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Publicly funded prekindergarten programs have achieved small-to-large impacts on children's cognitive outcomes. The current study examined the impact of a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other nontargeted, essential components of school readiness, such as executive functioning. Participants included 2,018 four and five-year-old children. Findings indicated that the program had moderate-to-large impacts on children's language, literacy, numeracy and mathematics skills, and small impacts on children's executive functioning and a measure of emotion recognition. Some impacts were considerably larger for some subgroups. For urban public school districts, results inform important programmatic decisions. For policy makers, results confirm that prekindergarten programs can improve educationally vital outcomes for children in meaningful, important ways.

An in-depth look at the challenges undocumented immigrants face as they raise children in the U.S. There are now nearly four million children born in the United States who have undocumented immigrant parents. In the current debates around immigration reform, policymakers often view immigrants as an economic or labor market problem to be solved, but the issue has a very real human dimension. Immigrant parents without legal status are raising their citizen children under stressful work and financial conditions, with the constant threat of discovery and deportation that may narrow social contacts and limit participation in public programs that might benefit their children. Immigrants Raising Citizens offers a compelling description of the everyday experiences of these parents, their very young children, and the consequences these experiences have on their children’s development. Immigrants Raising Citizens challenges conventional wisdom about undocumented immigrants, viewing them not as lawbreakers or victims, but as the parents of citizens whose adult productivity will be essential to the nation’s future. The book’s findings are based on data from a three-year study of 380 infants from Dominican, Mexican, Chinese, and African American families, which included in-depth interviews, in-home child assessments, and parent surveys. The book shows that undocumented parents share three sets of experiences that distinguish them from legal-status parents and may adversely influence their children’s development: avoidance of programs and authorities, isolated social networks, and poor work conditions. Fearing deportation, undocumented parents often avoid accessing valuable resources that could help their children’s development — such as access to public programs and agencies providing child care and food subsidies. At the same time, many of these parents are forced to interact with illegal entities such as smugglers or loan sharks out of financial necessity. Undocumented immigrants also tend to have fewer reliable social ties to assist with child care or share information on child-rearing. Compared to legal-status parents, undocumented parents experience significantly more exploitive work conditions, including long hours, inadequate pay and raises, few job benefits, and limited autonomy in job duties. These conditions can result in ongoing parental stress, economic hardship, and avoidance of center-based child care — which is directly correlated with early skill development in children. The result is poorly developed cognitive skills, recognizable in children as young as two years old, which can negatively impact their future school performance and, eventually, their job prospects. Immigrants Raising Citizens has important implications for immigration policy, labor law enforcement, and the structure of community services for immigrant families. In addition to low income and educational levels, undocumented parents experience hardships due to their status that have potentially lifelong consequences for their children. With nothing less than the future contributions of these children at stake, the book presents a rigorous and sobering argument that the price for ignoring this reality may be too high to pay. HIROKAZU YOSHIKAWA is professor of education in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

The Trump administration is aiming to expand the criteria for deeming an immigrant likely to become a “public charge.” Such a change would have important consequences for access to medical care and for the health of millions of immigrants and their families.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a historic opportunity to implement interventions, at scale, to promote early childhood development. Although the evidence base for the importance of early childhood development has grown, the research is distributed across sectors, populations, and settings, with diversity noted in both scope and focus. We provide a comprehensive updated analysis of early childhood development interventions across the five sectors of health, nutrition, education, child protection, and social protection. Our review concludes that to make interventions successful, smart, and sustainable, they need to be implemented as multi-sectoral intervention packages anchored in nurturing care. The recommendations emphasise that intervention packages should be applied at developmentally appropriate times during the life course, target multiple risks, and build on existing delivery platforms for feasibility of scale-up. While interventions will continue to improve with the growth of developmental science, the evidence now strongly suggests that parents, caregivers, and families need to be supported in providing nurturing care and protection in order for young children to achieve their developmental potential.

