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This article tests whether parents reinforce or compensate for child endowments. We estimate how the difference in birth weight across siblings impacts specific parental investments: breast-feeding, well-baby visits, immunizations, and preschool attendance. Our results indicate that normal-birth-weight children are 5%–11% more likely to receive early childhood parental investments than their low-birth-weight siblings. Moreover, the presence of additional low-birth-weight siblings in the household increases the likelihood of investments such as well-baby visits and immunizations for normal-birth-weight children. These results suggest that parental investments in early childhood tend to reinforce endowment differences.

In this article, M. Rebecca Kilburn and Jill S. Cannon report on First Born, a targeted universal home visiting program operating in over half of New Mexico counties. Created in a small town in response to a lack of support for pregnant women and new parents, First Born adapts features of other home visiting programs, responding to conditions common to high-need, low-resource communities. As its name suggests, First Born enrolls first-time families. A team of home visitors, including a registered nurse or other licensed health care professional and a paraprofessional parent educator, offers 40 weekly home visits during the child's first year; the frequency of visits diminishes during the child's second and third year. The nurse visits the home both before and after the child's birth, and also when medical issues are the focus of visit. Because nurses are in short supply in many communities, however, most of the home visits are made by parent educators, who coordinate with the nurse visitor. To promote early childhood health and development, First Born educates parents and helps them access community resources, using a three-pronged approach: helping the family to develop life and social skills, such as decision-making, crisis intervention, and knowledge of child development; using screening tools to identify problems (for example, substance dependency or developmental delays) and referring families to the appropriate sources of help; and promoting effective coordination among community resources. Based on First Born's scale-up experience, Kilburn and Cannon outline several lessons for other universal programs, including the pros and cons of universal services, the expectation that universal programs will have population-level impact, and barriers to innovation.

Objectives To disseminate lessons learned from implementing a randomized trial in a community setting so that other randomized trials can anticipate and prevent some of the challenges we encountered. Methods A discussion of common challenges to the implementation of randomized trials and how the structure of our trial mitigated some of these, and a description of unanticipated challenges we encountered and how we addressed them. Results While we set up our randomized trial in a way that avoided some of the “pitfalls” of trials identified in the literature, we still encountered challenges that we did not anticipate. We undertook corrective actions to address these, and the caseflow of the trial improved. Conclusion All the lessons from our trial are variants of the same issue: ensuring sufficient buy-in among the program staff and community stakeholders. Even though we thought we had engaged in extensive activities to promote buy-in, it turned out that these efforts were not adequate. Trials would benefit from developing an outreach plan that targets individuals from across the organizational chart of involved organizations, is ongoing, and actively solicits concerns from stakeholders so that these can be addressed in a timely fashion. These activities represent a sizable amount of effort and need to be incorporated into project budgets.

Considers the potential consequences of not investing additional resources in children's lives, the range of early intervention programs, the demonstrated benefits of interventions having high-quality evaluations, the features associated with successful programs, and the returns to society associated with investing early in the lives of disadvantaged children. The findings indicate the existence of a body of sound research that can guide resource allocation decisions.

The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child’s initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in part among all children in a household. The empirical results of this paper imply that such household parental investments compensate for low endowments, as proxied by low birth weight.

Growth in federal, state, and private funding is fueling the initiation of home visiting programs around the country. As communities expand home visiting programs, they need information to help them successfully start up new sites. This paper documents lessons learned about home visiting installation and initial implementation from the replication of the First Born ® Program in six counties in New Mexico. Specifically, we examine how well sites met staffing, family referral and enrollment, program model fidelity, and financing goals in the first year of providing services. Data come from semi-structured interviews with program staff and document review. The findings are likely to be valuable to a wide spectrum of communities starting or expanding home visiting services, as well as to public and private funders of programs.

With the growing push toward accountability and the interest in designing programs based on scientific evidence, decision makers increasingly need to know what works in the social policy arena. This need has fueled a proliferation of projects aimed at compiling best practices. These projects can be approached in numerous ways, which differ according to their target audience, philosophy regarding what constitutes evidence, medium of presentation, and a host of other factors. One such project is the Promising Practices Network (PPN) on Children, Families, and Communities. The motivation behind the approach to providing information about what works is explained. The focus of PPN is to provide high-quality objective evidence about what improves outcomes for children and families, with an emphasis on serving [policy-makers and service providers. For policymakers and service providers who would like to adopt a program and replicate it in their community, more information is needed about the issues involved with scaling up and replicating a program.

There is increasing evidence that the first few years after birth are particularly important in child development and present opportunities for enrichment but also vulnerabilities do to poverty and other social stressors. Elected officials have begun proposing potentially costly programs to intervene early in the lives of disadvantaged children. Have such interventions been demonstrated to yield substantial benefits? To what extent might they pay for themselves through lower welfare and criminal justice costs incurred by participating children as they grow into adults? This study synthesizes the results of a number of previous evaluations in an effort to answer those questions. Conclusions are that under carefully controlled conditions, early childhood interventions can yield substantial advantages to recipients in terms of emotional and cognitive development, education, economic well-being, and health. (The latter two benefits apply to the children's families as well.) If these interventions can be duplicated on a large scale, the costs of the programs could be exceeded by subsequent savings to the government. However, the more carefully the interventions are targeted to children most likely to benefit, the more likely it is that savings will exceed costs. Unfortunately, these conclusions rest on only a few methodologically sound studies. The authors argue for broader demonstrations accompanied by rigorous evaluations to resolve several important unknowns. These include the most efficient ways to design and target programs, the extent to which effectiveness is lost on scale-up, and the implications of welfare reform and other safety net changes.

As the war on terrorism wages on, our nation's policymakers will continue to face the challenge of assessing threats that various terrorist groups pose to the U.S. homeland and our interests abroad. As part of the RAND Corporation's yearlong \"Thinking Strategically About Combating Terrorism\" project, the authors of this report develop a way to assess and analyze the danger posed by various terrorist organizations around the world. The very nature of terrorism creates a difficulty in predicting new and emerging threats; however, by establishing these types of parameters, the report creates a fresh foundation of threat analysis on which future counterterrorism strategy may build.

This rich and well-researched volume comes in the wake of intense national interest in young children. Leading scholars from diverse disciplines use relevant data from the Commonwealth Survey of Parents with Young Children to present new information about the lives of families with very young children - how parents spend their time with their children, the economic and social challenges they face, and the supports they receive to improve their children's health and development. Such a broad portrait based on nationally representative date has not been attempted before. Drawing on their extensive expertise and research in the issues being addressed, the authors examine and elaborate on the survey findings. They synthesize the major themes emerging from the data and consider the family, community, and policy implications to frame and interpret the results. What emerges is a picture of the complex forces that influence families and child-rearing in the early years.