Many Nebraska parents are providing stimulating and supportive home environments for Nebraska’s youngest children, which researchers found to be the most powerful element in ensuring healthy child development.
Those successes are coming no matter where families live, their finances or parents’ backgrounds.
But at the same time, early disparities in child development are evident in Nebraska based on family and community characteristics. About half of Nebraska families experience economic strain, which is associated with lower child development scores. Some 41% of families experience food insecurity.
Those glimpses into the development of infants and children in the state are drawn from a new, first-of-its-kind report that will be released Tuesday by Kidsights Data, located in the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health.
People are also reading…
The data behind it was produced using a new survey instrument, called the Kidsights Measurement Tool, which is designed to measure the development of children from birth to age 5 in the United States at the population level. Previously, no measurement tool had offered that view.
The goal of the initiative, said Abbie Raikes, lead author and an associate professor within the college, was to create a tool that tracks development of children from birth to age 5 so it can be used to inform decision-making at the state and community levels.
“If we want to have insight into our own communities, our own states, and we want to have insight into child development starting early on, then we need to have a solution that gets us to that place,” she said. “And that’s the reason why we invested into developing Kidsights.”
The tool was developed and tested for the first time in Nebraska in partnership with the World Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Services and Resources Administration. The effort was funded by the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, Imaginable Futures, Pritzker Children’s Initiative, Overdeck Family Foundation and Valhalla Foundation.
Raikes said researchers know that developmental disparities between groups of children based on family income, geography and other factors arise early in life and tend to persist and grow larger over time. But until now, the U.S. has had little if any data on preschool-level child development, much less from birth to age 5.
Dr. Joan Lombardi, director of the Early Opportunities Initiative, said what happens in children’s early years lays the foundation for long-term health, education and well-being.
The work by Raikes and other members of her team at UNMC, Lombardi said in a statement, are an “exciting step forward in our understanding of the needs of young children, how to support families and how policymakers can respond accordingly.”
The effort originated with the World Health Organization. Raikes said she became involved while working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She then moved to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, where she served as an early childhood program specialist. One of the organization’s new goals called for ensuring that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development in preparation for primary school; her job was to figure out how to measure progress toward the goal.
After a few years, she and her husband, Adam Gouttierre, now an executive with Hudl, returned to Nebraska to raise their own children. Gouttierre is the son of Marylu and Tom Gouttierre, the former head of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghan Studies.
Raikes’ family has long been involved in issues surrounding education. Her mother is Helen Raikes, a veteran education researcher and retired professor of education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her father is the late Ron Raikes, a former Nebraska state senator who served as chairman of the body’s education committee. Abbie Raikes earned a doctorate in developmental psychology from UNL and trained in public health at Columbia University.
“My family has a very deep interest in making Nebraska a great place for all families and in particular focusing on ensuring there are equitable conditions for everybody in the state of Nebraska,” she said.
The Nebraska results were drawn from a sample of more than 2,500 Nebraska families with young children.
The Kidsights team developed a methodology to generalize results from the sample to the underlying population, Raikes said. That means that Kidsights produces estimates that can be extrapolated to the population of young children as a whole. As Kidsights is used in other places, the team will collect data based on census estimates to generalize to each specific area.
The team’s next goal will be to find a new state or community to partner with to produce a new set of results for that area, she said.
Over time, she said, the Kidsights team will create approaches that allow results to be compared between geographies — comparing between states or cities, so that results can be used to better understand how state and local programs and policies affect child development.
Raikes said the Nebraska result that was most surprising to her was the proportion of parents — nearly 60% — who reported at least one adverse childhood experience, such as abuse, neglect or the absence of a parent. Such experiences can have implications for parents’ health and were associated with lower scores on child development. Far fewer of children in the sample, however, had adverse experiences.
She said she also was surprised how many young families have economic insecurity, defined as at least some time when they found it difficult to cover basics like food or housing on their family’s income since their child was born.
While there were no overall differences in child development scores between rural and urban families, rural families reported more supportive communities and greater levels of economic insecurity than families in urban areas, according to the report.