When Head Start was established in 1965, it was meant to boost outcomes for children from low-income families by offering high-quality early learning and wraparound services, like dental care and mental health support. Fifty-nine years later, funding has increased for the program—from about $96 million in the 1960s (about $959 million in today’s dollars) to nearly $12 billion in fiscal year 2023. But the way that federal funding is assigned to individual Head Start programs is still based in part on a formula developed in 1974. This has allowed an “outdated, uneven” funding system to persist, which fails to equitably assign money to states that now have the most children in poverty, according to a new report by the Southern Education Foundation.

The lack of equitable funding is leading to wildly different experiences within Head Start, researchers say. “Different children across different states are getting a different opportunity,” said Allison Boyle, a research and policy specialist at the Southern Education Foundation. Due to this inequitable funding, the percentage of children in poverty who are served in Head Start ranges from 7.7 percent in Nevada to 50 percent in Alaska.

Under Head Start’s current funding model, money runs directly from the federal Office of Head Start to individual Head Start program operators, like schools, nonprofits and community organizations that submit grant applications for funding. The funding these programs receive is based on a complex formula determined by Congress that takes into account factors like how much funding a program received the previous year, the number of enrollment spots a Head Start grantee plans to offer and the number of people in a state who receive public assistance.

Put more simply, the formula does not allow Head Start funding to shift in order to match population changes or rates of child poverty in a given community.

This is of particular concern to the Southern Education Foundation, as the southern region has higher rates of young children living in poverty. The report found Head Start programs in the southern states are of lower quality and serve a lower percentage of eligible children than those in non-southern states.

The solution, according to researchers: give Head Start a one-time boost—ideally $1 billion over a period of five years or less—to even out the funding, and then fix the formula so that it provides even per-child funding and takes into account the number of children in poverty and where those children live. That would ensure that Head Start funds are going to the places with the most need and that similar percentages of children would be served across the states.

A general boost in funding might also improve quality in Head Start classrooms, the report found. Head Start programs with the highest quality ratings spent an average of $10,932 per child, researchers found, while the classrooms with the lowest quality ratings spent about$1,300 less per child.

The report’s release comes on the heels of a new federal rule that will provide a raise of about$10,000 annually to most Head Start teachers, adding urgency to the need to reconfigure the funding formula, said the report’s authors. If the formula doesn’t change, the limited money available within programs could be put to teacher salaries instead of taking on more children.

“I actually admire the Head Start office for saying you have to pay more to the teachers and the home visitors and all the personnel,” said Kathy Thornburg, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Institute for Professional Development at the University of Missouri. “But it can’t be at the expense of serving fewer children. And that’s what directors are worried about all over the country.”

This story about Head Start funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Parents know they should talk and read to their young children. Dozens of nonprofit organizations have promoted the research evidence that it will help their children do better in school.

But the focus has been on improving literacy. Are there similar things that parents can do with their children to lay the foundation for success in math? 

That’s important because Americans struggle with math, ranking toward the bottom on international assessments. Weak math skills impede a child’s progress later in life, preventing them from getting through college, a vocational program or even high school. Math skills, or the lack of them, can open or close the doors to lucrative science and technology fields.

A new wave of research over the past decade has looked at how much parents talk about numbers and shapes with their children, and whether these spontaneous and natural conversations help children learn the subject. Encouraging parents to talk about numbers could be a cheap and easy way to improve the nation’s dismal math performance. 

A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Irvine, teamed up to summarize the evidence from 22 studies conducted between 2010 and 2022. Their meta-analysis was published in the July 2024 issue of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 

Here are four takeaways:

There’s a link between parent math talk and higher math skills

After looking at 22 studies, researchers found that the more parents talked about math with their children, the stronger their children’s math skills. In these studies, researchers typically observed parents and children interacting in a university lab, a school, a museum or at home and kept track of how often parents mentioned numbers or shapes. Ordinary sentences that included numbers counted. An example could be: “Hand me three potato chips.” Researchers also gave children a math test and found that children who scored higher tended to have parents who talked about math more during the observation period. 

The link between parents’ math talk and a child’s math skills was strongest between ages three and five. During these preschool years, parents who talked more about numbers and shapes tended to have children with higher math achievement. Parents who didn’t talk as much about numbers and shapes tended to have children with lower math achievement. 

