support and child-development programs, including a national demonstration project called Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) that was a potential precursor of Early Head Start and which Abt concluded was ineffective.

"We know what to do at preschool with older kids," says Layzer. "We don't know what to do about infants, and we especially know little about how to make effective change in parents. You have a lot of guesses out there."

There's no clear evidence, she says, that society wouldn't be better off taking the money for Early Head Start, and funneling it to fully fund Head Start for all eligible children, and for a full year, full day, instead of the present part day, part year; or to start children at age 3.

She wishes only a few careful quality experiments were being tried first.

But others say the present political situation - particularly welfare reform - makes it impossible to hesitate. "People who worry about worsening conditions for infants and toddlers - and it's going to get worse with welfare changes - have a strong feeling we need to do something, and that we can't wait five years for the results of research," says Love, of the national research evaluation.

He adds, "It's not as though we're totally ignorant."

Centers and Family Support

There are two major questions in the field, however, that remain unresolved.

First is the question of whether to go into parents' homes to train them to give their children the nurturing and stimulation they need, or send the children to the highest-quality educational care - a kind of "pre-preschool" - to make up for what they're missing at home.

And, second, is whether you can or must help poor children by helping their parents.

Layzer says that almost half the children in the target population probably need early, intensive educational care outside the home; earlier studies show such programs produce great developmental leaps. In contrast, almost no home-visiting programs show such gains.

"Part of the problem is that there's little infant care in this country, and that's why the emphasis is on home visiting," concludes Layzer. "But if kids aren't getting what they need, figure out how to help them, don't do something that's ineffective because it makes you feel better."

But philosophical differences are at work, too, notes Deanna Gomby, deputy director of the Packard Foundation's Center for the Future of Children. Some fear we're heading down the road to "universal child care," rejected by some as taking away the family's child-rearing role, and by others as being too expensive.

Home-visiting programs, a great part of the Early Head Start experiments, seem more "family friendly," leaving the parent as the instrument of the child's early development.

Despite their poor track record, Love says Early Head Start wants to explore whether better home programs can work. The key to getting results, he says, is if they're direct and specific with parents about what they need to do. "Don't just say, `You're a good parent, and I want to be supportive.' "

UW researcher Kathryn Barnard goes further about the needed strategy:

Start by working with parents in the home, she says, but if the mother isn't showing progress, continue to work with her but don't dawdle about putting the child into an educational care program. "We know the infant can't wait until the parent improves.

"We're finding - and I don't know how to say this so it doesn't sound pejorative or offensive - but we're finding many of these women who are poor come from families where poverty and deprivation have been intergenerational. Unfortunately, it seems like some of their capacity to change and be responsive is limited, even with support."

Even Layzer isn't closing the "home" door, entirely, given that approach. "It represents a strategy worth testing. Barnard is a serious researcher, and she's smart enough that I'd be willing to be agnostic and wait and see."

Perhaps ironically, welfare reform might seem to offer the potential for favoring just the sort of educational care center the research shows would benefit poor children. After all, with the moms at work, infant day care is going to be the norm.

But there seems widespread pessimism that much educational day care for poor children will happen. Gomby of the Center for the Future of Children, for one, says flatly: "There isn't enough money to do good care."

As for whether you can help children with "family support" programs aimed primarily at helping their parents, the record indicates no.

Such programs typically assign parents an advocate who hooks them up to needed services, such as job-finding, housing, education. The idea, quips Abt Associates's Robert St. Pierre, whose firm evaluated the concept and found it wanting, was to "make strides with children on the cheap, by fixing the mothers."

But change in parents is iffy, and usually comes too slow to help kids. The research is clear that children only made gains when they received focused and intensive attention.

(In any case, comparison groups of parents seemed to improve their lives at about the same rate as those in most of the family support programs, according to Abt. Were they finding the services on their own? Nobody is quite sure.)

Abt concludes that, with limited funds, it makes most sense to favor directly helping children. It's simply a harder and more complicated proposition to help parents than children.

Consider, Layzer says, that parents' needs vary - a job for one, housing for another - while the needs of their young children are more uniform. "What you could do for any poor child is provide some time in an enriched environment."

Still, Love says, "even though there is not a lot of evidence for it, we've got to believe the child will be better off if the parent has a job and is not in an abusive relationship." So family support is a part of Early Head Start.

"The programs can't be total failures," says Love. "Some elements worked, some worked for some families and not others. We know family support as a label doesn't work, and CCDP (Comprehesive Child Development Program) wasn't effective - but what was it about it that didn't work?" The projects will try to figure that out.

Gomby, of the Center for the Future of Children, says the recent massive government-funded child-care study points to another reason to keep trying on the family front.

The study found that quality child care has a greater positive effect on the development of poor children than on middle-class children. But it also found the family remains the most important determiner of children's development. "You need to pay attention to both pieces."

