More and more economists turn their attention to the little ones. They study the influence of the socioeconomic level of their families and their environment on their development. They design, implement and evaluate specific interventions for early childhood. They promote strategies that improve their care, both at home and in children's centers. Why is this concern about how children play and learn? Why do you insist on making known the benefits of warm, sensitive and stimulating child care?
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The answer must be sought in the goal of breaking the cycle of poverty - the ultimate purpose of Economics as a science - and in the certainty that one of the best ways to achieve it is through the accumulation of human capital, that is that is, of the acquisition and sum of personal and professional skills. For this, economists consider it essential to develop and accumulate skills from the first years of life.
To understand the process of human capital accumulation and thus find the master key that alleviates poverty and reduces inequalities, economists have been studying the processes that take place in the different stages of life and have designed strategies and incentives that help improve them. Traditionally, they have approached the life trajectory of people in the opposite direction, that is, from the end to the beginning. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, seeking to improve productivity and income-generating capacity among adult workers, they focused on labor markets. Subsequently, the focus was directed towards young people and how to facilitate their access to university (via educational loans, for example) or reduce their risk behaviors, such as drug use or criminal activities. Over time, reducing high school dropouts or improving educational quality in primary and secondary schools began to receive greater attention in the faculties of Economics.
Today, a further step has been taken and the debate focuses on ensuring quality preschool education and improving the quality of parent-caregiver interactions with children from the time they are infants. It is about ensuring that they have the necessary skills to start their school life in the best possible conditions. Acquiring the appropriate skills in early childhood is considered, today, the cornerstone to reduce the gaps in opportunities, break with the intergenerational transmission of poverty and aspire to a better future. At this point on the road, economists meet developmental psychologists and neurologists.
The ultimate purpose of Economics as a science is to break the cycle of poverty
What distinguishes economists is that, in addition to data, they use mathematics and modeling to formalize decision-making processes and understand what factors play an important role in promoting children's skills and simulate the extent to which different incentives could modify those factors. For example, a study by economists published earlier this year used a pilot intervention, in the form of a social clinical trial, in low-income communities in Colombia. For 18 months, community facilitators conducted a series of weekly home visits to children between the ages of 12 and 24 months to promote quality play activities and interactions between caregivers and children. The wealth of data collected on child development, parenting skills, and the time and other material resources (mainly toys and books) that they devoted to their children, combined with the use of technical tools such as the production function - popularized lately by the Nobel Prize winner James Heckman but in force since the 1960s with the pioneering work of Gary Becker — allowed the experiment to draw important conclusions.
The authors found that the improvements in cognition and language of the children who received the visits were due to greater investments by parents in both materials and play time, and not so much in the time allocated to the child during the meetings with the facilitators . This implies that simply talking to parents about the importance of their children's development or letting the facilitator spend more time with the child would probably not produce results. It also shows that parents do not tend to reduce playtime with their children when they participate in these types of interventions. The analysis also reveals two aspects that help to explain the persistence of inequalities: fathers tend to spend more time on the children they perceive to be more capable, and mothers with greater abilities tend to invest more in their children. All of this has great implications for the design of future interventions and policies for promoting child development.
Economics is a social science that studies the optimal allocation of scarce resources. It implies understanding how “economic agents” (companies, producers, consumers, citizens) can make the best decisions subject to existing restrictions (monetary or time, for example). Using the appropriate tools, calibrated with real data, allows us to simulate the impact of policies that promote improvements in human capital, a capital that must begin to be consolidated from childhood so that it contributes to closing gaps and inequalities.
Marta Rubio Codina is a specialist in the Social Protection and Health division of the Inter-American Development Bank.
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