With older children, the amount of time that parents spent talking about math was not as closely related to their math achievement. Researchers speculated that this was because once children start school, their math abilities are influenced more by the instruction they receive from their teachers. 

None of these studies proves that talking to your preschooler about math causes their math skills to improve. Parents who talk more about math may also have higher incomes and more education. Stronger math skills could be the result of all the other things that wealthier and more educated parents are giving their kids –  nutritious meals, a good night’s sleep, visits to museums and vacations –  and not the math talk per se. So far, studies haven’t been able to disentangle math talk from everything else that parents do for their children.

“What the research is showing at this point is that talking more about math tends to be associated with better outcomes for children,” said Alex Silver, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who led the meta-analysis. “It’s an easy way to bring math concepts into your day to day life that doesn’t require buying special equipment, or setting aside time to tutor your child and try to teach them arithmetic.” 

Keep it natural

The strongest link between parent talk about math and a child’s math performance was detected when researchers didn’t tell parents to do a math activity. Parents who naturally brought up numbers or shapes in a normal conversation had children who scored higher on math assessments. When researchers had parents do a math exercise with children, the amount of math-related words that a parent used wasn’t as strongly associated with better math performance for their children. 

Silver, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center, recommends bringing math into something that the child is paying attention to, rather than doing flashcards or workbooks. It could be as simple as asking  “How many?” Here’s an example Silver gave me:  “Oh, look, you have a whole lot of cars. How many cars do you have? Let’s count them. You have one, two, three. There’s three cars there.”

When you’re doing a puzzle together, turn the shape in a different direction and talk about what it looks like. Setting the dinner table, grocery shopping and keeping track of money are opportunities to talk about numbers or shapes.

“The idea is to make it fun and playful,” said Silver. “As you’re cooking, say, ‘We need to add two eggs. Oh wait, we’re doubling the recipe, so we need two more eggs. How many is that all together?’ ”

I asked Silver about the many early childhood math apps and exercises on the market, and whether parents should be spending time doing them with their children. Silver said they can be helpful for parents who don’t know where to start, but she said parents shouldn’t feel guilty if they’re not doing math drills with their kids. “It’s enough to just talk about it naturally, to find ways to bring up numbers and shapes in the context of what you’re already doing.”

Quality may matter more than quantity

In the 22 studies, more math talk was associated with higher math achievement. But researchers are unable to advise parents on exactly how much or how often to talk about math during the day. Silver said 10 utterances a day about math is probably more beneficial than just one mention a day. “Right now the evidence is that more is better, but at some point it’s so much math, you need to talk about something else now,” she said. The point of diminishing returns is unknown.

Ultimately, the quantity of math talk may not be as important as how parents talk about math, Silver said. Reading a math textbook to your child probably wouldn’t be helpful, Silver said. It’s not just about saying a bunch of math words. Still, researchers don’t know if asking questions or just talking about numbers is what makes a difference. It’s also not clear how important it is to tailor the number talk to where a child is in his math development. These are important areas of future research.

Technology may help. The latest studies are using wearable audio recorders, enabling researchers to “listen” to hours of conversations inside homes, and analyzing these conversations with natural language processing algorithms to get a more accurate understanding of parents’ math talk. The 22 studies in this meta-analysis captured as little as three minutes and as much as almost 14 hours of parent-child interactions, and these snippets of life, often recorded in a lab setting, may not reflect how parents and children talk about math in a typical week.

Low-income kids appear to benefit as much from math talk as high-income kids

Perhaps the most inspiring conclusion from this meta-analysis is that the association between a parent’s math talk and a child’s math performance was as strong for a low-income child as it was for a high-income child. 

“That’s a happy thing to see that this transcends other circumstances,” said Silver. “Targeting the amount of math input that a child receives is hopefully going to be easier, and more malleable than changing broader, systemic challenges.”

While there are many questions left to answer, Silver is already putting her research into practice with her own three-year old son. She’s asked counting questions so many times that her little one has begun to tease her. Every time he sees a group of things, he pretends to be Mommy and asks, “How many? Let’s count them!” 

 “It’s very funny,” Silver said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, Mommy really drilled that one into you, huh?’ Buddy knows what you’re up to.”

