Early intervention Intervening with families in the first five years of a child's life has been shown to have many positive benefits that persist throughout the child's school years. Programs such as Even Start and Head Start that target low-income children and their families typically combine family involvement and parent training with preschool education for the child and home visits. Studies credit these programs with reducing fighting, impulsiveness, disobedience, restlessness, cheating, and delinquency. Such education programs for young or low-income parents gives them an opportunity to improve their economic situation by gaining knowledge and skills that make them more employable, but they also signal to their children that education is important. Such lessons are essential in breaking a family's cycle of poverty.
Early education is by no means limited to low-income families.
South Carolina, for example, tries to connect all parents with schools as soon as a child is born. The packets include a letter from the governor and the school superintendent welcoming their child into the world of learning. The value of volunteers Only 40 percent of the parents in the Hand in Hand study say they volunteered time at a school event several times or more during the last school year. Like the quality and quantity of parental contacts with schools, parental volunteerism declines as children get older. Many parents may truly not have time to volunteer at their children's school but there are other ways to volunteer, such as working on projects that can be done at home, baking for fundraisers or being part of a telephone tree.