The long-term impacts of home visiting programs are unknown.

Home visiting programs aim to bolster children’s early development and promote school readiness by supporting and strengthening parent-child relationships and focusing on caregivers’ strengths. However, there has been limited research on their longer-term benefits. The University of Chicago’s Center for the Economics of Human Development’s (CEHD) seeks to understand if and how such programs can lead to more robust skill formation in children and what implementation levers influence the quality of service delivery.  

Toward this end, CEHD sought help piloting and analyzing Creciendo Juntos, a home visiting collaboration between Preparing for Life (PFL)—an evidence-based home visiting model from Ireland—and Casa Central, a Chicago social services organization. The program is the first PFL adaptation in Chicago and began providing the city’s Latino families with support services, including monthly home visits, prenatal education, and evidence-based parenting programming in 2024.

NORC is collaborating with Creciendo Juntos to evaluate the program.   

In collaboration with CEHD, PFL, and Casa Central, NORC is providing critical expert direction for the development, implementation, and evaluation of all Creciendo Juntos components. Our collaborative design process will result in a robust infrastructure for the monitoring of child development, impact evaluation, and for ongoing program monitoring. We are using a randomized control trial design to examine Creciendo Juntos’s fidelity and whether it improves key parent and child outcomes. By randomly assigning families to either a treatment (home visiting) or control group, we will be able to causally assess the impact of the program on key outcomes.  

Our research focuses on how early interactions with caregivers and other adults lead to more robust skill formation in children and what implementation levers influence the quality of service delivery. Our hypothesis is that strong and continuous support of supervisors and home visitors, in a strengths-based environment, will allow them to provide strong and continuous support for the enrolled caregivers who will, in turn, do the same for their children. 

We will conduct assessments at critical stages of child development until newborns in study participant families enter kindergarten.