I was intrigued by a recent interview with James Heckman, Nobel Laureate economist from the University of Chicago, who has focused his work on how early childhood interventions affect society at large and the life skills and development of young children. He talks about the extraordinary potential for children if they get a great start.
Here are some key quotes from Heckman in his interview with Sharon Lerner for a special report of The American Prospect, The Genius of Intervention:
One way early development has such a strong impact:
“Success breeds success, and if you get more highly able children who are given the opportunity and enthusiasm for learning, you’re going to get enormously high rates of return.”
The power of non-cognitive skills:
“By giving these kids both the cognitive and noncognitive skills, self-control, social and emotional skills, as well as screening for early health problems, you’re providing a powerful base for adult health. There’s a lot of evidence that these noncognitive traits are predictive of a whole range of behaviors. It’s far more important to be conscientious than to be smart if you want a long life. These persistence traits are very, very predictive, and they can be shaped.”
On the earliest years, zero to three:
“But the gap in test scores that’s there at high-school graduation between the children of affluent mothers and the children of poor mothers is more or less there at age three. So we really should ask what’s going on from zero to three.”
