How a preschool parent intervention produced later benefits: A longitudinal mediation analysis

Abstract

Preschool parent interventions may produce downstream benefits if initial intervention gains are sustained and improve later socialization experiences. This study explored associations between initial effects of the REDI (Research-based Developmentally Informed) Parent program and later benefits. A randomized trial involving 200 Head Start children (55% European-American, 26% African American, 19% Latino, 56% male, M age = 4.45 years) produced kindergarten gains in parenting and child skills. Four years later, sustained effects were evident in areas of academic performance and social-emotional competence at school and new benefits emerged at home. Initial gains in child academic and social-emotional domains mediated sustained gains within the same domains. In addition, initial gains in parent-child conversations, parent academic expectations, and child social-emotional skills mediated later reductions in parenting stress and child problems at home. Parent-focused preschool interventions may not only promote sustained improvements in child school adjustment but may also foster better family functioning over time. Children growing up in poverty often start school with less well-developed social-emotional and language skills than their more advantaged peers (Ryan, Fauth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2006). Limited financial and educational resources create multiple hardships for families, often exposing parents and children to high levels of chronic stress, compromising effective parenting, and reducing home learning support (Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005). These adversities impede the development of the prefrontal cortex during the early childhood years and diminish child progress in acquiring the language and self-regulatory skills that provide a critical foundation for controlling attention, managing emotions, inhibiting impulses, and approaching problems with flexibility and persistence (Blair & Raver, 2015). The result is a socioeconomic gap in key competencies that support school success, evident across the dual domains of language/emergent literacy skills and social-emotional/self-regulatory functioning (Blair & Raver, 2015). This gap does not diminish in later years but predicts to persistent socioeconomic disparities in effective social adjustment, learning engagement, and academic performance (Ryan et al., 2006).

A Systematic Review of School Transition Interventions to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing Outcomes in Children and Young People

“…Yoshikawa et al (2015) presented a much more extensive intervention lasting for two years within the school setting involving workshops and in class coaching for teachers in child oral and literacy development, socioemotional development and coordinating education with health services. Six of the 11 interventions (55%) included a component targeting parents-for example, the REDI-P program (Bierman et al, 2015(Bierman et al, , 2017(Bierman et al, , 2018(Bierman et al, , 2019(Bierman et al, , 2021b which had children participating in the primarily classroom-focused REDI-C intervention as its control group, involved providing parents with learning materials alongside home visits-and nine out of the 11 (82%) included a component aimed at teachers. Five involved direct interaction with the children from other adults, including research assistants, community volunteers and mental health professionals.…”

“…Across all transition types, very few interventions included in the review were delivered solely post-transition (n = 4; 17%) and there is no clear trend that interventions that run across the transition were more effective than those that were solely pre-transition. There is no clear pattern of effectiveness based on whether interventions were targeted at low SES families or not, although some of the larger interventions, in particular REDI-C and REDI-P (Bierman et al, 2014(Bierman et al, , 2015(Bierman et al, , 2017(Bierman et al, , 2019(Bierman et al, , 2021a(Bierman et al, , 2021bNix et al, 2013;Welsh et al, 2020), did demonstrate effectiveness across the preschool to school transition for this population. In terms of bias assessment, the larger more extensive interventions also tended to be those more likely to receive a 'some concerns' rather than 'high' assessment, and there does appear to be a trend that these better quality interventions are more likely to report positive effect estimates.…”

Free access to multilingual digital books: a tool to increase book reading?

“…Previous studies by Hall et al (2018), Tatar andGerde (2022), andZhao et al (2022) suggest that establishing a regular routine for accessing the platform may be beneficial. To establish such a routine, it may be necessary to involve Early Education Centers, as suggested by Bierman et al (2019) and Hummel et al (2023). Collaborating with teachers could also encourage parents to read the same books at home as are read in school.…”

Educación y apoyo familiar, y logro en matemáticas en dos contextos sociodemográficos diferentes

“…Asimismo, los hallazgos del estudio permiten poner en relevancia que las oportunidades de aprendizaje complementario de los estudiantes dependen en gran medida del capital cultural de las familias, que a su vez está determinado por su entorno demográfico. Otros estudios han mostrado que, si el apoyo de los padres para la educación de los hijos consiste en intervenciones estratégicamente efectivas para los niños, puede ayudar a reducir las posibles brechas educativas en los niveles de educación superior (Bierman et al, 2019;Iruka et al, 2018).…”