Preschool depression and poverty

The New York Times Magazine has a story about depression among preschoolers this week, which asks whether depression can be diagnosable among young children, and, if so, where it might come from.

The article suggests that maternal depression can play a role, but is not definitive. The author writes: “Despite the assumption that these kids must have experienced severe psychosocial deprivation, abuse or neglect, Luby says: ‘I’ve seen many depressed kids with nurturing, caring parents. We know that psychosocial stress is an important ingredient, but it’s not the only issue. And it’s not a necessary condition either.’”

I was reminded of some of the research in Ellen Galinsky’s new book, which we wrote about here a few weeks ago, that looked at how maternal non-responsiveness can adversely affect infants. In particular this can be an issue among families living in poverty, where family stress can exacerbate the problem.

The Times story doesn’t really get into what role poverty might play in exacerbating depression among young children; she does write about the connection between anxiety and depression. This seems in part because the research is new, but common sense would say that children growing up in poverty would be more susceptible to early onset of depression and anxiety disorders, or at least would have fewer opportunities to combat it in the ways described in the story. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the future research tells us.

The Lives of Children in a Downturn: What Stories Can Be Told?

The downturn economy is taking a toll on grown-ups, with a confluence of stressful events: rising unemployment, a housing crisis, income cuts and an overall sense of fear that is permeating everyday life. But how are children faring? EarlyStories was reminded why journalists should be paying closer attention, after reading Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times this week.
Herbert didn’t speak to any children for his column, nor did he focus on any particular family. He wrote rather broadly and stated some obvious facts that really could be the starting point for taking a closer look at the lives of children in just about any U.S. community: “Official statistics are not yet readily available, but there is little doubt that poverty and family homelessness are rising, that the quality of public education in many communities is deteriorating and that legions of children are losing access to health care as their parents join the vastly expanding ranks of the unemployed,” Herbert wrote.
He went on to describe the efforts of a Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician who also is a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and president of the Children’s Health Fund in New York. Redlener is headed to Detroit this week with a medically equipped mobile operated by the Children’s Health Fund that will provide free health and dental care to children whose parents cannot afford to pay for care. Just imagine the stories he will hear along the way.
It’s important for journalists to delve into the health and well being of children in these tough times, along with covering local school news and pre-k battles. What kinds of stories are teachers hearing? Have requests for free lunch doubled and even tripled? What are schools doing in particularly hard hit communities to help the many newly laid off families along with those that have struggled in poverty for years? And how are children faring? Are they displaying signs of stress, and are schools dealing with more discipline issues, more children coming to school hungry, angry and stressed? Are they looking for these signs and providing any kind of help or assistance?
Journalists who spend time speaking with and listening to children and their families right now will find some terribly sad — but important– stories, just waiting to be told. EarlyStories would like to hear them.

In Tough Times For Children, Show As Well as Tell

It’s refreshing to see newspapers stay on top of the many ways the economic downturn hurts small children and their families. In ailing Michigan, the Heritage newspapers reported some startling data from the annual Kids Count survey in the Michigan Data Book, finding that poverty affects one out of every four children in a state hit hard by auto industry layoffs.
The report, produced by the Michigan League for Human Services, found “stark disparities for minorities in Michigan threaten the well being of large numbers of young children and their families.”
EarlyStories would like to see journalists go beyond reporting the depressing but not surprising numbers and talk to some of the families about how they are coping. What government efforts, if any, are there? What programs are being cut? Who is hurt? What are nonprofits, also struggling, doing to help?
Are any leaders emerging during these terrible times? Journalists might want to look for inspiration at the story Paul Tough, a New York Times wrote this week in Mother Jones Magazine about the efforts of Geoffrey Canada of Harlem’s Children Zone to combat poverty and educate children in a poor New York City neighborhood.
The piece describes the efforts of Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone to educate poor parents and children in ways large and small, including a simple trip the Harlem Children Zone aimed at exposing young children to everyday language.
“The point wasn’t to learn about nutrition, but rather about language—how to fill an everyday shopping trip with the kind of nonstop chatter that has become second nature to most upper-middle-class parents, full of questions about numbers and colors and letters and names,” Tough wrote, describing what he saw on the trip with parents to a local supermarket. “That chatter, social scientists have shown, has a huge effect on vocabulary and reading ability.”
Tough’s magazine piece looks at an effort to solve some of the most intractable problems of poverty, and grew out of his new book on the Children’s Zone.
The supermarket anecdote is great example of the kind of show-don’t-tell journalism needed more than ever right now, alongside the data and statistics quantifying the ways children are hurting in tough economic times.

