TMW Center Newsletter June 2022
Engaging the Pediatric Sector in Akron, OH
The TMW Center is thrilled to be piloting an innovative pediatric-sector based approach to engaging families of young children in Akron, Ohio. This strategy integrates TMW Center interventions into existing healthcare systems, such as pediatric clinics and birthing hospitals, in order to make them readily accessible to families. We are working closely with Summit Education Initiative (SEI) and other local partners including Akron Children’s Hospital to implement a multi-layered intervention strategy that engages parents and healthcare providers in the important work of supporting healthy brain development.
This collaboration will allow us to design, test, and refine an approach to the pediatrics sector that truly promotes healthy brain development in the first year of life—an approach that can be replicated in other communities across the country. We look forward to sharing what we learn in the months and years to come.
What Parents Know Matters: Parental Knowledge at Birth Predicts Caregiving Behaviors at 9 Months.
ICYMI, this TMW Center study published in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2020 found that parents who had more knowledge of infant development when their child was 1 week old were more likely to foster social-emotional and cognitive growth when the child was 9 months old. Read the article.
What we’re reading
A new NBER working paper estimates the effects of proposed childcare subsidies and finds that a policy that limits family payments for ECE to no more than 7% of income (among those up to 250% of national median income) would increase mothers’ employment by six percentage points, with substantially larger increases among lower-income families. The authors note that “The policy would also induce a shift from informal care and parent-only care to center- and home-based providers, which are higher-quality on average, with larger shifts for lower-income families. Despite the increased use of formal care, family expenditures on ECE services would decrease throughout most of the income distribution. Finally, teacher wages and market prices would increase to attract workers with higher levels of education.”
Read the paper:
An Equilibrium Model of the Impact of Increased Public Investment in Early Childhood Education. Jonathan Borowsky, Jessica H. Brown, Elizabeth E. Davis, Chloe Gibbs, Chris M. Herbst, Aaron Sojourner, Erdal Tekin, and Matthew J. Wiswall. NBER Working Paper No. 30140. June 2022.
More
Read the rest of the June 2022 newsletter here.