Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Research suggests that children’s participation in early childhood education programs can improve the outcomes of their parents. Experimental studies find that parents of children who attended Head Start increased both their investment in their children’s education (Gelber & Isen, 2014) and their own education attainment (e.g., Sabol & Chase-Landsdale, 2015), relative to parents of children who did not attend Head Start. Yet less is known about the impacts of early interventions on parental well-being where the key difference between treatment and control children is the quality of care received.

Evidence suggests that bi-directional relations exist between parents’ psychological well-being, and children’s emotional and behavioral problems (e.g., Combs-Ronto et al., 2009; Lengua & Kovacs, 2005; Psychogiou et al., 2017). Furthermore, research also suggests that reductions children’s behavioral and social-emotional challenges may alleviate barriers to parents’ employment (Coley et al., 2011; Corman, Noonan & Reichman, 2005; Dworsky & Courtney, 2008), and that improvements in parents’ psychological well-being can support subsequent human capital formation (Linver, Brooks-Gunn & Cohen, 2002).

In this paper, I examine the extent to which a multi-component, classroom-based intervention; the Chicago School Readiness Program (Raver et al., 2008), had indirect benefits to parents of participating children. The CSRP intervention randomly assigned teacher training in combination with mental health consultations, aimed at supporting teachers’ classroom management and emotional support, to Head Start centers in Chicago. Studies indicate the intervention had positive impacts on children’s emotional and behavioral adjustment (e.g., Raver et al., 2011), and longer-term impacts on academic and executive functioning outcomes (Watts et al., 2018). The present study considers the hypothesized bidirectional processes within families, and examines whether the positive impacts of CSRP on children’s emotional and behavioral outcomes led to subsequent improvements in parent outcomes.

I examine the impacts of the CSRP intervention on the well-being of parents of participating children within two broad domains. First, I examine the impact of random assignment to the CSRP intervention on short-term measures of parents’ psychological well-being based on parent self-reports of psychological distress from when children were enrolled in Head Start and in elementary school. Second, I examine impacts on longer-term measures of parents’ human capital formation (education, employment, and economic well-being) from the end of the intervention year through children’s transition into high school. Finally, I will examine potential mechanisms behind these impacts, including whether reductions in children’s socioemotional and behavioral challenges explain impacts on parent psychological well-being, and whether short-term impacts on parents’ psychological well-being explain longer-term impacts on human capital formation.

Preliminary findings suggest that CSRP intervention improved parents’ psychological well-being, particularly in when children entered the early elementary grades. In the preferred specification, which controls for measures of baseline imbalance, I find evidence that the intervention reduced parent-reported measures of stress. Additional analyses will examine the extent to which these impacts translate into longer-term impacts on parents’ human capital formation, and explore the mediating role of shorter-term impacts on children’s self-regulation and behavior outcomes. Implications for ECE policies aimed at supporting family well-being will be discussed.