“This is when children are at the most receptive stage of development and when they are most rapidly developing and everything is changing.”
“In Ireland we traditionally do not invest enough in early childhood, compared to other countries in the EU,” explains Dr Orla Doyle, Senior Researcher at the UCD Geary Institute and lecturer in the UCD School of Public Health and Population Science.
Research has now proved that the first couple of years of a child’s life is the most important period, and is the time when investment is crucial, adds Dr Doyle.
“This is when children are at the most receptive stage of development and when they are most rapidly developing and everything is changing.”
“If you want children that are happier and healthier, are more cognitively aware, have better socio-emotional outcomes, can interact with other children better, then you have to tackle these issues early in life. It’s all about prevention,” she explains.
As part of an overall project, many interventions will happen around Ireland. The task for Dr Doyle and her team in the Geary Institute is to evaluate the first of these interventions.
A multi-disciplinary research team at the Institute, involving economists, developmental psychologists and clinical epidemiologists, embarked on the programme, which is jointly funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and the Office of the Minister for Children.
Preparing for Life (PFL) is a programme by the Northside Partnership, which aims to improve levels of school readiness in three designated disadvantaged areas of North Dublin. The programme begins during pregnancy and lasts until the children start school.
While there is some evidence to suggest that early investment provides the biggest benefits, this is based on outdated research, explains Dr Doyle.
“This was based on studies that were done in the US in the last 40 years”
There is also a need for data specific to the needs and behaviours of Irish children, she adds.
Other programmes in Ireland in the past have attempted to address health and a social inequality, however, the problem was that these were never properly evaluated.
“The only way that you can know that a programme works or not is to carry out a rigorous evaluation and the best way to do that is with an experimental design.”
Preparing for Life is a school-readiness intervention that begins during pregnancy and lasts until the children are five years old, explains Dr Doyle.
The Northside Partnership, a community group in Darndale, helped devise the programme and the team at the Geary Institute will be evaluating its success.
“We were involved in recruiting the participants and we survey them every six months, collecting a whole range of data on the parents and also on the children, once they are born,” says Dr Doyle.
Parents that agree to join the study are randomly assigned to be in one of two different groups. Depending on which group they are in, they will receive a different service, explains Dr Doyle.
“One group will have a family mentor that calls to their house every week for five years and helps with key parenting issues, which obviously differ depending on the age of the child.”
This arm of the study is a very intensive intervention, admits Dr Doyle.
The other group will have an information officer that can help them access services, such as developmental toys and public health information, but a different experience to that of mentoring, she says.
After the first five-year period for which the programme has received funding, she hopes that the children involved will be monitored right through adolescence, early adulthood and beyond.
The study is the first of its kind to be carried out in Ireland, explains Dr Doyle. And because of this it has attracted world-renowned researchers in the area to University College Dublin.
Working with Dr Doyle is Prof James Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at The University of Chicago and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2000, as well as Prof Richard Tremblay, Professor of Psychology, Pediatrics and Psychiatry and the Director of the Research Unit on Children’s Psycho-Social Maladjustment at the University of Montreal, who have both taken up positions at the university.
“What I do is applied microeconomics so I use the rigorous statistical tools and apply them to certain issues. Economics gives you a type of rigor that is sometimes missing,” says Doyle.
She has previously used these techniques to explore issues such as breastfeeding, cognitive ability and childcare from an economist’s point of view.
“With the PFL, what we are trying to figure out is when do you invest - is pregnancy the optimum time to invest and do you have to supplement that investment later on?”
Dr Doyle is hoping that this study will answer some of these questions.
“This is basically a pilot study. It may or may not work but that’s why we are evaluating it in such a manner. If it does work then the idea is that it could be rolled out on a national basis.”
A cost benefit analysis of the study will be carried out, but Dr Doyle explains that the full range of benefits may not be obvious for some time.
“We may not see these results for 10, 20 or even 30 years. We want to see results such as if these kids stay in school longer - we hope to follow these children right through to adulthood.”