We developed the Early Childhood Data Playground (ECDP) at the Sorenson Impact Center to better understand the lives of children at the community level. As a society we struggle to objectively measure the well-being of children, especially those under five. There are few reliable measures of childhood development that community leaders and policymakers can rely on to help them understand a child’s trajectory between birth and starting school. Many community-level service providers use a developmental screening tool like the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) to identify at-risk infants and toddlers, but screenings are not mandatory and communities do not typically aggregate data from these screenings to assess well-being across a community.
In other realms of policy making, communities frequently measure and report on the things they care about the most, such as unemployment filings or jobs created and lost. Policymakers rely on these indicators to help them react decisively and quickly. With the current COVID-19 economic crisis in mind, how frightening would it be if we had to wait a year for updated data about the economy? Would federal policymakers wait a year to pass stimulus packages?
Communities in the U.S. do not measure the status of young children in a comparable way because there are so many financial, logistical, and contextual factors that make it difficult. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory provides a valuable framework for understanding the challenges that currently exist when attempting to understand the needs of children using public data: children grow up in the care of their immediate family, and develop alongside the influence of their family and various layers of community factors, like faith, schools, and broader cultural values. Put simply, children do not develop in a vacuum. To fully understand their experiences and needs we would need to look to multiple data sources, including family and community data to make inferences about their well-being.
An important area of focus at the Sorenson Impact Center is supporting foundations, nonprofits, and governments seeking to better collect and understand early childhood data. Most of the data we rely on to gauge the well-being of children from birth to age five tells us about the whole family and is reported annually. However, we have learned that when we invest in building stronger data infrastructure, emphasizing common definition and measurement, quality, timeliness, and integration, we can make more informed decisions that ultimately benefit the lives of young children and their families.
The Center’s new Early Childhood Data Playground (ECDP) can be used to help communities navigate some of the most pertinent data. These data help policymakers connect the dots by looking at community-level indicators correlated with long-term outcomes for children. Much like a park playground facilitates play, the data dashboard can be used as a tool for inquiry. When data are integrated, accessible, and used to explore children’s well-being, they can be an incredibly effective tool for practice, systems building, policy making, collaboration, and investment.
The ECDP utilizes public data sets at the county level and compares them to state and national data to help policymakers draw comparisons. Data sets from the American Community Survey (an annual extension survey of the Census) are disaggregated by age, allowing us to also compare data for children under age five to the averages for all children or all residents in the county. Data are disaggregated by race and ethnicity so policymakers can understand potential inequities for populations of color. The ECDP displays birth data from the Centers for Disease Control at the county level, however, given the sensitivity of this data it is not released for some small counties. The ECDP also guides a less experienced data user through curated indicators to provide the user more context for each indicator.
The ECDP illuminates some concerning trends that affect our most vulnerable children. For example, when compared to other age groups, children under age five experience the highest levels of poverty. When disaggregated by race, the data highlight another unsettling figure: across the nation, families of color face additional barriers to ensuring their infants, toddlers, and young children have everything they need for healthy development. For example, Apache County, Arizona has more land designated as Indian reservation than any county in the United States. In Apache County, 76% of children under age six live at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), compared to the state average of 50% living at or below 200% FPL for children under six.
Unfortunately, the effects of the lack of real time community-level data are felt most acutely during times of crisis. Since much of the data about children under age five lives with service-providers, communities battling the effects of the pandemic are struggling to get an accurate account of critical needs or gaps in service provision. Most communities do not have data infrastructure that pools programmatic data, so questions about the impact of the current crisis are more difficult to answer.
However, by using the public data sets in the ECDP, policy makers can monitor year over year changes experienced by families with young children. Disaggregated data will be especially relevant for monitoring inequitable impacts, as it appears that minority populations are facing poorer health outcomes as a result of access and care for COVID-19. There are some startling early reports of the impact that we expect to eventually bear out in the data. For example, there are reports of more pregnant women choosing to give birth at home because they are not permitted to have the support system they need at hospitals. In the next year, we could see a disproportionate impact on birth outcomes for low income women and women who are less comfortable navigating the hospital system.
As society braces for the long-term impacts of the pandemic, policymakers must prepare themselves to understand how family instability rocks the well-being of children under age five. The stakes are high because of the implications for their long-term development. There are also fiscal impacts for policy makers and communities. Understanding the impact of the pandemic in real time and mitigating those effects in the short-term will reduce the long-term fiscal burden of addressing it down the road.
Community leaders can also prepare themselves by monitoring innovation and key learnings emerging from the crisis that can lead to renewed efforts to build better state and community data systems for early childhood. For additional reading, check out the following resources focused on systems-building and COVID-19 responses: Alliance for Early Success, The Build Initiative, Council for A Strong America’s ReadyNation, Center for American Progress, The First Five Years Fund, Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child, The Hunt Institute, The National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers.
By Kendall Rathunde, Senior Associate, Sorenson Impact Center
Early Childhood Data Playground (ECDP) designed by Nair, Reynolds and Shotorbani
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