Connecticut Early Years:  A Whole Child-Whole Family Approach to Child Care

Connecticut Early Years is an innovative intervention to test how early childhood programs can enhance children and families’ wellness and children’s school readiness, starting in the infant/toddler period. Funded with a $10 million grant from the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, Drs. Cohen and Lombardi will implement and evaluate Connecticut Early Years, an intervention that uses currently funded systems (state and federal) to improve the collaboration among systems, enhancing the combined impact of these programs for children and parents. Based on the literature on “whole child: whole family” services, the intervention will bring comprehensive two-generation services to community-based child care settings. CT Early Years will build upon the knowledge base and infrastructure of the federal Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program at the state level, specifically home visitor knowledge of social services and communities, to augment state funded child care services. In this way, the aspects of services specific to home visiting programs will be brought to working families with children in child care. CT Early Years funding will be used to provide the additional resource of a family consultant who has experience in home visiting. Family consultants will work with families to help gain access to comprehensive services, provide parenting support, and bring families together for peer support.

Research Design: Thirty early childhood programs who are receiving new funding from OEC to expand their number of infant toddler slots in two communities, New Haven and Hartford, will participate in the research. Fifteen will be intervention sites and receive the additional support of a family consultant, while fifteen will be control sites. Six hundred children and families will be enrolled in the study, 300 in the intervention group and 300 in the control group. Research questions include:

• Implementation: Is Early Years being administered as designed, and is it being uniformly administered across families and centers? What factors are associated with differences in the uptake of the intervention? Factors hypothesized to be associated with differences in uptake are: characteristics of communities, family consultants, teachers, and families. 
• Proximal Outcomes: Does Early Years change services (early intervention, job training, housing, food supports, etc.) that families receive?
• Family Impacts: Does Early Years have an impact on parenting, family wellbeing and economic circumstances when children are 2 1/2 years old?  
• Child Impacts: Does Early Years have an impact on children at age 2 1/2?

Funder: Connecticut Office of Early Childhood

Timeline: Spring 2024 to Winter 2026

Research team: The research team is led by Drs. Rachel Chazan Cohen and Caitlin Lombardi, in collaboration with leaders at the CT OEC, community partners in Hartford and New Haven, and two advisory committees, one of national leaders in early childhood and the second of child care providers and parents. ARC graduate students Delaina Carlson and Amanda Sather are supporting the project as graduate research assistants.