Can Early Intervention Improve Maternal Well-Being? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

ObjectiveThis study estimates the effect of a targeted early childhood intervention program on global and experienced measures of maternal well-being utilizing a randomized controlled trial design. The primary aim of the intervention is to improve children’s school readiness skills by working directly with parents to improve their knowledge of child development and parenting behavior. One potential externality of the program is well-being benefits for parents given its direct focus on improving parental coping, self-efficacy, and problem solving skills, as well as generating an indirect effect on parental well-being by targeting child developmental problems.MethodsParticipants from a socio-economically disadvantaged community are randomly assigned during pregnancy to an intensive 5-year home visiting parenting program or a control group. We estimate and compare treatment effects on multiple measures of global and experienced well-being using permutation testing to account for small sample size and a stepdown procedure to account for multiple testing.ResultsThe intervention has no impact on global well-being as measured by life satisfaction and parenting stress or experienced negative affect using episodic reports derived from the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). Treatment effects are observed on measures of experienced positive affect derived from the DRM and a measure of mood yesterday.ConclusionThe limited treatment effects suggest that early intervention programs may produce some improvements in experienced positive well-being, but no effects on negative aspects of well-being. Different findings across measures may result as experienced measures of well-being avoid the cognitive biases that impinge upon global assessments.

A Multicomponent Early Intervention Program and Trajectories of Behavior, Cognition, and Health

“…We found that a 5-year multicomponent early intervention program, which provided education and social support to families living in economic deprivation, had moderate to large positive effects on children's behavioral and cognitive development and use of health services between the ages of 6 months and 4 years. These results were in line with previous findings of the PFL trial 24,27,41 and, with our results, we extended this body of work by testing the impact on children's…”

Present Bias and Everyday Self‐Control Failures: A Day Reconstruction Study

“…A recent trend is to take lab experiments into the field in order to increase external validity and measure decision making in real contexts (Charness, Gneezy, & Kuhn, ; Gneezy & Imas, ; Harrison & List, ). Another trend that also elicits information from people's real lives and has gained popularity in happiness research is to measure emotions in everyday life by using experience sampling and day reconstruction methods (Bryson & MacKerron, ; Daly, Baumeister, Delaney, & MacLachlan, ; Doyle, Delaney, O'Farrelly, Fitzpatrick, & Daly, ; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, ; Knabe, Rätzel, Schöb, & Weimann, ). In this paper, we use day reconstruction procedures to measure not only happiness but also decision making in everyday life.…”

The Effects of a Parenting Program on Maternal Well-Being: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…The focus on a relatively advantaged group allows for analyzing the effectiveness of such programs on a group that is easy to address. Moreover, if it is a political goal to use a universal approach, which addresses more and less disadvantaged families to avoid stigmatization (see also Doyle et al 2017), this analysis gives further evidence of whether such an approach is effective. We focus on the causal identification of such a program for subjective satisfaction as a measure for well-being.…”

“…However, he does not analyze well-being measures explicitly. Doyle et al (2017) evaluate the "Preparing for Life" early childhood intervention program in Ireland. The treatment group was also invited to participate in an additional parenting course, namely the Triple P program, when their children were between two and three years old.…”