“The findings for girls were different,” said Jennifer Engle, lead author of the study. “Overall, teachers reported that girls in the first and third grade had good social skills, regardless of the quality of their kindergarten friendships. Boys, on the other hand, clearly benefited from the good start that early high-quality friendships provide.”

Engle said the study was unique in comparing how the presence and quality of children’s kindergarten friendships are related to their behavior problems and social skills in kindergarten, first, and third grades.

She noted that friendship quality was important for both boys and girls in kindergarten. Kindergarten kids with high-quality friendships tended to have fewer behavior problems and better social skills than those whose friendships were of low or moderate quality. In contrast, kids who had low-quality kindergarten friendships had more behavior problems during kindergarten.

The differences in friendship quality for boys versus girls didn’t show up until the children were older, she said.

“Boys who had no friends in kindergarten had more behavior problems, but not until they had reached first and third grades,” she said.

The researchers examined data from 567 children who had participated in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.

Mothers in the study reported on whether their kindergarten child had at least one friend and on the quality of their child’s friendships. Researchers then compared the progress of children with no friends, low-quality friendships, average-quality friendships, and high-quality friendships. Teachers provided feedback on children’s behavior problems in kindergarten and first and third grades.

“As we expected, high-quality kindergarten friendships that featured cooperation and sharing, taking turns, low levels of hostility, and little destructive conflict, gave children–especially boys–practice in positive interaction, which they demonstrated in grades 1 and 3,” Engle said.

How can you help your child learn to be a good friend? McElwain stressed that peers become important as children enter kindergarten. Parents should make an effort to help children, especially boys, make friends at this age through play dates and other social activities, she said.

Children also will likely relate to friends in more positive ways if they have experiences in their family that model positive expectations, caring, and respect.

When children learn to expect that people will respond positively to them, they will be responsive and friendly to others, she noted.

“Those children will be able to handle their emotions better when the going gets rough, and they’ll learn how to work through conflicts. Conflict isn’t necessarily good or bad; it’s a matter of how kids approach disagreements with their friends or parents,” she said.

McElwain offered reassurance to parents of friendless kindergartners. “Almost all of those children had made a friend by the time they reached third grade,” she said.

The U of I’s Nicole Lasky, now of Chicago’s Perspectives Charter School, is a co-author of the study.

For the analysis, Reynolds and other researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the Chicago Public Schools’ federally funded Child Parent Centers (CPCs) established in 1967. Their work represents the first long-term economic analysis of an existing, large-scale early education program. Researchers surveyed study participants and their parents, and analyzed education, employment, public aid, criminal justice, substance use and child welfare records for the participants through to age 26.

“Our findings provide strong evidence that sustained high-quality early childhood programs can contribute to well-being for individuals and society,” said Reynolds, director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study and co-director of the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. “The large-scale CPC program has one of the highest economic returns of any social program for young people. As public institutions are being pressed to cut costs, our findings suggest that increasing access to high-quality programs starting in preschool and continuing into the early grades is an efficient use of public resources.”

The CPC program in the project provided services for low-income families beginning at age three in 20 school sites. Kindergarten and school-age services are provided up to age nine (third grade). Funded by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, CPC is the second oldest (after Head Start) federally funded preschool program. The analysis appears in the January/February issue of Child Development, the journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. Co-authoring researchers included Judy Temple, Barry White and Suh-Ruu Ou at the University of Minnesota and Dylan Robertson from the Chicago Public Schools.

Reynolds and his colleagues did the cost-benefit analysis of the CPC using information collected on about 900 children enrolled in the 20 centers starting when they were three and first enrolled in a preschool program. The study continued until the children were nine and taking part in a school-age program that featured smaller classes, teacher aides, and instructional and family support. Follow-up interviews were done in early adulthood and information was collected from many sources until age 26. These children were compared to a group of about 500 comparable children who didn’t take part in the CPC but participated in the usual educational interventions for disadvantaged youths in Chicago schools.

The CPC resulted in significantly higher rates of attendance at 4-year colleges and employment in higher-skilled jobs and significantly lower rates of felony arrests and symptoms of depression in young adulthood.

The program’s economic benefits in 2007 dollars exceeded costs, including increased earnings and tax revenues, averted costs related to crime and savings for child welfare, special education and grade retention. The preschool part showed the strongest economic benefits providing a total return to society of $10.83 per dollar invested — equivalent to an 18 percent annual return on program investment. Gains varied by child, program and family group.

When the researchers included the benefits from reductions in smoking, total returns rose to more than $12 per dollar invested. The school-age program yielded a return of about $4 per dollar invested (annual rate of return of 10 percent) and the combined preschool and school-age program (preschool to third grade) yielded returns of $8.24 per dollar invested (annual rate of return of 18 percent), based on average net benefits per child of $38,000 above and beyond less extensive intervention.

