Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Parental time investments are essential for child development. Evidence suggests that time parents spend with their children positively relates to test scores and cognitive development, especially when children are young (Del Boca, Flinn, and Wiswall, 2014; Thomsen, 2015; Del Bono, Francesconi, Kelly, and Sacker, 2017). However, since most parents work full-time, time spent with their children is limited and much of parent-child interaction takes place on parents’ days off from work (Bianchi, 2000; Fox, Han, Ruhm, and Waldfogel, 2013; Heiland, Price, and Wilson, 2017).

This study addresses the question if the effectiveness of parenting support depends on when support is provided. Specifically, it compares the effects of an early childhood text-messaging program sent during the weekend to the same program sent on weekdays. The text-messaging program was developed at Stanford University and has been shown to improve parental engagement and children’s literacy development (Cortes, Fricke, Loeb, Song, 2018; Doss, Fahle, Loeb, and York, in press; York, Loeb, and Doss, in press). This intervention breaks down the complexities of parenting by providing a combination of general information about important literacy skills and parent-child activities (i.e., “FACT” text messages), actionable advice with specific examples of parent-child literacy activities (i.e., “TIP” text messages), and encouragement/reinforcement (i.e., “GROWTH” text messages).

We randomly assign parents of pre-kindergarten children into three groups. The first group of parents receives the original program, that is, a “FACT” message on Monday, a “TIP” message on Wednesday, and a “GROWTH” message on Friday, henceforth the Weekday program. The second group received the “FACT”, “TIP”, and “GROWTH” messages on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, respectively, henceforth Weekend program. The Weekend program differs from the original program (i.e., Weekday program) in that it sends the text messages on different days but also in that these days are consecutive. Therefore, a third group of parents receives the “FACT”, “TIP”, and “GROWTH” message on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, respectively, to parse out the spacing effect from the weekend effect. This program will henceforth will be called MidWeek program.

We find that sending text messages with parenting support on weekends is more beneficial to children’s development compared to sending texts on weekdays. Children whose parents received the Weekend program had, on average, higher test scores in both the literacy and mathematics assessments than children of parents who received the Weekday and MidWeek programs. Moreover, we find effect heterogeneity with respect to children’s baseline literacy and math skills, as well as with respect to the difficulty of the assessment components in both literacy and math. Improvements were particularly pronounced for children who started pre-Kindergarten in the lower half of the baseline skill distribution on easier sub-components, such as rapid letter naming, rote counting, and shape naming. Test scores on the more difficult literacy and math assessment components, such as phonological awareness and operations, appeared to decrease with a lower magnitude in response to the Weekday program for children in the upper half of the baseline skills distribution.