And Stowitschek and other researchers say even though Early Head Start rules require some focus on parents, child-care workers and community, "We've been told to keep our eyes on the prize - and the prize is the child."

The lesson of Head Start

In formulating Early Head Start, everyone wants to mind the lessons of Head Start, though opinions differ on exactly what those lessons are.

Head Start has been beneficial, but not as much as was hoped.

As early-learning researcher Betty Hart of the University of Kansas explains, the gains weren't in intellect or IQ, but social: Kids stayed in school longer, were less likely to be held back a grade, be placed in special education, or get involved in the criminal-justice system.

But there are caveats.

Studies showed the bigger, lasting improvements came from the highest-quality, most intensive preschool programs. But quality in Head Start is acknowledged to be highly uneven, and children in poorer programs didn't show the same gains. Most Head Starts spend less, have less trained staff, and offer fewer hours to children, than the model programs. A high-quality version documented to work well spent $7,600 per child per year; more typically, Head Starts spends $4,000 a year, according to a recent study by Rutgers University professor W. Steven Barnett.

While Head Start, meanwhile, has launched a quality-improvement program with higher standards, most researchers say the same "watering down" of a demonstration is likely to occur should Early Head Start became a mass program. The key, some say, is to have enough gains so you still have progress when it inevitably waters down.

But another caveat is that the long-term effectiveness studies track Head Start programs that took place in the '60s and '70s - and some researchers believe the worsening social problems of drugs, gangs and violence call into question whether the results would be the same for today's generation.

Some researchers suggest wider social changes are needed, or programs like Head Start are the equivalent of digging in quicksand.

The Barnett study says Head Start kids end up in "our lowest-quality schools." Perhaps they can't maintain the gains they make in preschool unless the public schools they're funneled into are improved.

Layzer says that in some cities Early Head Start may be doomed because "there may be conditions people are living in that won't allow any program to succeed. That wouldn't be true in Seattle - but in inner-city Pittsburgh, D.C., Baltimore, New York, they're really facing challenges no program should have to face."

In those cases, she says, "you could have said, we'll make sure every family has an adequate living situation, tossed away all these little programs and just done that." Of course, that would have cost a lot more.

In frustration, she says: "We probably should stop obsessing about effectiveness. We're looking to salve our consciences, not being really effective."

Defining success

Measuring success will be complex, says Love. The days of simplistic goals like curing poverty in a generation, certainly, are over.

"We're trying to avoid saying, does it work? That's too simple," Love says. "We're trying to say, what can we learn about the ways in which Early Head Start can work for different families in different circumstances? We'll learn about some things that work, and some that won't."

Hart, whose own research dates back to the early days of Head Start, says one lesson that Great Society program teaches us is to think in terms of incremental change. With the end of the Great Society, she says, "All those programs were cut off, the whole impetus was removed once it was found that no great changes would be made in a generation. We can't afford to do that again.

"It won't happen in a generation, it's not realistic. But as children experience good parenting and language experience, they will hand that to their kids. It will filter down to the next generation."

gests it might be cheaper in the long run to put tax dollars into helping children earlier. The latest high-tech brain research shows the best window of opportunity for developing the capacity to learn takes place in the first few years of life. Head Start programs don't generally start until children are 4 years old.

It's all about building public support for new initiatives to do something for our youngest citizens.

Which leads us to the government's new tack.

With little fanfare, a small but growing percentage of Head Start money is being shifted into experimental programs that help low-income children and their families in the first three years.

Pilot projects have been launched all over the country -two in Washington state - to see what works best.

Shorthand says Early Head Start is Head Start for the infant and toddler set, but that's not exactly right.

The plans: competing models?

Of the 143 pilots now under way - possibly 200 by October - all are required to cover "the four cornerstones":

-- Promote the health, intellectual and emotional growth of infants and toddlers;

-- Support parents to become self-sufficient, stable and equipped with good parenting skills;

-- Develop better-trained and paid child-care workers;

-- Spur communities to improve fragmented services for families of young children.

With $160 million this year, and more next year, they'll serve 10,700 families. But the potential numbers, should Early Head Start became a nationwide plan, are staggering: at least 3.75 million children might qualify, 100,000 in this state alone.

The two projects in Washington state are among 16 that are part of the most intensive national research study:

-- Parent-Child Communication Coaching: University of Washington professors Kathryn Barnard and Susan Spieker from the School of Nursing and the Center on Human Development and Disability are studying an intervention in South King County based on Barnard's work, in partnership with the Children's Home Society. The goal: strengthen the relationship between mother and baby to boost the baby's intellectual and language development.

The unknowns

The projects deal with a lot of unknowns, because research on infants and toddlers is limited.

There's no clear evidence, she says, that society wouldn't be better off taking the money for Early Head Start, and funneling it to fully fund Head Start for a full year, full day, instead of the present part day, part year; or to start children at age 3, so they have an additional year.