To help kids thrive, coach their parents and teachers

Click here for an interesting article about an intervention that has lasting effects on children living in poverty.  This experiment was done in Jamaica and it involved weely visits over a two-year period that encouraged parents to play actively with their children - reading picture books, playing peekaboo, singing songs, and so on. Compared to the control groups, this group of children went on to have significantly higher IQs, better self-control, and as adults earn 25% more than the control groups. 

The principle of intervening with adults appears to hold true as well when it comes to kindergarten teachers, as a Chicago experiment shows. When kindergarten teachers in high-poverty neighbourhoods get guidance on how to create a calm, consistent classroom, with clear routines and support for the children in managing their emotions, the children had "substantially better attention skills, impulse control and performance on memory tasks than did children in a control group. They also had stronger vocabulary, letter-naming and math skills, despite the fact that the training provided to teachers included no academic content at all."

This approach is particularly promising, given that most other early years interventions, ones that work directly with children, see any gains washed out before long. This is, of course, the case with Ontario's very costly junior kindergarten program. H/T TB

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