Longitudinal Effects of Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation Services on School Readiness

Introduction: Preschool children are being expelled from child care programs at an alarming rate.  This is frequently due to challenging behaviors such as aggression, tantrums, and noncompliance.  Teachers have reported needing more training in how to deal with these behaviors in early care and education (ECE) settings.  Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (ECMHC) has been shown to build ECE provider’s capacity and reduce challenging behavior.  There is ample evidence demonstrating the immediate impact of the ECMHC services, but less has been done to examine if there are sustained effects on the children’s school readiness. 

Methods: The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) currently funds 12 ECMHC programs that serve children ages 0-5 across the state.  MSDE also administers a universal Kindergarten Readiness Assessment and assigns a unique student identification number to every child. This permits data gathered from the ECMHC programs on baseline and follow-up data from children who received services to be matched to their Kindergarten Readiness Assessments (KRA).  Matching was successful for 183 children who received ECMHC services.  A second sample of children who did not receive ECMHC services is being created using propensity scores matching to generate a comparison group for longitudinal analyses.  

Results: Preliminary analyses examined the demographic characteristics of children who received ECMHC services, short-term change in the social-emotional and behavioral well-being as a result of ECMHC, and predictions of their KRA in the Social and Personal domains.    Using propensity scores matching, we will compare the school readiness of children who received ECMHC with demographically similar children who did not receive ECMHC services based upon their county of residence, gender, race, special education and poverty status.  We will examine the relationship between duration of ECMHC services and KRA, as well as short term changes in children’s behavior problems as a result of ECMHC as predictors of later school readiness.

Conclusions: This unique data set will allow us to look at the long-term impact of a short term preventive intervention on the school readiness of young children with and at risk for behavioral problems.  Findings from this study will help policy makers determine the effectiveness of ECMHC for helping prepare children for Kindergarten.