An Early Childhood Internet-based and Family-based Intervention Study

The poverty rate among children under 18 years old in Hong Kong in 2015 was 18% after social welfare intervention. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, advocates early childhood investment to enhance social mobility, given its lifelong impact of on child development. However, few randomized control trails have been used to examine the effectiveness of early childhood intervention in promoting social mobility through child development in Hong Kong. To fill these gaps, we propose an interdisciplinary intervention study involving academics from economics, sociology, social work, gerontology, education, and psychology to investigate methods to promote the social mobility of children living in poverty through early intervention. The overall objective is to enhance the developmental outcomes of children in poverty by utilizing parental resources within a family system, technological resources available in modern metropolis and the human resources enjoyed by the elderly in Hong Kong. The primary objective is to evaluate an internet- and family-based intervention to promote the development of children in poverty enrolled in the first year of Hong Kong's nurseries, who are mostly aged 24 months to three years. The examined outcomes will be the developmental well-being of participating children and parenting attitudes and behaviors, with the long-term goal of promoting their social mobility to break the cycle of poverty. In the long run, we aim to establish the proposed intervention in policy to promote the development of disadvantaged children. The secondary objective is to identify intergenerational volunteerism as a means for productive aging through a mentoring program using older adults as mentors to participating parents.

The proposed research consists of three phases. The first phase will be a cross-sectional survey with a sample of 1,000 cases from 60 nurseries cum kindergartens to explore the family demographics and developmental profiles of low-income children in comparison to others. The second phase will be a randomized control trail implementing two waves of a 10-month internet-based intervention with 200 toddler-parents dyads from 20 to 30 of the original 60 nurseries. Interventions will be delivered by older mentors professionally trained by the research team. All children, parents and elderly mentors will be evaluated through a set of outcome measurements to assess the effectiveness of the program. The last phase will involve the dissemination of research information that may become building blocks for policies on internet-based early childhood education, poverty alleviation and social mobility enhancement, as well as productive aging.