Passing the Baton: Does a Parent's "Head Start" Affect Children's Outcomes?

• In Event: 35.020 - Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

The debate over public provision of early childhood education (ECE) programs has been much in the news lately. Central to the debate over whether federal and state governments ought to support ECE programs is a question about the payoffs of providing these programs. A full accounting of costs and benefits should include “downstream” as well as immediate impacts of programs. This project uses plausibly exogenous variation in Head Start access and uptake to examine a previously unstudied source of downstream program outcomes: effects on children born to adults who participated in Head Start in their own childhoods. Specifically, I test whether Head Start has long-term impacts on the parenting style of adults (Generation 1 [G1]) who attended Head Start in their youth, and whether benefits (or disadvantages) accrue to the children of former Head Start participants (Generation 2 [G2]) in their early childhood years.
I pool analyses from several nationally representative datasets, including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) (NLSY-79, linked to the NLSY-79 Children and Young Adults dataset). Both provide data on G1 parents’ Head Start participation, as well as county of residence in parents’ youth (at birth or in early childhood years); both datasets include G1 sibling pairs; both datasets include measures of parenting outcomes for a sizable subset of parents; and both datasets include measures on early childhood outcomes for G2 children.
Family formation outcomes include indicators for whether G1 adults become teen parents and whether G1 adults have any children out of wedlock, as well as the (logged) income of the family at the birth of the respondent’s first child (averaged between the years that the child is born and the year after). The latter measure provides a sense of how financially stable each respondent is at the point that they embark on establishing a family.
Parenting outcomes include measures of cognitive and emotional stimulation in the home environment as well as parenting attitude scales (e.g., scales of parental self-efficacy and parental warmth in the PSID; scales of parental disciplinary attitudes in the NLSY).
Child outcomes include measures like birthweight, early cognitive and behavioral assessments, grade progression, and indicators for whether children are tagged for exceptional educational programs (i.e., either special education or gifted programs).

Author

• Cassandra M.D. Hart, University of California - Davis