A Coaching Model to Promote Economic Mobility and Child Developmental Outcomes

Children growing up in poverty experience worse developmental outcomes than their more economically advantaged peers. Whether Mobility Mentoring, a program focused on building parent executive function to promote economic mobility, results in improved child developmental outcomes is not known.

This study population was drawn from children enrolled in Washington State's public, income-qualified prekindergarten program and their families. We used a quasi-experimental, preintervention-postintervention design with 2 contemporaneous comparison groups: children in the same settings whose families did not receive the intervention and children in settings in which the intervention was not offered. Primary outcomes are improvement in each of the 6 dimensions of the Teaching Strategies GOLD (TSG) measure (social-emotional, physical, cognitive, language, literacy, and mathematics) and meeting or exceeding "widely held expectations" in all of these 6 dimensions.

Within sites that offered the coaching program, children whose parents received the program (n = 2609) showed gains in 2 of 6 TSG dimensions compared with children (n = 440) whose parents did not, and also met or exceeded widely held expectations. TSG outcomes of all children in sites offering the intervention (n = 3049) did not differ from those of children in sites that did not (n = 7216).

Findings provide sufficient evidence of a positive impact of Mobility Mentoring on child development to merit further study. If substantiated, building parental executive function may improve child outcomes as well as enhance progress toward economic self-sufficiency, and potentially be more engaging than traditional family support programs.