TipsByText: A Parent-Oriented Language Intervention for Preschool Children

Abstract

Early-life skills are a strong predictor of later life outcomes, and parents play an instrumentalrole in their children’s acquisition of early-life skills. However, there is still a question in the literature about the effectiveness of leveraging parents to improve children’s early-life skills as a large-scale policy tool. In this dissertation, we estimate the impact of a parent-oriented intervention, TipsByText, in a naturalistic setting with a large and diverse sample. TipsByText aims to increase language skills among preschool children by sending text messages directly to their parents with tips about how to incorporate simple language stimulation exercises into their everyday lives. To evaluate the effectiveness of the TipsByText intervention, we use data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Denmark in 2019/2020 among 3,305 families with 3,804 three-to-five-year-old children. We estimate that the TipsByText intervention has a tightly estimated null effect on children’s language skills in the short run, indicating that the TipsByText intervention was not successful in improving language skills in our sample. We draw on various qualitative and quantitative data sources to analyze potential explanations for why the TipsByText intervention did not improve children’s language skills. As none of the available data sources provide us with a conclusive explanation for the lack of positive effect of the TipsByText intervention, a potential implication of the current study is that leveraging parents to improve children’s early-life skills might not be as effective as a large-scale policy tool as the literature suggests.