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Mayor Bloomberg knows a good investment when he sees one.
Last month, his administration announced plans to make preschool education available to infants and toddlers from low-income families starting at just 6 weeks of age. This decision is both smart economics and smart brain science.
Early childhood is the most effective time to help disadvantaged kids, since early experience is critical for cognitive and emotional maturation. Brain development occurs in stages — if a child falls too far behind his or her peers, it becomes hard to catch up. For many disadvantaged children, by the time they start school, the academic skills gap is too wide to bridge. Instead, they can enter a vicious cycle of failure that reduces their interest in school, interfering further with their chances of academic progress.
Starting from the cradle, children learn from their environments, but impoverished conditions can interfere with that process.
In 2011, 21.9% of children in the US were living in poverty, according to Census data. Children in poor households are less likely to receive cognitive stimulation that is taken for granted in middle-class homes.
For example, only half of poor preschoolers have alphabet books, compared to 97% of children whose parents are professionals. Middle-class parents spend more than 40 times as much time, on average, reading to their preschoolers than do poor parents. When parents must struggle simply to meet daily basic needs, they have less energy and resources to provide a structured and supportive home environment.
Early experience matters because in the first few years of life, the brain is changing faster than it ever will again. Synapses, the connections that brain cells use to talk with one another, multiply at first during infancy, then are pruned back and refined, leaving only the ones that have been consistently activated. In this way, a brain’s circuitry is sculpted by the child’s experiences, positive or negative. A child’s brain becomes good at what it does often, whether that includes learning a language, reading, getting along with peers — or vegging out in front of the television.
Most preschools for disadvantaged children are aimed at 3- and 4-year-olds, but earlier interventions are even more effective.
Bloomberg’s new program, to be run by a company called Educare beginning next year, is for children between 6 weeks and five years of age. It will be housed at PS 41 in Brownsville and enroll about 125 children in its first year. For the youngest children, the program will focus on social learning through relationships with responsive and reliable adult caregivers, which is how infants learn best.
The benefits of starting at such an early age can last into adulthood. One famous small-scale experimental program, the Abecedarian Project, gave intensive early education year-round to 57 North Carolina children from 4 months to 8 years of age. When the participants were 21 years old, they were half as likely to have received special education or repeated a grade as children who were not enrolled. Abecedarians were more likely to have graduated from high school or have a skilled job and three times as likely to have attended a four-year college. In addition, they showed IQ gains of 4 points as adults.
Educare participants are likely to benefit in similar ways, providing substantial advantages to their communities as well as themselves.
How can preschool programs have such a powerful effect on adult outcomes? One key factor is self-control, a capacity that can be improved with practice. The ability to regulate emotions and delay gratification increase a child’s odds of success in many areas.
The ability of a 4-year-old to resist an immediate temptation such as a marshmallow, in exchange for two marshmallows given 20 minutes later, can predict both that child’s adolescent SAT scores and her ability to get along with peers. In small children, such self-control can be trained with simple activities such as planning elaborate pretend activities and learning to take turns.
Studies in both people and other animals support the idea that early childhood experience is important for the development of personality, emotion regulation and self-control. For example, rhesus monkeys that do not form a bond with an adult caregiver as babies grow up to be less sociable and more aggressive than normally reared monkeys. Interactions between a mother and her offspring can strongly affect socialization and temperament into adulthood.
Not only do early childhood programs improve lives, they are also cost-effective. From a purely economic perspective, a society’s investment in early childhood education reaps many rewards.
Educare will take $10 million in taxpayer money to set up, according to city officials, along with some added private donations. But dollar for dollar, preschool programs are much better investments than later schooling, job training or rehabilitation. Net lifetime benefits of early-childhood programs have been estimated to be between seven and 12 dollars per one dollar spent. As one part of that, good preschool programs increase a child’s earnings as an adult by about 15%-17% for each year that the child is in the program.
Blocks and books today pay off big dividends tomorrow. Expanding early childhood education to reach all poor children would go a long way toward keeping New York City economically competitive in the decades ahead.
Sandra Aamodt, science editor at BeingHuman.org and a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College” (Bloomsbury).