The effectiveness of early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs for children's development in various domains is well documented. Adding to existing meta-analyses on associations between the quality of ECEC services and children's developmental outcomes, the present meta-analysis synthesizes the global literature on structural characteristics and indicators of process quality to test direct and moderated effects of ECEC quality on children's outcomes across a range of domains. A systematic review of the literature published over a 10-year period, between January 2010 and June 2020 was conducted, using the databases PsychInfo, Eric, EbscoHost, and Pubmed. In addition, a call for unpublished research or research published in the grey literature was sent out through the authors' professional network. The search yielded 8,932 articles. After removing duplicates, 4,880 unique articles were identified. To select articles for inclusion, it was determined whether studies met eligibility criteria: (1) study assessed indicators of quality in center-based ECEC programs catering to children ages 0-6 years; and (2) study assessed child outcomes. Inclusion criteria were: (1) a copy of the full article was available in English; (2) article reported effect size measure of at least one quality indicator-child outcome association; and (3) measures of ECEC quality and child outcomes were collected within the same school year. A total of 1,044 effect sizes reported from 185 articles were included. The averaged effects, pooled within each of the child outcomes suggest that higher levels of ECEC quality were significantly related to higher levels of academic outcomes (literacy, n = 99: 0.08, 95% C.I. 0.02, 0.13; math, n = 56: 0.07, 95% C.I. 0.03, 0.10), behavioral skills (n = 64: 0.12, 95% C.I. 0.07, 0.17), social competence (n = 58: 0.13, 95% C.I. 0.07, 0.19), and motor skills (n = 2: 0.09, 95% C.I. 0.04, 0.13), and lower levels of behavioral (n = 60: -0.12, 95% C.I. -0.19, -0.05) and social-emotional problems (n = 26: -0.09, 95% C.I. -0.15, -0.03). When a global assessment of child outcomes was reported, the association with ECEC quality was not significant (n = 13: 0.02, 95% C.I. -0.07, 0.11). Overall, effect sizes were small. When structural and process quality indicators were tested separately, structural characteristics alone did not significantly relate to child outcomes whereas associations between process quality indicators and most child outcomes were significant, albeit small. A comparison of the indicators, however, did not yield significant differences in effect sizes for most child outcomes. Results did not provide evidence for moderated associations. We also did not find evidence that ECEC quality-child outcome associations differed by ethnic minority or socioeconomic family background. Despite the attempt to provide a synthesis of the global literature on ECEC quality-child outcome associations, the majority of studies included samples from the U.S. In addition, studies with large samples were also predominately from the U.S. Together, the results might have been biased towards patterns prevalent in the U.S. that might not apply to other, non-U.S. ECEC contexts. The findings align with previous meta-analyses, suggesting that ECEC quality plays an important role for children's development during the early childhood years. Implications for research and ECEC policy are discussed.

Globally, studies have shown associations between maternal stimulation and early child development. Yet, little is known about the prevalence of paternal and other caregivers' stimulation practices, particularly in low- and- middle-income countries (LMICs). Data from the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS) and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) were combined across 62 LMICs (2010-2018). The sample included 205,150 mothers of children aged 3 and 4 years. High levels of stimulation were defined as caregiver engagement in at least 4 out of 6 possible activities with the child. The proportion of mothers, fathers, and other caregivers providing high levels of stimulation was calculated by country, region, and for the whole sample. Socioeconomic disparities within and between countries were estimated. On average, 39.8% (95% CI 37.4 to 42.2) of mothers, 11.9% (95% CI 10.1 to 13.8) of fathers, and 20.7% (95% CI 18.4 to 23.0) of other adult caregivers provided high levels of stimulation. Stimulation varied by region, country income group, and Human Development Index (HDI), with higher levels of maternal and paternal-but not other caregivers'-stimulation in high-income and high-HDI countries. Within countries, stimulation levels were, on average, lower in the poorest relative to the richest households, and some but not all countries exhibited differences by child sex (i.e., boys vs. girls) or area (i.e., urban vs. rural). Results suggest a need for intervention efforts that focus on increasing caregiver stimulation in LMICs, particularly for fathers and in low-income contexts.

Despite a recent call for an expanded research agenda that is more likely to produce tangible societal reductions in inequality, efforts to articulate how social scientists can actually pursue this agenda remain few and far between. The central question this article addresses is, What can social scientists do to deliver the forms of knowledge that may lead to a reduction of social inequalities in youth outcomes and opportunities at large scale? Drawing on conceptualizations of inequality that pay attention to mechanisms of distributional and relational inequality, and examples of initiatives from a diverse array of the social sciences, the authors delineate six pathways for the kind of research that may generate reductions in youth inequality at scale. The authors conclude with a set of proposals for what academic institutions can do to train and support researchers to carry out this research agenda.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285985.].

This study examines causal impacts of unconditional cash transfers on economic hardship and key family processes that may affect children’s development. The study randomized 1000 mothers of newborns, with prior-year household income below the federal poverty threshold, to receive unconditional cash transfers of $333 or $20 per month (Clinical Trial Registry number NCT03593356). Data collected approximately 12, 24 and 36 months after the child’s birth show a moderate increase in household income and reductions in poverty; no statistically significant improvements in subjective economic hardship reports or quality of play with infants; and small, mostly statistically non-significant, increases in parental psychological distress and declines in mothers’ relationship quality. However, mothers receiving the higher amount reported more frequently engaging in enriching child activities than mothers receiving the lower amount. Cash support may provide other benefits for families and children, but moderate support levels do not appear to address self-reported economic hardship or standard survey measures of maternal well-being. However, these results do not rule out the possibility of very small effects. The authors examine the impact of monthly unconditional cash transfers starting at childbirth on families with low incomes. Transfers had minimal effects on family processes and maternal wellbeing, but improved family incomes and time mothers spent doing enriching activities with their child.

The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning in the United States make 2021 a potent moment to reimagine American education. This article introduces an ongoing Kappan series in which scholars look ahead to imagine what K-12 education will look like in 25 years. Na’ilah Nasir, Megan Bang, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa discuss some of the factors that have created an environment ripe for transformation and some of their ideas for what the future should look like.