By Lucy C. Sorensen, PhD
Imagine you are standing in line and suddenly feel someone push you from behind. How would you react? You might turn around, focus on the person, assess their likely intent, and then choose from a set of potential responses based on your prior experiences in similar situations.
Every action we take is actually composed of a series of smaller micro-decisions, each requiring specific social, emotional, or cognitive skills in order to enact successfully. Recognizing the importance of this concept, a group of researchers in the early 1990s designed a childhood intervention that trained specific skills and behaviors valuable toward preventing the long-term development of aggression—and the Fast Track project was born.
In a recent study published by the journal Child Development with coauthors Kenneth Dodge and the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, I assessed mechanisms by which Fast Track, a randomized intervention for 891 high-risk children in several different communities, reduced delinquency, arrests, and health and mental health service utilization in adolescence through young adulthood. Using a treatment effects decomposition, we found that improvements in social skills and self-control capacities during childhood accounted for a significant portion of the Fast Track intervention’s long-term impact on delinquency and crime outcomes, in contrast with improvements in academic skills which played no role in preventing later delinquency and crime.
The children participating in this study came from primarily disadvantaged families: 60 percent lived in single-parent households and 30 percent had parents with less than a high school education. During elementary school, the intervention featured a teacher-led curriculum aimed at helping children develop emotional concepts, social understanding, and self-control; parent training groups designed to promote positive family-school relationships and teach parents behavior-management skills; and home visits to help parents solve problems and manage situations at home. The program also featured social skill training groups and reading tutoring for children, and it paired children with peers to enhance their friendships in the classroom. When the participants were adolescents, the intervention included curriculum-based parent and youth group meetings as well as individualized services for youth and their families.
Fast Track researchers collected data on children’s academic, self-control, and social skills during elementary school (ages 6 to 11), and then tracked the sample over time to observe their arrests, delinquency, and use of mental health services during adolescence and young adulthood (ages 12 to 20). Our empirical approach adapted a novel econometric method from a study on the mechanisms underlying long-term impacts of high-quality preschool conducted by Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman and colleagues. This approach allowed us to both determine the effect of participating in Fast Track on outcomes in young adulthood and, importantly, also to pinpoint how significant the types of skills learned during the intervention were for driving these long-term benefits.
Our study found that certain non-academic capabilities (such as social skills and self-control) that children learned from in elementary school accounted for about a third of the program’s ultimate effect in reducing juvenile arrests and more than half of the effect in reducing acts of delinquency. Training in self-control was relatively more effective in the long term for very high-risk children, whereas learning social skills was more effective for mid-risk children. (Risk levels were defined by parents’ and teachers’ reports of children’s behavior problems in kindergarten, prior to the intervention.) These findings are consistent with hypotheses that pathways to criminal behavior or mental health issues differ for various groups of children. With the United States facing both the world’s highest incarceration rate and highest per-capita healthcare expenditures, it is worth considering evidence that early skills such as self-control, emotion awareness, problem solving, and prosocial behavior, constitute important developmental mechanisms for prevention of such costly adverse outcomes.
The type of childhood skills we investigated—academic, social, and self-control capabilities—corresponded neatly to the objectives of different intervention components. This allowed us to make inferences on which components were likely valuable for generating certain desirable long-term impacts. For example, our finding that learned self-regulation skills explain a large portion of Fast Track’s reductions in juvenile arrests suggests that the parent behavior-management training and social-emotional curriculum components held particular long-term value for preventing this outcome. The friendship groups and peer pairing programs may likewise have enhanced children’s positive social peer relationships, thus preventing interpersonal crime and delinquency in late adolescence.
For comprehensive (and expensive) early interventions, such as Fast Track, where positive results are sometimes only observed years or decades later, methods such as those used in our study that can identify developmental mechanisms from the experiment are a necessary step toward opening the “black box” of effective childhood programs and permitting cost-effective implementation at scale.
Acknowledgment
Funding for this study came from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.
About the Author
Lucy C. Sorensen is an assistant professor of public administration and policy in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at University at Albany, SUNY. She received her Ph.D. from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in 2016, with a concentration in economics. Dr. Sorensen’s research explores interactions between public policy and human development, with a focus on how educational interventions can reduce long-term socioeconomic inequality.
