Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

We present results of a randomized control trial of a two-generation English as a Second Language (ESL) program in which all families participated in Head Start while treatment parents also enrolled in a high dosage, family-focused ESL curriculum with supportive services. Examining 197 parent-child dyads among Spanish- (89%) and Zomi-speaking (11%) immigrant families, we found improvements in participant parents’ English reading skills and engagement with their child’s teacher after one year. Parents with low levels of English proficiency (57%) at program start reported more positive parenting skills and lower levels of psychological distress whereas parents with more advanced English proficiency (43%) reported more parenting stress and higher levels of psychological distress. We did not find main effects on children’s language and cognitive skills. We conclude by discussing policy implications of a two …

Increasingly, parents of young children need postsecondary credentials to compete in the labor market and meet basic family needs. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of CareerAdvance, a two-generation education intervention that offers postsecondary career training in healthcare for parents paired with Head Start for children. Overall, we find that CareerAdvance promotes low-income parents’ educational advancement during the first three years after program entry, with weaker evidence of benefits to career progress and psychological wellbeing, and no evidence of economic gains. The two-generation program promotes greater educational and career advancement among parents without postsecondary credentials at baseline, than for parents who began the program with postsecondary credentials. In contrast, exploratory analyses suggest that parents entering the program with …

High-quality early childhood education (ECE) is known to be beneficial for young children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. 1 Mothers, who are most often the primary caregivers for their young children, can also benefit from ECE, which may allow them to enter the labor force or work more hours. When ECE is only available at a high cost, mothers may be forced to move from full-time to part-time work or even leave the labor force to care for their children. 2 The decision to cut back on work can be particularly costly for mothers who are in the critical early years of building their careers. In this regard, affordable ECE is an important policy tool that promotes both children’s development and mothers’ employment.In 2017, New York City launched the 3-K for All (3-K) program, an expansion of its universal prekindergarten program, with the goal of providing free full-day care for all three-year-old children in the city. The program rollout plan aimed to make ECE availability more equitable and began in two school districts with the highest need. 3 3-K was then offered in more districts over the following four years, again prioritizing neighborhoods with higher poverty rates. Previous work using the Early Childhood Poverty Tracker (ECPT) found that parents showed high interest in the program, 4 with the number planning to apply far exceeding the available 3-K seats. In the 2021-2022 school year, 3-K served around 35,000 3-year-old children–approximately 40% of eligible children in the city–across all 32 districts. 5

Unstable and unpredictable environments are linked to risk for psychopathology, but the underlying neural mechanisms that explain how instability relate to subsequent mental health concerns remain unclear. In particular, few studies have focused on the association between instability and white matter structures despite white matter playing a crucial role for neural development. In a longitudinal sample recruited from a population-based study (N = 237), household instability (residential moves, changes in household composition, caregiver transitions in the first 5 years) was examined in association with adolescent structural network organization (network integration, segregation, and robustness of white matter connectomes; Mage = 15.87) and young adulthood anxiety and depression (six years later). Results indicate that greater instability related to greater global network efficiency, and this association remained …

Recent research demonstrates that the effects of adverse early childhood environments persist over a lifetime (Knudsen et al. 2006). Substantial gaps between the environments of advantaged children and those of disadvantaged children raise serious concerns about the life prospects of disadvantaged children and the state of social mobility in America. 1 The proliferation of single-parent households—especially households where children have never had a father present—is a major contributor to

BackgroundThe geographic location of birth has implications for low-income children's upward economic mobility, as Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez (2014) found in an examination of millions of income tax records from each county in the US. Additional work indicates that low income children in higher economic mobility counties have higher language scores and fewer behavioral problems (Donnelly et al., 2017). However, the processes by which the geography of opportunity influences parenting are less well-understood.ObjectiveThis study examines whether living in higher intergenerational mobility counties is associated with less harsh parenting, material hardship, household violence and substance use, and low child supervision – parenting behaviors that increase the risk for child maltreatment – for low-income families.DataData come from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth …

Gun violence is a major public health problem and costs the United States $280 billion annually . Although adolescents are disproportionately impacted (e.g. premature death), we know little about how close adolescents live to deadly gun violence incidents and whether such proximity impacts their socioemotional development (, ). Moreover, gun violence is likely to shape youth developmental outcomes through biological processes—including functional connectivity within regions of the brain that support emotion processing, salience detection, and physiological stress responses—though little work has examined this hypothesis. Lastly, it is unclear if strong neighborhood social ties can buffer youth from the neurobehavioral effects of gun violence. Within a nationwide birth cohort of 3,444 youth (56% Black, 24% Hispanic) born in large US cities, every additional deadly gun violence incident that occurred within …

Accumulating literature has linked poverty to brain structure and function, particularly in affective neural regions; however, few studies have examined associations with structural connections or the importance of developmental timing of exposure. Moreover, prior neuroimaging studies have not used a proximal measure of poverty (i.e., material hardship, which assesses food, housing, and medical insecurity) to capture the lived experience of growing up in harsh economic conditions. The present investigation addressed these gaps collectively by examining the associations between material hardship (ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15 years) and white matter connectivity of frontolimbic structures (age 15 years) in a low-income sample. We applied probabilistic tractography to diffusion imaging data collected from 194 adolescents. Results showed that material hardship related to amygdala–prefrontal, but not hippocampus …