Children at higher levels of risk experienced the highest economic benefits, including males ($17.88 per dollar invested; a 22% annual return), children who had taken part in preschool for a year ($13.58 per dollar invested; a 21% annual return) and children from higher-risk families, including those whose parents had not graduated from high school ($15.88 per dollar invested; a 20% annual return).

The researchers identified five key principles of the CPC that they say led to its effectiveness, including providing services that are of sufficient length or duration, are high in intensity and enrichment, feature small class sizes and teacher-student ratios, are comprehensive in scope and are implemented by well-trained and well-compensated staff. A further unique feature of the research is that the origin of the economic returns can be empirically traced through a chain of early educational advantages to cumulate in long-term effects.

The findings from this analysis can be useful to policymakers and school superintendents across the nation as they make funding decisions. A lot of states are thinking of scaling back on early childhood investments, but this analysis suggests the opposite, Reynolds said.

“Access to effective programs like CPC should be increased,” Reynolds said. “In scarce times, policymakers should divest in programs that aren’t working and reserve the scarce resources for the most effective.”

The study is the first to show that learning to use a wide range of spatial words predicts children’s later spatial thinking, which in turn is important in mathematics, science and technology. Children who heard and then produced 45 additional spatial terms saw, on average, a 23 percent increase in their scores on a non-verbal assessment of spatial thinking.

“Our results suggest that children’s talk about space early in development is a significant predictor of their later spatial thinking,” said Susan Levine, a psychologist at UChicago, who co-authored the paper in the current issue of Developmental Science.

The finding provides further evidence for the importance of exposing children to words related to mathematical concepts. In earlier work, Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology, and colleagues showed that talking about mathematics with children at an early age greatly improved their performance in math.

“In view of findings that show spatial thinking is an important predictor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) achievement and careers, it is important to explore the kinds of early inputs that are related to spatial thinking,” Levine and colleagues write in the article, “Children’s Spatial Thinking: Does Talk About the Spatial World Matter?” Spatial language may encourage children to adopt a habit of mind when looking at the world that increases their attention to spatial relations.

Joining Levine in writing the article were lead author Shannon Pruden, assistant professor of psychology at Florida International University and former postdoctoral fellow at UChicago, and Janellen Huttenlocher, the William S. Gray Professor Emeritus in Psychology at UChicago.

For the study, the research team videotaped children between ages 14 and 46 months who were accompanied by their primary caregivers. They videotaped the caregivers, primarily the children’s mothers, as they interacted with their children during their normal, everyday activities. The 90-minute sessions were conducted at four-month intervals.

The study group included 52 children and 52 caregivers from an economically and ethnically diverse set of homes in the Chicago area.

The researchers recorded words that were related to spatial concepts used by both children and caregivers. They noted the use of names for two- and three-dimensional objects, such as “circle” or “triangle”; words that described size, such as “tall” and “wide”; and words that described the features of shapes such as “bent,” “edge” and “corner.”

As was the case in their research on the use of mathematical words, the researchers found a wide variation in the number of spatial words parents and children used. On average, parents used 167 words related to spatial concepts during the 13.5 hours of recorded time during the period of 14 to 46 months, but the range was very wide — from 5 to 525 spatial words.

Among children, there was a similar variability, with children producing an average of 74 spatial related words and using a range of 4 to 191 spatial words during the study period. The children who used more spatial terms were more likely to have caregivers who used those terms.

Moreover, when the children were four-and-a-half years old, the team assessed them for their spatial skills, to see how well they could mentally rotate objects, copy block designs and do spatial analogies, which involved picking out the same spatial relations when different objects were involved.

The researchers found that the children who were exposed to more spatial terms during their everyday activities and produced these words themselves performed much better on spatial tests at four-and-a-half years of age than children who did not hear and produce as many of these spatial terms. Importantly, this was true, even controlling for children’s overall productive vocabulary.

The impact was greatest for children’s performance on the spatial analogies and mental rotation tasks. For every 45 additional spatial words children produced during spontaneous talk with their parents, they saw, on average, a 23 percent increase in their scores on the spatial analogies task and a 15 percent increase in their performance on the mental rotation task.

The increased use of spatial language may have prompted the children’s attention to spatial information and improved their ability to solve spatial problems, the researchers said. Spatial language also may reduce the mental load involved in transforming shapes and help children represent the spatial relations used on the spatial analogies task, they added.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and an award from the National Science Foundation’s Science of Learning Center program to the University’s Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.