Many Happy Returns: Early Childhood Programs Entail Costs, but the Paybacks Could Be Substantial

For four decades, scientific research has sought to determine if early childhood intervention programs such as home visiting, parent education, and early childhood education — alone or in combination — could yield long-term benefits for participating children and families. Lifelong benefits could include increases in academic achievement (test scores), educational progress (timely promotion), educational attainment (years of schooling completed), behavioral and emotional competencies, health, employment, and earnings; and decreases in child abuse and neglect, delinquency and crime, and use of social welfare programs.

Almost all the early childhood programs studied so far have focused on children “at risk.” Common risks involve living in poverty, having a single parent, having a mother with less than a high school education, and living in a family whose primary language is not English. Nearly half of entering U.S. kindergartners face at least one of these risk factors. Nearly one in six is subject to more than one.