Can Child Health Care Reduce Poverty Related School Failure?

Young children whose parents are active participants in their development by reading, talking, teaching and playing at every opportunity help their children become better prepared for school according to Alan Mendelsohn, M.D., Associate Professor of Pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City and his colleagues in developmental-behavioral pediatrics, developmental psychology, public policy and education. They are taking advantage of numerous health check-ups of children from birth to 5 years of age – the most critical time for brain development – to study whether working with parents can help children be better prepared for school.

For many children, health care represents the only contact with child professionals before starting school, and therefore provides an opportunity to implement low cost, preventive interventions to improve outcomes in low socioeconomic status (SES) children at high risk for disparities in development and school readiness. In partnership with Children of Bellevue, Inc., an interdisciplinary team of child health and development professionals (pediatrics, developmental psychology, and education) formed a laboratory at New York University and Bellevue Hospital Center (BHC) with the goal of leveraging health care in order to enhance parent-child interactions, a crucial and modifiable poverty-related factor.

The objective of the study was to determine whether primary care parenting interventions can have an impact on parent child interaction at age 14 months. In one of the programs, called the Video Interaction Project (VIP), parents are videotaped while they wait to see the doctor; working together with an early childhood education specialist, parents learn to engage in positive interactions by watching themselves on tape. In a prior study, VIP has already been shown to improve IQ and reading achievement in first grade. In a second program, called Building Blocks (BB), parenting materials are mailed monthly to families in order to encourage positive interactions with their children. In both programs, the key component is the link to child health care, which provides an opportunity for universal intervention at low cost; both build on successful child health care literacy programs such as Reach Out and Read. Together with critical educational initiatives such as pre-kindergarten, working with parents during child health care visits can help the most vulnerable children succeed in school and in life.

Dr. Mendelsohn will present the results of their study “A Randomized Clinical Trial of the Video Interaction Project (VIP) and Building Blocks (BB): 14 Month Impacts of Primary Care Based Parenting Interventions,”, on May 4th at the Academic Pediatric Association Presidential Plenary of the Pediatric Academic Society Meeting in Baltimore.

In addition to Dr. Mendelsohn, additional researchers include Samantha B Berkule, PhD1, Harris S Huberman, MD, MPH2, Lesley M Morrow, PhD3, Catherine S Tamis-LeMonda, PhD4 and Benard P Dreyer, MD1. 1Pediatrics, NYU School of Medicine - Bellevue, New York, NY, United States; 2Pediatrics, SUNY Downstate, Brooklyn, NY; 3Education, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and 4Applied Psychology, NYU Steinhardt, New York, NY.