Knowing Your Letters and Colors When you Start Kindergarten

An important new federal research report out today looked at 500 research studies to conclude, just as most parents would, that knowing the alphabet, the sounds of letters, the colors and other basic nouns (car, tree, house, man) and being able to write one’s name when a child goes to kindergarten predicts how well children will read later on. The six-year study also found that kids who can write individual letters when asked to do so, who can remember what they’ve been told, and who can break words down into their sound components do better, too.
The panel’s report is careful to say that its conclusions are limited by the limitations of the studies it reviewed and more research is needed on critical issues. Even so, the report raises some interesting issues that go against conventional wisdom.
–The highest impact teaching methods involved a teacher teaching a child a literacy-related skill either one-on-one or in a small group. Letting children do art or play in the kitchen area or other activities are what get more attention from preschool teachers and experts. “Many of the high-impact instructional strategies involved activities and procedures different from those typically seen in early childhood classrooms,” the executive summary of the report said.
–Experts often talk about the importance of having classrooms that are “language rich” or literacy rich.” The panel found few studies that looked at how much that mattered. Not that it doesn’t. But the panel could not find much of a research base for it.
–The report’s authors also say that the learning patterns of poor kids and better-off kids are the same. Again, that finding goes against other research that has found that poor kids need focused, more teacher-directed instruction.
There are certainly other views on these issues. Deborah Stipek at Stanford, Susan B. Neuman at the University of Michigan, and the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia are sources I’d consult in writing about this important report.
As always, of course, get out into preschools and Head Start centers to talk to them about this.

“Turn off the Play Station and go to school!”

Linda Jacobson has a story in this week’s Education Week highlighting new research on a problem that rarely gets mentioned: chronic absenteeism in early elementary school. The study by the National Center for Children in Poverty here at Columbia University shows a correlation between missing school starting in kindergarten and poor academic achievement throughout elementary school and into middle school. The study, “Present, Engaged, and Accounted For,” is not yet up at the NCCP Web site. But here’s a page on that site that collects the center’s earlier work on absenteeism.
This study tees up a number of good September stories for journalists. I recall seeing a newspaper story or a research study a few years ago that reported on a phenomenon I’d never thought about before: elementary school children who drift into school days or even weeks late. (I tried to locate it on the Web but couldn’t. If I recall right, it was datelined CHICAGO) Parents stressed by poverty, drugs, alcohol, their own youth, language differences, or frequently changing residences may not see getting kids off to a good start on the first day of school as such a high priority. This would be a perfect time to get out to some elementary schools in urban or poor rural communities and ask to see how the enrollment numbers changed during the first month. Then ask to see the attendance numbers. Follow up some interviews of teachers, the principal, parents and ask the district superintendent what is being done to reduce the problem. The new study provides the perfect hook.

Feeling the Pain: Budget Cuts Mean Tough Child Care Choices

(Budget cuts can lead families toward crowded, ad-hoc quality child care options)
A story in today’s Newsday did a great job of illustrating how painful New York State’s budget cuts are for the working poor, who depend in many cases on subsidized day care so they can hold onto their jobs.
Reporter Michael Amon found a particularly telling anecdote: a single mother who earns just $300 a week as an animal caretaker at a shelter and will no longer get assistance with the $150 in child care costs for her 6-year-old daughter. The key quote?
“It seems like it would be easier for me to just quit my job and go on welfare, because I can’t afford the day care,” a mother in the story tells Amon.
The situation Amon described is one increasing numbers of families across the U.S. are finding themselves in, as fuel and food costs rise and state budgets are slashed. While the program in Suffolk County is the only one to freeze the program as a result of $51 million in state child care fund reductions, many others across the state are being forced to make reductions.
Reporters covering early childhood issues and state budgets alike should find people to illustrate the impact of reductions and cuts on both the state and federal levels.
Such stories – especially if they come with an explanation of why cuts were made, and what the consequences are for families who seek alternative, and often substandard child care — are important to help the public understand what happens to our youngest children during tough times.
The Patriot Ledger of Quincy earlier this year did a great job in a three-part series of explaining how and why parents make such decisions and balance finances around child care in Massachusetts — and how and why they, and the programs they choose, often fall short.