This story about math with preschoolers was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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By Ariel Gilreath

The research is clear: Childrens’ developing brains are altered by the corrosive effects of poverty. 

But a new study published last month in Nature Communications suggests these effects can be mitigated when families have more resources. In states with more generous safety-net programs, children from low-income families have brains that are closer in size to their wealthier peers. 

Using existing data from the national Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study, researchers at Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis compared more than 10,000 children, ages 9-11, who lived across 17 states. The data showed that children from families with lower income levels were more likely to have a smaller hippocampus — the section of the brain responsible for learning and memory — and were also more likely to have mental health challenges.  

In states where the cost of living is higher, the disparity in brain size was even greater, the study found. But in high cost of living states with more generous welfare policies, the brain volume disparity between poor and affluent children was reduced by 34 percent, the study found. Rates of mental health challenges among children from low-income families also dropped. 

“When youth lived in states that were more expensive to live in, their hippocampal volume was even smaller if they were growing up in poverty, but that effect was counteracted if those states also had a stronger safety net. And then we also saw really similar patterns for depression, anxiety or internalizing problems,” said David Weissman, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Stress and Development Lab and co-author of the study. 

The safety net policies the study focused on were the Earned Income Tax Credit program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and whether the states had expanded access to Medicaid. While most states have expanded Medicaid eligibility to include 138 percent of the federal poverty rate, 10 states restrict eligibility to certain groups and to those with incomes at or below the federal poverty level. 

“We consider the results of this, in combination with other results that have emerged recently in similar studies, to be pretty solid evidence that policy decisions on things like Medicaid expansion and the generosity of cash assistance for families in poverty matter for brain development and mental health for children from those families in a measurable and significant way,” Weissman said. 

This research comes in the wake of a groundbreaking study published last year that showed improved cognitive activity in babies whose families received monthly cash support for a year. For that study, researchers from several universities placed 1,000 low-income mothers from across the country into two groups: One group received $333 monthly payments and the other received $20 each month. In both groups, the money came with no strings attached. After a year, Babies whose mothers received the $333 payments showed more high-frequency brain activity. 

“We’ve got mounting evidence suggesting that children from disadvantaged backgrounds often have differences in a variety of developmental and health outcomes, but here we’re showing that if we change family income, it can lead to changes in those outcomes,” said Kimberly Noble, an author of the study and a professor of neuroscience with Teachers College, Columbia University. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) 

Noble said $333 was chosen for the study because it is similar in size to the amount low-income families might receive in financial assistance from federal programs, and previous research has linked families that received an additional $4,000 per year to higher educational attainment. 

“We really haven’t had strong evidence on what the benefits [of safety net programs] are, in the way that we’ve had all sorts of studies on what the costs are. So, you can really think of our study as the strongest study that will provide evidence on the child benefits,” said Greg Duncan, an economist at University of California, Irvine and a co-author on the study. 

Researchers will continue to study the impact of the $333 payments on the children, who are turning 4 years old this year. But the early results are promising, Noble said. 

“By giving unconditional financial support, we’re seeing that moms are spending the money on their children,” Noble said. “Even after just the first year, we’re already seeing impacts on children’s development. So, it suggests that we can trust families to use social supports in ways that are in their children’s best interests.” 

Both studies are relevant right now as Congress debates adding work requirements to several assistance programs, Weissman said. 

“We do think that policymakers should take this into consideration as they weigh decisions like the ones they’re weighing right now, which involve cutting access to TANF benefits by imposing work requirements, or things like renewing the extended Child Tax credit, which cut child poverty in half but was allowed to expire in 2021,” Weissman said. 

This story from Jackie Mader published last year shows how a guaranteed income program in Texas provided stability for families with young kids.

The use of math games in Head Start classrooms as well as math activities for children to do at home with their families had a significantly impact on children’s math scores at the end of the school year, according to a study published in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly from researchers at the Education Development Center.

“Could access to child care be the key to helping parents clear arrest warrants?” The 19th News 

“More than 10,000 preschool kids missed required education services this year” Gothamist 

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The research on early childhood education can seem as messy as a playground sandbox. Some studies show that preschool produces remarkable academic and social benefits for low-income children, and some don’t. One 2022 study found that children who went to preschool in Tennessee ended up worse off, on average, than those who stayed home. Even among success stories, the benefits of preschool can be fleeting. Children who didn’t go to preschool still learn their letters and catch up. By third grade, the gap between those with and without preschool often disappears.

