When medical professionals make home visits to first-time mothers, their children’s cognitive skills and socio-emotional development improve, reports a new paper authored by acclaimed economist James Heckman. The study is the latest evidence from the Nobel Prize winner that such initiatives, while benefiting children of both genders, make a greater impact on boys.
Heckman’s research focuses on one of the first implementations of the Nurse-Family Partnership, a home visitation program that brings registered professional nurses into the homes of women during their first pregnancy. NFP has grown into one of the widest-reaching efforts of its kind — it served nearly 20,000 families in 2015, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center — but it was just getting started in 1990, when 1,138 women enrolled in a trial in Memphis. The expectant mothers were overwhelmingly likely to be low-income (95 percent), unmarried (97 percent), and under the age of 18 (64 percent); all entered the trial no later than 29 weeks into their pregnancies.
[For more of this story, written by Kevin Mahnken, go to http://the74million.org/articl...ens-cognitive-skills]
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