Leveraging Behavioral Insights to Empower Parents to Support Young Children’s Development: Evidence from Experimental Interventions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Parents play an integral role in nurturing their children’s development. Yet, parents often receive conflicting messages about the best ways to support their children, all the while facing time constraints and competing priorities. Parent-focused interventions that leverage behavioral insights from psychology and economics can help focus parents’ attention on key parenting behaviors and motivate parents to engage in high-impact activities with their children (Gennetian et al., 2016). Light touch text message-based “nudge” approaches that send parents actionable information have emerged as a key behaviorally informed strategy for shaping parents’ behavioral choices (e.g., Smythe-Leistico & Page, 2018; York et al., 2018). This symposium presents findings from four experimental intervention studies testing novel text message-based interventions to support parents in nurturing their children’s development in several specific domains. The first paper tests text messages encouraging parents’ engagement in science-related activities with their preschool-aged children. The second and third papers both introduce and test math-focused interventions. Specifically, the second examines the impact of providing the parents of preschool-aged children in Head Start centers math activities and associated text messages targeting parental mindsets. The third considers the relative effectiveness of providing the parents of preschool-aged children math-only versus combined math, literacy, and social-emotional supports. The final paper evaluates the efficacy of sending parents of early elementary-aged children messages on supporting children’s self-regulation through interactive games. The presentation will discuss implications of these interventions for parenting behaviors and children’s development, as well as highlight broader implications for the design of behaviorally informed interventions for parents.

Sub Unit

• Prevention and Interventions

Chair

• Lisa Gennetian, Duke University

Individual Presentations

• Using Mobile Messaging to Improve Parents’ Support of Preschool Children’s Science Learning - Presenting Author: Todd Grindal, SRI International - Silicon Valley; Non-Presenting Author: Megan Silander, Education Development Center - New York; Non-Presenting Author: Sarah Nixon Gerard, SRI International - District of Columbia; Non-Presenting Author: Tiffany Maxon, EDC

• The MPACT initiative: Using Behavioral Tools to Improve Children’s Math Skills - Non-Presenting Author: Susan Mayer, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Ariel Kalil, University of Chicago; Presenting Author: William Delgado, University of Chicago

• Math is for Girls: The Unequal Effects of Text-Messaging to Help Parents Support Early Math Development - Presenting Author: Christopher Doss, RAND Corporation; Non-Presenting Author: Hans Fricke, Amazon; Non-Presenting Author: Susanna Loeb, Annenberg Institute at Brown University

• Nudging Young Children’s Self-Regulation Through Behaviorally Informed Text Messages for Parents - Presenting Author: Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City; Non-Presenting Author: Sophie Barnes, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Non-Presenting Author: Nonie Lesaux, Harvard Graduate School of Education