Fostering language skills for children in less-educated households: Evaluating a parental reading initiative.

Summary Interventions that encourage parents to read with their pre-school aged children can be a cost-effective way to boost early childhood development and reduce educational inequalities. But socioeconomic and cultural barriers can hinder the efficacy of such interventions, and recent impact evaluations question their value. This column looks at a large-scale experiment that provided parents of pre-schoolers with books as well as materials on the benefits of shared reading. It finds that the accessibility of the information provided played a key role in the intervention’s success.