Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jappdp Supporting parent engagement in a school readiness program: Experimental evidence applying insights from behavioral economics ☆ Lisa A. Gennetian a, ⁎ , Maria Marti b , Joy Lorenzo Kennedy a , Jin Han Kim a , Helena Duch b a New York University, USA b Columbia University, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Early childhood intervention Parent involvement Parent engagement Poverty Behavioral economics ABSTRACT Early childhood interventions aimed at reducing socioeconomic disparities hinge on parent engagement. However, sparking parents' engagement and sustaining it throughout the course of interventions has historically been challenging. We designed program enhancements informed by the interdisciplinary field of behavioral economics to support parent engagement in Getting Ready for School, a school readiness intervention for Head Start preschoolers. The behavioral economics enhancements are hypothesized to address psychological factors that might interfere with parents' decision-making, including attention, misestimation, and related parent biases about children's learning. Results from a randomized control design in four Head Start centers show that, compared with families that received the typical curriculum, those that received behavioral economic- s–enhanced strategies, such as personalized invitations, child-friendly activity planners, text-message reminders, and commitment reinforcement, had higher parent attendance and follow-through for GRS activities and spent more time with children on educational activities outside of the classroom. Inroduction Early childhood educational programs aim to reduce the socio- economic inequities in children's developmental outcomes and bolster the chances that every child is equivalently prepared to succeed (Duncan & Magnuson, 2012). Meeting the objective of improving children's developmental outcomes hinges on parents' decisions and behavior both inside and outside of educational settings, whether spending time with a child, attending a workshop, or shifting day-to- day parenting practices (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services & U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Yet, engaging parents in these and related ways can be challenging. Preventative interven- tions (i.e., programs aimed at young children or their families to pre- vent developmental inequities from arising) struggle to elicit parents' buy-in and to sustain parent engagement throughout the course of the intervention (Fishel & Ramirez, 2005; Gross et al., 2009; Halgunseth, Peterson, Stark, & Moodie, 2009). Some interventions to address be- havior problems show only 30% to 48% of targeted families partici- pating (Baker, Arnold, & Meagher, 2011; Garvey, Julion, Fogg, Kratovil, & Gross, 2006; Heinrichs, Bertram, Kuschel, & Hahlweg, 2005), and some preschool-based educational programs report that less than half of parents attend workshops (Dawson-McClure et al., 2015; Mendez, Carpenter, LaForett, & Cohen, 2009). Why is parent engagement low and erratic among some parents even when parents are well informed and when programs and materials are free and publicly accessible? Though many interventions address a variety of personal and environmental barriers (e.g., providing trans- portation, childcare, and food; addressing conflicts in work schedules; Brookes, Summers, Thornburg, Ispa, & Lane, 2006; Brooks-Gunn, Berlin, & Fuligni, 2000), even motivated parents with good intentions may not follow through with early education offerings and re- commendations. This scenario suggests that other influences may be interfering with the ways in which programs are designed and im- plemented, for example, parents' available attention and energy may be diverted to other demands of parenting and daily life (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). This pull may be particularly heightened among low- income parents, who are the most frequent targets of early childhood initiatives, whether preventative or more generally educational, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2018.12.006 Received 23 July 2018; Received in revised form 2 November 2018; Accepted 21 December 2018 ☆ We are grateful to the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Institute for Education Sciences Grant R305A120783 for financial support, and the families and teachers who consented to participate in this study. L. Gennetian and H. Duch developed the study concept. All authors contributed to the study implementation and design. Testing and data collection were performed by L. Gennetian, M. Marti, J. Kennedy and H. Duch. J.H. Kim performed the data analysis. All authors drafted the manuscript and provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: lg1864@nyu.edu (L.A. Gennetian). Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 62 (2019) 1–10 0193-3973/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. T