But a more coherent story is taking shape with the latest 15-year milestone of a large, long-term study of 4,000 children who attended Tulsa, Oklahoma’s preschool program. In 1998, Oklahoma became the first state to offer free public prekindergarten for all four-year-olds. Tulsa’s program was heralded for being well run and well funded, with an expenditure that would be the equivalent of $12,000 per child in today’s dollars. Researchers studied the children who attended in 2005-06 and saw an immediate academic bang, followed by disappointments. Children without preschool managed to catch up to those who went to preschool. But in high school, an advantage for the preschoolers re-emerged. They were taking harder classes and more of them were graduating high school on time. 

In the latest study, published in January 2023, children who went to preschool were far more likely to go to college within a couple years of graduating high school. 

“Don’t give up on the protagonist until the story is told,” said William Gormley, a professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University and co-director of its Center for Research on Children in the United States, which has overseen much of the Tulsa research. “This is a classic story of a big bounce from pre-K in the short run, followed by disappointing fade out in standardized test scores in the median run, followed by all sorts of intriguing, positive effects in the longer run, and culminating in truly stunning positive effects on college enrollment.”

Earlier research has also found long-term benefits from preschool. Studies of the Perry preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan and the Abecedarian preschool in Chapel Hill, North Carolina documented higher levels of educational attainment and higher earnings for children who attended. But those were tiny preschool programs for low-income children dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. A more recent study published in 2018 of low-income preschool centers in Chicago linked attendance in the 1980s to higher rates of earning college degrees 30 years later. 

The advent of universal preschool for all children is more recent. It’s not clear whether these newer and much larger programs will also produce long-term benefits. So far, a 2021 study of Boston’s universal pre-K program found that students who attended the city’s preschools between 1997 and 2003 were more likely to go to college immediately after high school.

In Tulsa, there were roughly 4,000 four-year-old children who were eligible for free preschool in 2005-06. About 40 percent of the families took advantage of it and chose to send their children to a pre-K program at a public elementary school. Another 10 percent opted to send their children to a federally funded Head Start program for low-income children at a community center. The remaining 50 percent decided against attending either. Many children stayed home but some went to private preschools or day care centers.

Researchers then looked up college enrollment records from 2019 to 2021 for these Tulsa children in a database of the National Student Clearinghouse, an education nonprofit that collects data from nearly every U.S. college and university. Overall, 44 percent of the preschool alumni and 37 percent of Head Start alumni enrolled in a college or university, as opposed to 33 percent of students in the comparison group. 

From this raw data, it’s unclear if the differences in college attendance could be attributed to preschool or the fact that families who chose to send their children to preschool placed a higher value on education. Their kids might have gone on to college anyway.

The researchers attempted to overcome this problem by making statistical adjustments to compare children with the same income and family characteristics, such as the mother’s level of education.  

After these apples-to-apples adjustments, the likelihood of enrolling in college was 12 percentage points higher if a child attended a Tulsa public school preschool than if a child didn’t attend. The adjusted results for Head Start did not produce statistically clear answers.

It’s still possible that the families who chose public preschool were more ambitious and motivated than their demographically and economically similar counterparts in the comparison group. That’s why it’s hard to study education programs where participation is voluntary and know for certain that the program is producing results. But this is the best that researchers can do without randomly assigning families to preschool as in a drug trial.

It’s puzzling why preschool playtime and lessons might lead to more college going if the academic benefits of preschool generally fade out in elementary school. Researchers have theorized that the social skills children learn in preschool may help them overcome frustrations and persist in their studies later in life but that is hard to prove. 

In this Tulsa study, Gormley noticed that the city’s magnet schools were part of the answer. Magnet programs are often criticized for being inequitable, disproportionately filled with white and Asian students. But Gormley found that low-income Black, Hispanic and Native American children who attended public preschool were more likely to attend a magnet school, and children who attended magnet schools were more likely to go to college. 

“It is a path,” said Gormley. “There have been many efforts to include students of color in the pre-K program, and also in the magnet schools. Without those heroic efforts by people on the ground in Tulsa, you might not have seen the very positive long-term effects.”

