The Benefits of Home Visiting to Children, Families, and Taxpayers

Four papers provide new evidence of the benefits of home visiting for children and families…and taxpayers’ bottom line. One paper by Kristen Kirkland and her colleagues at the State University of New York-Albany used seven-year follow-up data from a randomized controlled trial to find that home visiting has significant positive impacts on the school readiness of children entering first grade. Download the executive summary and full report.

Similarly, Carla Peterson and her colleagues at Iowa State University analyzed follow-up data from 1,053 families who received home visits as part of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, a large randomized controlled evaluation. They found that greater involvement in home visiting when the child was an infant and toddler predicted better child developmental status in pre-kindergarten, better child outcomes when the child was in fifth grade, and more stimulating and nurturing home environments in both pre-k and fifth grade. Download the executive summary and full report.

But not all of the findings were positive. In a randomized controlled evaluation of the Healthy Families Massachusetts program, M. Ann Easterbrooks and her colleagues at Tufts University found that some (but not all) subsamples of the families in the state program showed higher rates of child maltreatment and neglect than families not enrolled in the program. The authors speculate this may be the result of surveillance bias, that is, because families were participating in the program, incidences of maltreatment were more likely to be reported than they would be for non-participating comparable families. The researchers also found evidence that maternal depression may block program effectiveness. Download the executive summary and full report.

Similarly, in a small follow-up study of the My Baby and Me home visiting program, University of Notre Dame professor John Borkowski and Penn State Harrisburg’s Jaelyn Farris found no differences in IQ, language development, or early literacy skills at five years of age between children randomly assigned to the program or not. Children in both groups scored close to the general population average on these measures, but the authors also acknowledge the sample may have been too small (only 92 children) to detect any differences. Download the executive summary and full report.

Report Assets