May 23, 2019 Update:
In 2016-2017, the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) began a modest expansion of Economic Mobility Pathways’ (EMPath) Mobility Mentoring®-informed approach to engage with families by using coaching methods to support families to acquire resources, skills, and sustained changes. In 2017-2018, ECEAP underwent a more substantial expansion of Mobility Mentoring®.
This incremental rollout offered researchers at the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) the opportunity to conduct a comparative evaluation of the program. One of the more exciting findings included in this evaluation was the apparent positive association between families’ participation in Mobility Mentoring® and improved developmental outcomes for their children over the course of the ECEAP school year.
Following the release of these results in ECEAP’s annual Mobility Mentoring Outcomes Report, researchers at DCYF and EMPath began to explore the possibility of publishing the work in a peer-reviewed journal. Unfortunately, the ensuing process revealed some methodological errors that brought the original findings into question. In some ways, uncovering errors such as these through a critical examination of methods is an important component of research, which is often iterative in nature. That said, researchers connected to this work are thinking harder about how to embrace a thorough review process while taking care not to send conflicting messages to the field. Fortunately, DCYF and EMPath researchers still intend to submit a revised analysis to a peer-reviewed journal which, in time, will provide a great deal of clarity regarding the possible association between families’ participation in Mobility Mentoring® and improved developmental outcomes for children.
Stay tuned—we will provide updates as they are available on the next steps and results of this important research.
On April 1, 2019, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) announced the recent release of research findings which assert that coaching parents for economic mobility positively influences childhood development.
In 2015, DCYF’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) launched a pilot program in partnership with Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), introducing low-income families to economic mobility coaching. Participating families showed significant improvements in metrics such as decreasing conflict and debt, or increasing parenting skills and healthy lifestyles.
Earlier in March, ECEAP released its Mobility Mentoring Outcomes® Report which highlights the key findings from the pilot program and the next steps for implementing this family support approach.
EMPath President and CEO Elisabeth Babcock wrote the following remarks about the partnership with DCYF:
As the CEO of EMPath, I want to say what an honor and a pleasure it has been to partner with DCYF, their innovative ECEAP community providers, and the strong and caring families they serve. We have all worked hard together to leverage EMPath’s coaching platform, Mobility Mentoring®, to strengthen opportunities for low-income parents and their children. This latest report shows, in the most gratifying ways, that our collaboration is paying off and that strengthening the tools and approaches front-line workers use to coach low-income families makes a powerful difference not only in the real-world outcomes of parents, but also in their children.
DCYF families who received Mobility Mentoring® showed significant improvements in 17 areas of adult development including earnings, savings, and education gains, as well as decreases in debts and parental stress. When compared with children whose families did not participate in Mobility Mentoring®, children whose parents participated attained significantly higher scores on their evaluations of literacy, math, cognition, and social-emotional development—all key predictors of future success in school. The data also suggest a reason why coaching parents may have improved their children’s outcomes: children whose families received Mobility Mentoring® remained enrolled in ECEAP programs more than 90 days longer than children in non-participating families.
Although excited by these wonderful outcomes, we at EMPath were not especially surprised: the data on family impacts was consistent with our experience over many years. But seeing it at scale and using different measures than we have used gives us even greater confidence in the results.
We know that changing longstanding and well-intentioned approaches is hard. DCYF has gone about this thoughtfully, starting with a small pilot, expanding it to more sites, and comparing outcomes between participating and non-participating families. We have been buoyed throughout this process by hearing from DCYF and community staff, as well as participant families, that they preferred this new way of working, they felt it was leading to stronger outcomes, and the change was worthwhile. Mobility Mentoring® was explicitly designed as an intervention that honors and respects the individual differences of every participant and in doing so, supports them in setting their own priorities and goals for moving ahead.
It’s wonderful to see the outcomes in this report: they validate that investing in the right kind of change can produce better real-world outcomes, as well as greater equity through families’ increased feelings of being respected for their beliefs, culture, language, and child-rearing practices.
Ultimately, the science on which Mobility Mentoring® is based shows that to make lasting change (whether it be in public systems, organizations, or individuals) we must first honestly assess where we stand; then clearly understand, and strongly desire the goal we wish to attain; and finally see and believe in the path forward.
This report shows that DCYF and its ECEAP partners and families have learned how to harness this science and Mobility Mentoring® as a means to propel themselves to new levels of achievement. We have learned a great deal together along the way and look forward to our continued partnership in the years to come.
Together, we are making stronger paths forward for low-income families and their children.
Elisabeth Babcock, MCRP, PhD
President and CEO