Gormley said he plans to retire soon and shared two lessons he’s learned from his career studying early childhood education. One is that education policymakers “need to spend as much time redesigning their K through 12 school systems as they spend designing their pre-K systems if they want pre-K to have long-term benefits.” The second lesson is to wait patiently for long-term benefits to emerge even when elementary school test scores disappoint. “Ignore the zigs and zags along the way and focus on where the kids wind up,” said Gormley. “The game isn’t over until the bottom of the ninth inning.”

This story about the long-term benefits of preschool was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Advocates sold free preschool as a way to improve the lives of people in poverty and help level the playing field. Oft-cited research from a high quality preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan concluded that 58 low-income kids who attended in the 1960s were more likely to hold a job, earn more money, own a home and less likely to commit a crime than similar kids who didn’t go to preschool. It not only seems fair, but a wise use of public dollars to give poor children the same early childhood education that wealthier children enjoy.

In practice, as communities around the country offer free preschool to more and more tiny Americans, the results are uneven. Tennessee vastly expanded its free preschool programs in 2005 but a study released in January 2022 showed that the programs can be so low quality that some kids are worse off. They might have done better without preschool. In New York City, which expanded free pre-K to all four-year olds in 2014, the quality is better. But researchers from the University of California, Berkeley found that lower income kids are learning in notably lower quality classrooms than higher income kids. 

“We found these particularly low levels of quality in heavily Black communities,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at Berkeley and lead author of the May 2022 study. “We’re not going to close disparities unless we equalize the distribution of quality.” 

Fuller also expressed concern that universal pre-K may have unintentionally lured some of the best early childhood educators away from programs that serve poor children, but he doesn’t yet have enough information about the movements of early childhood teachers in the city to prove that. 

My colleague Jackie Mader wrote extensively about the disappointing Tennessee study and the quality problems in Tennessee preschools. So I wanted to focus on this latest New York City study, “Do preschool entitlements distribute quality fairly? Racial inequity in New York City,” published in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

New York put resources and effort into creating high-quality programs for all. It initially invested $300 million in 2014, spending the same amount on rich and poor alike, $10,000 per child. That spending increased over the years. Currently the city pays preschool providers between $18,000 to $20,000 per student, according to Gregory Brender, director of public policy at the Day Care Council of New York, Inc. That’s comparable to some private programs in the city. The city also hired 120 people to observe classrooms to monitor quality and share the ratings with parents to help them pick the best programs for their children. 

Fuller analyzed these ratings and characterized the overall quality of New York City’s 1,800 preschools as “medium to slightly above medium quality” from 2015 to 2019. They’re not as good as San Francisco’s, but much better than Florida’s or Tennessee’s preschools, based on qualitative measurements that are commonly used by researchers.

Fuller mapped these observer ratings against census tracts in New York City and noticed that the early childhood programs in poorer neighborhoods, such as East Tremont in the Bronx, were lower rated than public programs offered in wealthier neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights. 

Fuller’s team also saw high levels of segregation and many programs that were predominantly filled with Black or Hispanic children. A third of New York City’s preschoolers attend a program that is at least three-quarters populated by one racial or ethnic group. Preschools located in neighborhoods with a high percentage of Black residents were some of the lowest rated, raising concerns that these programs aren’t giving Black children a firm foundation for their future school years.

“It’s a fragile floor especially for kids in predominantly Black communities,” said Fuller. Many of the ratings and observational scores “are falling to very dangerously low levels for those youngsters. And we don’t really know why.”

The quality measures cover a wide range of things, from play space and furniture to the school’s daily routines for going to the toilet and hanging up a coat. Fuller was especially focused on instructional measures, activities and how teachers interact with children. 

“Child-teacher relationships are quite different between medium and high-quality pre-K,” said Fuller. “There’s a big difference between teachers that are really down on the floor, engaging with kids versus teachers that are kind of hovering above and not really interacting with youngsters.” 

Some aspects of preschool quality, such as physical space, aren’t as important for kids’ future development, Fuller said. But “instructional support,” he said, is highly predictive of kids’ future learning trajectories. One of the biggest gaps between rich and poor, Fuller noticed, was in “program structure.” Low-quality programs weren’t organizing a variety of activities for kids, from playing music and reciting lyrics to playing with math concepts and objects around a table.  Kids in low-quality programs also seemed less engaged. Fuller found that programs run by community groups had higher quality overall, regardless of the neighborhood, but city schools provided stronger instructional activities.