Pre-K part of “Broader, Bolder” Approach to Education

Look for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post this morning laying out what the backers say is a “broader, bolder” approach to raising achievement levels and closing achievement gaps. The liberal Economic Policy Institute is the organizer of the effort, which involved a truly all-star line up of researchers, educators, economists and others. The main idea, as laid out by EPI scholar Richard Rothstein, is that schools alone can’t make up for all the factors that tend to undermine poor children’s performance in school. (Poor health, poorly educated parents, language differences, maternal depression, transiency.) Those factors overwhelm the effects of teaching, now matter how good it is.
That’s an argument Rothstein has made eloquently and authoritatively for a long time. But it’s controversial, however, because some education reformers argue that Rothstein is letting schools off the hook, blaming poverty for children’s performance rather than weak teaching. The measures proposed by other authors hardly go beyond the usual in-school reform efforts. They call for better trained teachers, more supportive emotional climate, smaller class sizes, more data and accountability, better services for immigrants.
One policy prescription offered, however, does go beyond elementary and secondary schooling: high quality child care and pre-kindergarten classes. My TC colleague Sharon Lynn Kagan and co-author Jane Waldvogel summarize the evidence persuasively, saying that poor children will make greater gains from pre-kindergarten than will middle class children.
By the way, EPI will be hosting a conference call about the reports at 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time today.

To Understand Obstacles to Pre-Kindergarten Expansion, Read Responses Between the Lines

The Jackson Clarion Ledger published an editorial last week urging better funding for pre-kindergarten, noting that Mississippi is one of only 11 states without a state funded program.
The responses posted at the end of the editorial made it clear how much opposition remains in the state, ranked 48th in the nation in per pupil spending and 48th in student achievement.
“Government baby-sitting,’’ one individual wrote. “Early childhood indoctrination for the socialist USA. Get them on the big yellow buses to send them to the fascist-run propaganda factories ASAP. Sorry, send your children. Leave mine alone.’’

Such remarks should be worrisome to pre-kindergarten advocates in the state, where Republican Governor Haley Barbour has resisted funding expansions like nearby Tennessee.
Advocates who support the Quality Act of 2008 are now hopeful that lawmakers in the large rural state will include $5 million in the budget to improve existing centers. Money would be earmked for three programs approved in 2006 but never funded: an early childhood grant program, a child-care resource and referral effort, and a “quality step system,” which would pay bonuses to providers who meet higher-than-minimum standards, according to an article in this week’s Education Week.
One person who responded to the editorial wanted to know what other states that fund pre-kindergarten are actually getting for their tax dollars. Another complained that the state can’t “get it right,’’ with its K-12 students.
The opinions expressed freely are a window into an issue that merits thorough coverage and exploration.

Poverty and Pre-K in the South

Two reports within days about the South that, in a way, show two sides of the same coin. A report from the Southern Regional Education Board notes that the 15-state region leads the nation in offering publicly funded preschool and then quantifies that claim. Mississippi’s Jackson Sun editorialized about the report. The Southern Education Fund this week issued a report saying that a majority of students in the region are poor. Seems like one is related to the other.

Yesterday Was Attack Edwards Day

I didn’t know it and you may not have either but, in the blogosphere, yesterday was “attack John Edwards Day.” At least, that’s what I’m surmising from the deepening pond of bile and name-calling in right-wing blogs fed by an article in the Concord Monitor.
Here’s the lede of the article:

John Edwards says if he’s elected president, he’ll institute a New Deal-like suite of programs to fight poverty and stem growing wealth disparity. To do it, he said, he’ll ask many Americans to make sacrifices, like paying higher taxes.
Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, says the federal government should underwrite universal pre-kindergarten, create matching savings accounts for low-income people, mandate a minimum wage of $9.50 and provide a million new Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor. He also pledged to start a government-funded public higher education program called “College for Everyone.

In reaction, cries of socialism and all manner of other sins suddenly appeared here, here, here, here, and here. The entries were rife with name-calling of Edwards, the most progressive of the three leading Democratic contenders for the presidency who is, according to media pundits and polls, running third behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Apparently they all got the memo that said Edwards’ plans to address poverty would drive away investment capital, undermine the family, coddle those who are lazy or stupid or just plain unlucky, and result in brainwashing of the children. Note to the memo-writers, two red states–Oklahoma and Georgia–have universal pre-school programs that others are trying to emulate and Republican legislatures and governors support expanded investments in pre-k.