Nudging Young Children’s Self-Regulation Through Behaviorally Informed Text Messages for Parents

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

Abstract

Children’s self-regulation skills are increasingly recognized as central to children’s success in school and beyond (Blair & Raver, 2015; Moffitt et al., 2011). Self-regulation is an umbrella term for a number of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes, including working memory, attention, and mental flexibility, that develop rapidly in early childhood (Jones et al., 2016; Jones & Bouffard, 2012). Adult caregivers, whether at school or at home, play a key role in nurturing children’s self-regulation development through their interactions with children. Consequently numerous interventions have taken aim at improving caregiver knowledge and skills to in turn support children’s regulatory skills (Durlak et al., 2011; Hamoudi et al., 2015). Despite the promise of many of these interventions, most are resource intensive and few are readily scalable.

In response to these limitations, we introduce in the present study a low-cost, highly scalable text message-based approach targeting parents’ capacity to support children’s self-regulation development. Combining principles from behavioral science with content from the Brain Games (Jones et al., 2014), the intervention includes a set of interactive activities with embedded opportunities for practicing self-regulation skills that can be integrated into normal daily activities. We examine the impacts of this approach on parenting behaviors and children’s self-regulation skills through a rapid cycle randomized control study embedded within a statewide, longitudinal study of children’s early learning and development.

In early 2020, we recruited 238 parents with primarily six- and seven-year-old children in the broader longitudinal study to participate in the text message intervention study. These parents were then randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group. Over six weeks in spring 2020, parents in the treatment group received three messages per week focused on supporting children’s self-regulation skills. Figure 1 illustrates an example of a weekly sequence of messages. Parents in the control group received no additional supports.

Baseline information about participating parents and their children was collected via online surveys conducted during recruitment to the intervention study and in previous years of the broader longitudinal study. Table 1 presents demographic characteristics of parents in the treatment and control groups, indicating equivalence between the two study groups. Follow-up information was collected via an online survey sent to parents at the end of the six-week intervention period in spring and summer 2020. This survey asked parents about their parenting-related stress, quality of their relationship with their child, and self-efficacy beliefs about how well they could support children’s self-regulation development. It additionally asked parents to report on children’s regulation-related behaviors. The final presentation will include full intent-to-treat analyses examining impacts of the text messages on each of these parent- and child-level outcomes. Specifically, we will estimate a series of multivariate regression models predicting each outcome as a function of parents’ random assignment to the text message intervention. In addition to presenting the full results, the final presentation will also highlight the implications of this work for supporting parents in nurturing their children’s self-regulation development, particularly in the context of the current global pandemic.

Authors

• Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City
  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
  Non-Presenting Author