Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions

"Parents play an integral role as active agents on behalf of their children. Simplified, program participation and engagement are often assumed to be the result of an active evaluation by parents about costs versus benefits. This evaluation is also assumed to be largely context-agnostic and to reflect relatively stable preferences and full understanding of available information. However, recent developments from behavioral economics suggest otherwise..."

Although most early childhood development interventions recognise and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parents' engagement in those interventions (broadly construed as parent-targeted initiatives designed to support and improve early childhood learning and development), few take seriously the decision making roles of parents, according to the authors of this paper. Using insights from the behavioural sciences, they revisit assumptions about the presumed behaviour of parents in a developmental context, especially in the context of poverty. They then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to enhance the intended impacts of early development, education, and care initiatives by improving parent engagement - providing a few examples with illustrative parent coaching, early childhood literacy, and home visiting programme models.

"The interdisciplinary framework of behavioral economics - combining the theories of conventional economics with social psychology and cognitive decisionmaking - recognizes the ways in which context, and the cognitive processing related to attention, self-control, social norms, and identity, affect people's real-world, in-the-moment decision making." The idea is that, by recognising the constraints and opportunities of parents' current context, the behavioural economic perspective may uncover new design innovations and thereby facilitate access and engagement among individuals who might benefit from early childhood programmes yet do not engage because of small situational features.

What nearly all of these early childhood models share is a focus on two primary avenues of improving children's developmental trajectories: the quality of their early environments and the quality of parenting practices. The broader environmental or family circumstances of income-poor children impose a variety of challenges that can interfere with their ability and capacity to take advantage of existing programmes. Implementation science has led to a number of creative solutions, such as the adaptation of home visiting strategies to include visits to child care providers, as it can be difficult to arrange to meet parents at home due to erratic work schedules. However, most of these initiatives presume that once structural or personal barriers have been addressed, eligible parents are able and willing to respond to the availability of programmes and will do so as programmes require and suggest. This assumption has not been borne out.

The authors suggest that there is a dearth of attention to promising and low-cost design strategies to improve the participation and engagement of otherwise able and capable parents. "Even those parents who have good intentions and who have easy and free interventions available to them may not be utilizing available resources. Children cannot benefit from programs if parents do not enroll them or if parents are not receptive to new skills. Parents cannot be expected to practice new skills without some tools or circumstances to help remind and support them to do so. The circumstances of poverty, and the financial juggling that results, are draining on parents' attention and self-control, and this can impact responsive parenting and sensitivity to children's cues even among parents with good intentions. The interdisciplinary framework emerging from behavioral economics broadens our understanding of parent behaviors that can subsequently inform design strategies to facilitate parent engagement."

The paper outlines a behavioural economics perspective, contrasting it with rational-actor models in which people are assumed to affirmatively choose what they want and actively reject what they do not want. On the latter models, individuals are believed to be able to objectively evaluate their options, largely independent from the context of that evaluation. Behavioural economics integrates economic and psychological frameworks, incorporating concepts about individual decision making behaviour from psychology, while maintaining a focus on context and institutions. "This framework implies that constraints on our attention, self-control, how we see ourselves in certain situations, and elements of our social environment (what our peers do) interfere with reasonable evaluation of cost-benefit trade-offs even in the presence of full information and that these constraints sway many individuals from participating when they might in fact benefit the most." Behavioural economics also helps us understand that poverty is not simply a matter of scarce financial resources but that the context of poverty can drain and strain cognitive resources.

The authors draw on Bronfenbrenner's concept of "proximal processes" to build a theoretical bridge between behavioural economic principles and insights and the challenges of understanding and improving early childhood interventions. They explain that developmental scientists have examined a number of features of parent/child relationships over the first three years of life (infancy and toddlerhood) that meet Bronfenbrenner's criteria for proximal processes. Two such features - joint parent/child attention and parent contingent responsiveness to child cues - can link central insights from behavioural economics to the emerging science of early childhood development. The bridging of the developmental and behavioural economic theories also points to the influence of surrounding circumstances on parent decision-making behaviours. This implies that certain features of programmes can be designed or redesigned to foster certain behaviours; for instance, changes in environment can affect how parents see themselves and might influence their subsequent interactions with their children. Examples of the types of low-cost design features that emerge out of this framework are provided in an appendix, along with evidence garnered about their effectiveness.

Studies emerging from the beELL initiative at New York University in the United States (US) provide concrete examples of the ways in which the theoretical insights from behavioural economics are applied and tested among existing early childhood interventions. For instance, one study integrates a city-wide early language media and text-based programme campaign with home visiting services to minimise the demands on parents' limited attention and to provide positive affirmations of motherhood. Launched in 2015, the early language texting programme Talk to Your Baby (TTYB) had few users; there was interest in increasing uptake among new mothers served by New York City's Newborn Home Visiting Program (NHVP). Mothers in the experimental group: were automatically enrolled in TTYB (opting out shifts the burden of making a decision); receive text reminders that reinforce early language habits and provide positive affirmation of maternal identity (to redirect attention to reinforce parents' daily habits); are shown a video with positive parent-infant language interaction; receive a positive affirmation during the second home visit (a teachable moment from a trusted NHVP caseworker cements new ideas); and are sent a gift packet at the 4- to 6-month infant birthday with tailored geographic information about New York City literacy resources, an activated library card, and links to the public library system (small rewards and opening channels at a sensitive child development period). These behavioural economic enhancements are proposed to facilitate engagement and subsequent positive parenting, which in turn translate to eye contact and reciprocity during infancy, both of which support children's later print awareness, word recognition, vocabulary, and verbal fluency. Data collection is under way to measure some of these aspects of engagement and assess whether the behavioural economic strategies have any effect.

As is outlined here, tools emerging from behavioural insights can be used to create new and complementary interventions and to enhance the impact of existing curricula or large-scale, system-wide interventions, including home visiting programmes. For example, the insights have supported creation of lighter-touch parent-focused early childhood interventions, such as PACT, a tablet-based reading intervention that incorporates goal-setting and feedback made available to children in Head Start centres in the US, with promising impacts on parent reading time with their children. The effect of behavioural economic enhancements can be tested through a set of embedded mini-experiments randomly assigning cohorts, potentially at one or more of the identified critical decisionmaking points to enroll, participate, and follow through. Experimentation can also test whether a particular sequence of behavioural economic interventions is more effective (e.g., affirming particular identities - "I'm sensitive and responsive to the needs of others" - may be more influential during early interactions with a programme, whereas small financial incentives may be more influential for ongoing participation in a programme).