Fuller wants to understand if teacher quality is responsible for the quality differences but he doesn’t yet have data on the training and years of experience of teachers at different preschool sites. New York City has spent a lot on professional development training to improve the instruction in low-quality programs, but other than some big improvements in the first couple years after universal pre-K launched in 2014, Fuller didn’t detect meaningful improvements after 2016. Some aspects of quality, such as instructional support, continued to deteriorate throughout the city’s preschools. 

Before New York City introduced universal pre-K, low-income children already had access to free preschool through community organizations financed by federal Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant. But participation was low. After a big marketing campaign to encourage everyone to go to free preschool, the number of poor children in preschool more than tripled from about 12,500 in 2013 to more than 37,000 in 2015. But more than 12,000 poor children remained not enrolled, according to a 2015 estimate by Berkeley researchers. 

The critical question is whether low-income children are better off now, even if their preschool programs are not as good as those of wealthier kids. We’re still waiting for the research to learn whether this pricey preschool experiment is making a difference. 

This story about universal pre-K was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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At the start of the school year last August, I spent several days visiting a first-grade classroom in Austin, Texas, to see how the coronavirus pandemic was impacting teaching and learning after nearly two years of disruption. The academic impact was exactly what experts predicted: students were all over the map in their reading abilities. But I was struck by some less widely reported trends their teacher shared with me, like the pandemic’s impact on non-academic skills, including social-emotional, fine and gross motor skills. Many students were struggling with things like being able to use scissors, work independently and resolve conflicts.

As the pandemic trudges on, here are three strategies experts recommend to address student (and teacher) needs, a prerequisite for closing academic gaps:

1. Acknowledge the trauma students have faced

In the past 22 months, many children have faced hunger, housing insecurity, the death of parents and family members and isolation. Failing to address this could only hamper efforts of teachers to catch students up, said Cailin Currie, a developmental psychologist and lead researcher for a social-emotional (SEL) program created by the Committee for Children, a nonprofit focused on social-emotional learning. This could mean adopting a trauma-informed approach to working with children or offering more counseling services, as some schools are doing. Some states, like Colorado, published a guide for schools encouraging them to offer social emotional support for students and staff.  “The pandemic is adding stressors to kiddos’ lives, and depriving them of positive experiences that support their development,” Currie said. If you understand that kids are coming in having dealt with a lot at home, and provide them a place where they feel safe, confident and a sense of belonging, “that’s really going to help,” she added.

2. Explicitly teach children conflict resolution and other skills, even those they are already expected to know

Students often learn how to behave in classrooms and get along with peers in early childhood classrooms. These social and behavioral skills, like how to follow classroom routines and get along with peers, must be explicitly taught to kids who missed school and even to older children who mastered these skills previously, Currie said. “How can you learn if you don’t know how to pay attention? If you don’t know how to control your impulses, if you don’t know how to kind of persevere through those daily challenges?” she said. “If you want to kind of, jump start learning and focus on learning, ignoring SEL won’t get you there any faster.” It can help to teach kids how to name their feelings, validate and normalize those feelings and focus on what they can control, said Katie Dorn, a licensed school counselor and therapist and the CEO and co-founder of EmpowerU, which offers a social emotional learning program for elementary and secondary students. That practice “really gives [students] that confidence that they can manage the hard things, instead of being afraid,” she said.

3. Support the emotional needs of teachers

Supporting staff is even more important this year, experts say, as teachers are facing an enormous task. That could mean providing mental health resources, using federal funds to hire support staff or including educators in discussions and decisions around the school. For Heather Miller, the first-grade teacher I interviewed, the work has been relentless. “My brain is constantly going over how I’m going to help the kids,” she said late last year. At the same time, Millerhas dealt with the same woes as other working parents with young children. By mid-October 2021, she had used up her paid sick leave taking care of her toddler, who contracted several viruses from his child care center and had to quarantine after a positive Covid-19 case at the center. “It’s just reality right now,” she said. “It’s really hard.”

