Effects of Adding Parenting Components in Early Childhood Education: A Meta-Analysis

Background/Purpose: Early childhood education (ECE) is emphasized in practice and policy due to its effectiveness in improving children’s educational outcomes that lead to success in school. As ECE enrollments expand, an important question is how to design ECE programs and how social workers in these settings can maximize program effectiveness. Often an important program feature and one in which social workers are frequent engaged is building parental involvement. ECE commonly include programmatic components designed for parents that may have a variety of goals and modes of delivery. Yet, little is known about how effective it is to add parenting components in existing ECE program. Using meta-analytic techniques quantify program impacts across studies and systematically identify common patterns of program effectiveness. This meta-analysis study examined: 1) whether adding parenting components yield larger effects on children’s cognitive and pre-academic skills than not including these programs, and 2) whether these effects differ across program goals and modes of delivery. To our knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis of parenting “add-on” programs.

Methods: The data was drawn from a large meta-analytic database of ECE studies from 1960 to 2007 developed by the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs. In this study, additional inclusion criterion were imposed: 1) children’s cognitive and pre-academic skills had to be measured, and 2) a treatment with an explicit parenting program (e.g. parenting education, meetings, home visits) was compared to ECE without such a component. Out of the 124 studies reviewed (of any type of add-on program), 13 studies included parenting add-on, representing 231 effect sizes, nested in 29 contrasts (group comparisons within study). Cognitive outcomes included IQ, vocabulary, task persistence, syllabic segmentation, and other skills. Pre-academic skills included reading, math, letter recognition, and other achievement tests. Using standard meta-analytic techniques, we compared effect sizes (Hedges’ g) between treatment and alternative treatment groups on children’s outcomes. Multi-level regression models were used to handle the nested data (effect sizes within contrasts). Inverse variance weights were used to give more weights to precise estimates.

Preliminary Results: We found that adding parenting components was associated with larger program impacts on children’s overall performance (ES=0.21, p=0.02), although separate models were not statistically significant primarily due to smaller sample sizes. Programs including the goal of improved parenting exhibited positive effects on children’s cognitive skills compared with those who did not explicitly have improved parenting as a goal (ES=0.58, p<0.01). Future analyses will next consider the mode of delivery (class, home visits) as moderator of effect sizes.

Conclusions/Implications: The findings of our meta-analysis study suggest that adding parenting components in ECE programs has a significant positive impact on the development of children’s cognitive and pre-academic skills above and beyond the effectiveness of ECE programs. Our results also suggest that making parenting an explicit target of intervention is an effective approach. This has important implications for ECE programs and for social workers practicing in ECE settings.