The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Non-marital childbearing is associated with many adverse outcomes for both the mother and the child. Most of these births are unintended. If these unintended births could be reduced it might improve children's prospects by enabling their mothers to get more education, earn more, and wait to have children within marriage. In this brief, the authors…

Children born into low-income families face barriers to success in each stage of life from birth to age 40. Using data on a representative group of American children and a life cycle model to track their progress from the earliest years through school and beyond, the authors show that well-evaluated targeted interventions can close over 70 percent…

There is ample evidence that children born to poorer families do not succeed at the same rate as children born to the middle class. On average, low-income children lag behind on almost every cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and health measure. These gaps start early--some of the newest research suggests that cognitive gaps are detectable in…