BB2-MC: Long-term benefits of Baby Books on parenting and child outcomes in middle childhood

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY The transition from early to middle childhood offers opportunities for growth in cognitive and social-emotional skills as well as challenges, increased aggression, and risky behaviors. These increases in cognitive and social capabilities are accompanied by new roles and responsibilities that are concurrent with children entering and progressing through formal educational contexts. The degree to which children growing up in diverse homes make a successful transition through middle childhood largely depends on parents' knowledge and parenting practices. That is why the pediatric community utilizes well-child visits as an opportunity to provide education (i.e., anticipatory guidance; AG) about child development and optimal parenting. Provision of AG is the only population-level caregiver education method is the U.S., however, the empirical evidence of the effectiveness of AG is uneven mainly due to the mode of delivery. One intervention that addressed this problem is NIH-funded Baby Books (BB1; 2006-2011), which embedded AG information into baby books. BB1 increased new mothers' knowledge; improved maternal practices (e.g., reading, non-physical discipline); reduced maternal depressive symptoms; and increased children's expressive language at 18 months. However, it did not include fathers and ended at 18 months. Building on BB1, Baby Books 2 (BB2; 2015-2022), an NIH-funded RCT included fathers, focused on coparenting, used bilingual books, and followed the children up to 46 months. Results show that providing BB2 books was more beneficial than commercial books and impacts varied with different parental characteristics (e.g., bilingual). Such results are promising and beg the question: Does this low-cost educational intervention in early childhood have long-term effects into middle childhood? Such processes are under- researched in general, but especially among children from diverse backgrounds. We, thus, know little about normative parenting processes among diverse samples of families or their heterogeneity. Understanding how children, family, and school are implicated in the transition through middle childhood for children who are at higher risk than their peers and underrepresented in this research is essential for identifying ways to bolster supports and minimize risks. Further, long-term studies of the impacts of AG have not been conducted. This study capitalizes on BB2's diverse cohort of families enrolled at age 9 months and follows them through middle childhood. Data will be collected at 10, 11, and 12 years of age from mothers, fathers, and children, twice annually by phone/video-chat each Spring and Fall for 3 years and twice annually by phone/online survey in summer and winter, yielding 9 waves of child, mother, and father data. Teachers will also complete online surveys each spring (3 waves). By following this sample, we can assess the impacts of early intervention on later child and parenting outcomes and identify trajectories of academic, social-emotional, and cognitive skills in a way rarely done for this population. This information will provide valuable insight into the longer benefits of a low-cost and easy to implement parent intervention for children from a diverse sample of families.