Early Head Start Research

Building Their Futures: How Early Head Start Programs Are Enhancing the Lives of Infants and Toddlers in Low-Income Families

Early Head Start is a two-generation program that provides child and family development services to low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers. It also blends these services with a focus on staff development and a commitment to community partnerships. Early Head Start began with 68 new programs in 1995 in response to the recommendations of the 1993 Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers. The program continued to build on its bipartisan mandate embodied in the 1994 Head Start reauthorizing legislation, with impetus added by the 1998 reauthorization. Today, almost 650 programs serve more than 55,000 low-income families with infants and toddlers. A rigorous national evaluation, including about 3,000 children and families across 17 sites, also began in 1995. This report, Building Their Futures, describes the interim impact findings emerging from the analysis of child and family outcomes through the first two years of the children's lives.