Nobel Winner’s Research Shows Home Nurse Visits for New Moms Boost Children’s Cognitive Skills [The74Million.org]

Samantha Sangenito 7/26/178:42 AM

When medical professionals make home visits to first-time mothers, their children’s cognitive skills and socio-emotional development improve, reports a new paper authored by acclaimed economist James Heckman. The study is the latest evidence from the Nobel Prize winner that such initiatives, while benefiting children of both genders, make a greater impact on boys.

Heckman’s research focuses on one of the first implementations of the Nurse-Family Partnership, a home visitation program that brings registered professional nurses into the homes of women during their first pregnancy. NFP has grown into one of the widest-reaching efforts of its kind — it served nearly 20,000 families in 2015, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center — but it was just getting started in 1990, when 1,138 women enrolled in a trial in Memphis. The expectant mothers were overwhelmingly likely to be low-income (95 percent), unmarried (97 percent), and under the age of 18 (64 percent); all entered the trial no later than 29 weeks into their pregnancies.

[For more of this story, written by Kevin Mahnken, go to http://the74million.org/articl...ens-cognitive-skills]

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Karen ClemmerMember

I love, LOVE this guy! Dr. Heckman is my public policy hero - I never thought I'd say that about an economist!

Dr. Heckman is so well regarded, his research is impeccable, and the data has the potential to powerfully transform public policy with the end result of better lifelong outcomes for children and parents.

AND in addition to cognitive skills, he recognizes "the importance of socioemotional skills, physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self-confidence. They contribute to performance in society at large and even help determine scores on the very tests that are commonly used to measure cognitive achievement."

Helping pregnant women prepare to become parents, allows these women and their children the strongest start possible and it has the greatest ROI.

Waiting until after the baby is born and for problematic situations or behaviors to develop - requires costly remediation.

From his report: "Child poverty is growing in the United States; investing in comprehensive birth-to-five early childhood education is a powerful and cost-effective way to mitigate its negative consequences on child development and adult opportunity." “The rate of return for investment in quality early childhood education is 7-10% per annum through better outcomes in education, health, sociability, economic productivity and reduced crime."