Children's Education

Children's Education



Many early childhood interventions address low intelligence, poor academic performance, and cognitive deficiencies and are often provided in preschool settings in conjunction with home visits. Programs such as Head Start, the Yale Child Welfare Project, and the Syracuse Family Development Program attempt to intervene in the earliest stages of a child's development to improve intellectual and cognitive skills and success in later educational contexts. A number of these programs have shown considerable success, including better school performance, fewer behavioral problems, and lower levels of crime and antisocial behavior among participants. In particular, when early educational interventions are combined with prenatal and parent training services, significant improvements in child, family, and parent outcomes are reported.

Other individual-focused interventions provide children with problem-solving techniques, teach negotiation and interpersonal skills, and help children to develop self-control. Such programs may involve prosocial behavioral messages and reinforcements, academic enhancement strategies, and social competency training and skills development. Programs such as Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) have demonstrated success at reducing the number of behavioral problems among participants. Research has found, however, that the intensity and duration of the program, as well as the quality of programmatic components and instruction, can significantly affect outcomes.

Family-Focused Interventions

There are also developmental interventions designed to improve the family environment, parenting skills, and parent—child relations. Various prenatal and infant nursing programs target parent knowledge about child care, nutrition, and social bonding techniques, and provide important medical and nutrition services to pregnant women and their infants. The first 3 years of a child's life appear to be particularly important for physical and cognitive development, and these programs target risk and protective factors considered essential to healthy social development. A number of health-related factors have been associated with intelligence, aggression, and hyperactivity, and these have been linked with antisocial and delinquent behavior. Prenatal care and perinatal follow-ups can reduce the frequency and seriousness of health problems among infants and reduce the likelihood of child maltreatment and neglect, both of which are risk factors for later antisocial behavior and delinquency.

Family interventions designed to improve parent management skills teach parenting skills that emphasize identifying problematic behaviors, communicating clear and consistent expectations for conduct, and providing appropriate positive and negative consequences for prosocial and antisocial behavior, respectively. Increasing the level of communication between parent and child and the use of token economies have been found to be effective at improving family relations and reducing antisocial behaviors. Given that parental rejection and excessively harsh and inconsistent punishments are strong risk factors for delinquency, a primary target of these interventions is to improve parent—child relations.

Prenatal care visits, parent education combined with preschool programs, and school-based child and parent training programs have demonstrated significant improvements in a variety of risk and protective factors and reducing antisocial behavior. It is clear that dysfunctional family environments are not conducive to providing proper supervision, positive role modeling, or behavioral reinforcements, or developing children's cognitive and behavioral skills. However, the context and mechanisms required to successfully alter those factors is not yet completely understood.

Multimodal Interventions

Problems such as poor school performance and attachment, emotional and mental health problems, and problems in the family environment are likely overlapping and interactive rather than ...