Understanding How Families Support their Children’s Early Learning: Creating an Unprecedented Database

Scholars studying the role of parenting in child development, and programs that boost parent-child interactions, rarely have data from naturalistic settings. Parenting, and interactions of family members in the home, are typically not observed by outside observers. Knowing what goes on “inside the black box” of family environments can help us understand how children can get a strong, healthy start in life. The New Jersey Families Study, a study that videotaped the lives of a group of diverse fam­ilies for two weeks, unlocks that black box. No one has ever examined home life in the United States with this breadth or duration. The use of videos, rather than observers or ethnographers, affords an opportunity to reduce bias and examine the dynamics of family interaction. This research partnership brings together a multi-disciplinary, multi-insti­tutional team to use machine learning, AI, and computer vision tools to curate a user-friendly dataset and offer it as a commu­nity resource to early childhood and family researchers.

The Need

Families play a critical role in building their children’s early skills and knowledge. Each year, the United States invests billions of dollars into programs to support parents. However, many parenting interventions have had weak effects on chil­dren’s outcomes. Developing parenting initiatives that better address families’ daily needs and reflect their knowledge and expertise requires a deeper understanding of the home life of children and their families. We need to understand what par­ents do—and what they aspire to do—to prepare their children for kindergarten and help them get ready to learn.

The Solution

This partnership builds on the innovation of The New Jersey Families Study, which took an innovative approach and brought video-cameras into the homes of 21 families with a 2- to 4-year-old child for two weeks. These videos allow researchers, in a secure and respectful way, to examine the struggles families face and identify the creative strategies they applied to support their children’s development. Up to eight stationary video cameras were placed in up to four rooms in participants’ homes and activated for 14 hours each day over the two-week period. Altogether, the project collected 504,000 discrete video clips—the equivalent of 11,500 hours of in-home video data on parent-child interactions. A dataset like the New Jersey Families Study provides unique opportunities for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to learn more about how best to support families as they support their children.

The Impact

By successfully implementing this project, we will:

1. Design a user-friendly searchable database for 504,000 video clips.
2. Create an automated digital transcript of the audio on all 688,300 minutes of NJFS video/audio data.
3. Develop the New Jersey Families Study Collaboratory, a group of scholars working on a common set of data and problems and interacting frequently about findings—a “center without walls.”
4. Advance research and knowledge on early childhood development, parenting, and in-home learning.
5. Lay the knowledge base for those programs, services, and interventions that aim to improve the lives of vulnerable children.
6. Ultimately, help more children acquire the necessary skills to become school ready.

Research Questions

Our unprecedented in-home video database can address these types of research questions:

1. How do families build their children’s early literacy and mathematical skills?
2. How do families support their children’s socioemotional development?
3. How and when do families integrate teaching and learning into their everyday lives?
4. What rules, routines, and expectations do families create for their children?
5. How and how much do parents talk to their children?
6. How do families engage in play and creativity with their children?
7. How does technology enable and constrain parenting?
8. How does gender impact parenting practices?
9. How does stress outside the home affect parenting practices?
10. What similarities and differences do we observe in parenting practices across families?