Early Years Evidence in Action - parents spend less time playing and reading with children, marshmallows and Zombie research, and more! Issue #5

Hello and welcome to my monthly newsletter - your 7 essential reads about research and practice in the early years. Views personal.

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1?? Parents are spending less time reading and playing with their young children

The latest report from the National Literacy Trust is worrying. Their findings:

In 2024, fewer parents reported engaging daily in all home learning activities compared with 2019. For example:

• 4 in 5 (78.1%) of parents said they had chatted to their child at least once a day in the last week, a decrease of 12.2 percentage points (pp) compared with 2019, when 9 in 10 (90.3%) said they had done this
• 1 in 2 (56.0%) parents told us that they had played together with their child at least once a day in the last week. This compares with 3 in 4 (76.2%) who reported playing with their child daily in 2019, a decrease of 20.2pp
• 1 in 2 (50.5%) parents said they had read with their child daily in 2024, a decrease of 15.1pp compared with 2019, when 2 in 3 (66.1%) said they had done this.
• Around 1 in 2 parents reported singing with their child (47.5%) daily or more often, while 1 in 3 engaged their children with digital learning activities (34.5%) and played outdoors (33.3%) daily.

?? What can we do about this problem?

Whilst it’s likely that many factors are playing a part in this, there are several well-evidenced approaches to encouraging book-sharing at home. To take just two examples, Booktrust and PEEPLE both run well-evidenced programmes to help parents and carers enjoy sharing books with babies and young children.

2?? How did the Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP) improve maternity services?

LEAP used a substantial chunk of its Big Lottery Funding on a project to introduce ‘caseload midwifery’ to Lambeth. This provides women with continuity of care from a primary midwife and a small team of midwives throughout their pregnancy, childbirth, and the first weeks after birth.

The impact of this is striking: a reduction in pre-term births and births by caesarean section. A paper in the British Medical Journal reports that implementing caseload midwifery led to ‘a significant reduction in preterm birth rate in women allocated to caseload midwifery, when compared with those who received traditional midwifery care’.

The researchers also comment that ‘when applied to targeted groups (women in higher IMD quintile and women of diverse ethnicity) the impact of [caseload midwifery] is greater.’

It's a striking example of ‘proportionate universalism’ – improving the health of everyone, but with a greater focus on those who’ve been historically under-served or need the most help.

The project comes to life in a film where mothers describe their experience of caseload midwifery. It highlights the importance of hearing first-hand from women who use midwifery services in England.

Take 6 minutes: this is a powerful and moving watch.

3?? High-quality interactions in the Early Years

A short guide from the Education Endowment Foundation covers the important topics of back-and-forth conversation, shared book reading and sustained shared thinking. It sets out the strategies educators might use, and explains how to put them into action.

A new approach, called STAIRS, sets out the key steps to follow when scaffolding children’s early learning.

4??Are there different types of disadvantage which affect children?

A new report from NESTA argues that we need to think about disadvantage in two dimensions: economic and home.

It builds on the important arguments made in the Marmot review that ‘action to reduce health inequalities must start before birth and be followed through the life of the child. Only then can the close links between early disadvantage and poor outcomes throughout life be broken’

NESTA's report, The impact of non-economic and economic disadvantage in pre-school children in England, argues that we need to consider ‘home disadvantage’ as well as economic disadvantage. Examples of ‘home disadvantage’ include chaotic home environments, parents living with mental distress, or over-authoritarian or over-permissive parenting. Amongst a wide range of important findings, the report illustrates the negative association of both types of disadvantage on a child’s development:

?? What can we do about this problem?

Child poverty needs to be tackled as a matter of urgency, and access to high-quality early education should be part of that. The NESTA report indicates that ‘disadvantaged children have more to gain from receiving more, and higher quality, early childhood education and care (ECEC) than their peers from less disadvantaged backgrounds’.

5?? Can we measure executive function capacity and plot its impact on later success in school and life?

In an important thread on BlueSky and X (formerly Twitter) Yuko Munakata challenges much of thinking in this area.

Professor Munakata argues that researchers have paid too little attention to context and to cultural differences: ‘for me, a moment of insight came from seeing that the same child can find delaying gratification easy or hard, depending on the rewards offered and how they relate to cultural practices.’

Referencing the famous Marshmallow test of a child’s capacity to defer gratification, she adds that ‘I think the idea that traditional tests have been "debunked" isn't quite right. Yes, we've found that whether kids wait to eat a marshmallow depends on many things, like whether they trust an adult to follow through on promises and how much their culture practices waiting.’

So should we abandon this area of research into the impact of executive function skills entirely, as new findings call many conclusions into question? She argues not.

‘To me, this means we need to EXPAND our answer to why kids' behaviors predict life outcomes, not ABANDON the question (and paradigms) altogether.’

?? What can we do about this problem?

The Global Executive Function Initiative is working to 'foster greater research capacity to assess, study, and promote executive functions (EF) skills and behaviors in children ages 3-12 around the globe, and especially in low-resource settings'.

?? Find out more

The ‘Marshmallow Test’ is a telling example of the replication crisis in psychology. Many classic studies – including this one – have been re-evaluated. Researchers haven’t found the same eye-catching results, under conditions of more rigorous methodology.

The original ‘Marshmallow Test’ showed that children in the early years who could delay gratification had better academic achievement and socioemotional outcomes later in life. However, replication studies using larger and more representative samples with better control for other factors found that the results are not as strong. This article from UCLA Anderson Review explains some of the background.

But old findings like those from the original Marshmallow Test never die, popping up regularly in conference keynotes and articles.

They're the zombies of the research world.

6?? Translating evidence into policy

A new report from PEDAL at Cambridge University explores the question of tackling the gap between academia and policy through an innovative project called Mobilise.

The programme aimed to teach policymakers about early childhood development and to support them to use that knowledge to achieve impactful, evidence-based change in their work.

In doing this, Mobilise embodied a paradigm shift: from focussing on sharing the findings of the latest academic studies, to convening and curating information from different sources to support policymakers in their work.

The report gives many fascinating insights into the many highs, and a few lows, of the programme with the following summary of findings:

7?? The 2024 ParentKind survey

ParentKind surveyed a representative sample of just over 5000 parents across the UK. The findings are about parents of children of all ages: there is no specific focus on the early years. It’s another stark reminder of how families, and young children in particular, are affected by the cost-of-living crisis and the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can read the full report here.

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