A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Long-Term Professional Mentoring Program for Children at Risk: Outcomes Across the First 5 Years

Introduction: Across cultures, adult support and guidance are considered the cornerstones of healthy child development. A variety of researchers have noted that some children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds yet succeed as adults are those who were able to connect with “natural mentor” adults. Unfortunately, not all children living in challenging situations have the opportunity to develop relationships with natural mentors, and these children might benefit from interventions that proactively connect them with such adults. Typically, volunteer mentoring programs have been utilized in these situations, but these programs struggle with various issues, and alternatives have been developed. One such alternative is a professional mentoring program, Friends of the Children (FOTC), which begins in kindergarten and continues until high school graduation. Here, we report findings on child outcomes for FOTC from the first 5 years of an ongoing randomized controlled trial.

Methods: Participants were 278 boys and girls attending kindergarten or first grade who were identified as “at risk” for later adjustment problems during adolescence and emerging adulthood through an intensive collaborative school-based screening process. Identified children were randomly assigned to a FOTC preventive intervention condition or a control condition. Mentors were hired to work full time with small caseloads of children and were provided initial and ongoing training, supervision, and support. The program was delivered through established nonprofit organizations operating within four major U.S. urban areas within neighborhoods dealing with various levels of challenges, including relatively high rates of unemployment and crime. Recruitment into the study took place across a 3-year period. After the initial assessment, follow-ups were conducted every six months. Mixed effects growth models, which accommodate multilevel data and can handle common issues in longitudinal designs such as unevenly spaced data, were fit and estimated with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) using all available data.

Results: Of the children who received a mentor, after 4.4 years of mentoring, almost 90% were still in the program. Five years after the initial assessment, positive effects of FOTC were found in terms of caregiver report of child behaviors at school, with a trend towards higher child behavioral and emotional strength. No significant effects were detected for any other variables. Effect sizes for all variables were in the range typical of mentoring studies. Findings were not moderated by child sex, baseline risk, race, or intervention site.

Conclusions: Almost half way through the FOTC program, the effects observed for children are similar to the typical findings in the mentoring literature at large. The most promising effects were found in positive caregiver perceptions of a child. This and other protective factors including the mentor-child relationship, and long term relationships with other children who are also being mentored, will increase the likelihood of success for mentored children during adolescence and beyond: school success, positive youth engagement, and a healthy, prosocial lifestyle.