Orla Doyle - University College Dublin

There is growing evidence that circumstances early in life are critical for developing the skills required to lead a successful life. For the last 16 years, I have conducted a randomised control trial of Preparing for Life, a pregnancy to age five home visiting and parenting program in Ireland. The goal was to distil knowledge from the field regarding the sufficient intensity, length, and focus of early intervention curricula that is required to optimize children’s skills, with the aim of creating a landmark study which would make substantive and methodological contributions to the human development literature. To date, over 25 papers on the trial have been published. The most recent have shown that the program significantly improved children’s cognitive development and executive functioning at age five (Doyle 2020) and age nine (Doyle 2022), with effects somewhat larger than those reported in the seminal studies of home visiting programs (e.g., Heckman et al. 2017) and the early outcomes that have emerged from more contemporary home visiting trials (e.g., Attanasio et al. 2014). There is little evidence of treatment heterogeneity by gender, birth order, or distribution of ability, and the effects are mainly driven by improvements in early parental beliefs. This presentation will present an overview of the study to date, as well as future plans for the replication of the trial in Chicago and the age 14 follow-up.