In a Head Start classroom somewhere in Pennsylvania roughly two decades ago, a group of researchers made a quiet bet: that teaching a four-year-old's parents how to play and read with their child would matter more than almost anyone expected. The results, now published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, suggest that bet has paid off — in ways still visible when those same children reached seventh grade. The study, led by Karen Bierman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Psychology at Penn State, tracked children who had participated in the Research Based, Developmentally Informed programme, known as REDI, which was designed to strengthen social-emotional learning and early literacy inside Head Start classrooms. Head Start is a federally funded preschool initiative targeting children from low-income families in the United States.

Even after the original REDI programme produced measurable gains in emotional and academic skills, many of those benefits faded by the end of first grade. To extend them, the research team developed a parent component: structured coaching sessions and play-based instructional materials sent directly to families. The children whose parents received that additional support showed fewer conduct problems and stronger working memory — the cognitive capacity to hold and mentally manipulate information — when assessed in seventh grade, more than seven years after the intervention had ended. Working memory is widely regarded as a reliable predictor of long-term academic achievement, making the finding particularly significant.

"Children who are ready for school when they enter kindergarten — those who have skills such as following classroom rules, sitting still and listening to directions — are much more likely to succeed throughout their education," Bierman said.