Building Their Futures: How Early Head Start Programs are Enhancing the Lives of Infants and Toddlers in Low-Income Families. Volume I: Technical Report

Finds that, a year or more after enrolling in the program, 2-year-olds perform significantly better on a range of measures of cognitive, language, and social-emotional development, when compared with a randomly assigned control group. EHS families are also more likely to attend school or job training and have less parenting stress and family conflict. The program produced significant impacts for important groups, including welfare families, working families, and families headed by teenage mothers. For these families, EHS programs appear to have provided a foundation of support for parenting and child development while families coped with new work requirements and time limits on TANF cash assistance, balanced the demands of work and family, or attended to their own developmental needs.