Experts say this is a common experience of teachers. “I’ve never seen educators more exhausted, overwhelmed, depleted and really unsupported than now,” said Dorn of EmpowerU. “If there’s an expectation that they’re going to teach [social-emotional learning], we need to be attending to their own mental health and supporting that,” she added. Brooke Mabry, strategic content design coordinator for NWEA Professional Learning, said it’s also important to be realistic and thoughtful about remediation plans because teachers will ultimately bear the brunt of the burden to help close academic gaps. “I’m worried that if educators put pressure on themselves to achieve these unrealistic goals this year, or if leaders apply those unrealistic goals to educators, then what’s going to end up happening is we’re just going to cause more trauma and more frustration,” she said.

Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning. Subscribe today!

This story about Covid-19 trauma was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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It’s a challenge to raise a child who is motivated to do things that aren’t always fun. Why is it that some kids have the persistence to read through the boring passages in a novel, do their math homework or practice piano every day?

Even within a family, some siblings seem to have this magical discipline and others don’t. Those blessed with persistence appear to have an advantage in life because they are more likely to do well in school, graduate from college and enjoy rewarding careers. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth calls the combination of persistence and passion “grit.”

A team of eight researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are trying to find the keys to motivation and persistence and they’re beginning in an unlikely place: a toddler’s mouth. 

The researchers persuaded 81 parents of three-year olds to take cellphone videos of their children brushing their teeth every night for 16 days during 2019 and early 2020. Cuteness abounded. Pets and siblings intruded. Kids cried.

But the researchers were actually most interested in what the parents were saying off screen. During the nightly brushing, many parents coached their kids to move the toothbrush in circles or explained how to reach their molars. Some parents got creative. One renamed his child’s teeth after football players. “You need to go get Tom Brady in the back!” Another turned brushing into an adventure movie. “Spit out the bad guys!”

All the parents’ utterances were transcribed and categorized as praise, instruction or something else. When the researchers crunched all the data, they noticed that kids brushed longer on nights when they heard more praise. Conversely, toddlers brushed less on nights when their parents gave them more instructions. For example, one child averaged 17 seconds of brushing when the parent didn’t praise them at all. But on a night when the parent gushed with praise, the child brushed for more than 50 seconds.

“This suggests that praise may help children brush longer,” said Julia Leonard, lead author of the study, which she conducted in her previous position as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She is now an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. “But this isn’t a causal study. It’s just a correlation.”

Like the chicken and the egg riddle, what’s confounding here is what comes first, the brushing or the praise. It could be that children first hear praise and that motivates them to brush even more. Or it could be that kids who brush for a long time prompt lots of genuine praise from their parents. 

“My hypothesis is that it’s both,” said Leonard. “It’s a self-reinforcing process.”

The study, “Daily fluctuations in young children’s persistence,” was published online December 2021 in the journal Child Development. 

For the dentists out there who might be reading, none of the children was brushing for the recommended two minutes a night. One child averaged five seconds a night. The best brusher averaged 74 seconds a night.

Leonard and her colleagues weren’t really interested in tooth brushing, but they picked it as sort of a pilot test of persistence. “We wanted to capture kids as they were building a habit,”  said Leonard. 

In the future, Leonard hopes to test whether parental praise also influences a child’s motivation to learn to read. But with cognitive tasks, researchers will need to measure a child’s IQ, which also influences a desire to learn. 

It’s important to emphasize that this is a small study of 81 kids, most of whom were white and from higher income families. It’s unclear, from this study, if praise is as motivating for other children. “We know praise differs by culture,” Leonard said. “And so how kids respond to that should very much differ by culture.”

Researchers were also unable to distinguish the effect of different types of praise. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has argued that praising effort is better than praising a person. But, in this study, “Good girl!” was lumped together with “Good job!” and, collectively, all the praise was associated with longer brushing times. 

Researchers also checked to see whether sleep, mood or a parent’s stress level influenced how long a child brushed. On average, these other factors didn’t matter. But for certain toddlers, sleep mattered a lot. That’s inspiring Leonard to think about customized interventions for children. 

Leonard was also struck by how time spent brushing varies so much for each child depending upon the night. One child ranged from a low of five seconds to a high of 102 seconds. Another brusher ranged from 10 seconds to 143 seconds. “Kids have good and bad days,” said Leonard. 

That’s something that often isn’t captured in a lab and why the ability to record real life at home is improving psychological research.

This story about tooth brushing  was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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