Paul Rand: When you become a parent, you also become your child’s very first teacher.

Ariel Kalil: Parents have a long reach in terms of the influence they have on kids’ development.

Paul Rand: That’s Ariel Kalil. She’s a developmental psychologist and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy where she directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab.

Ariel Kalil: I’ll just give you a simple fact. If you think about all the waking hours that a child has from birth to age 18, 85% are spent in the company of parents or in contexts or activities chosen by parents.

Paul Rand: Even doing the most mundane activities with your child can greatly shape their success later in life.

Ariel Kalil: Very broadly, I will just say the cognitive stimulation that parents provide in the home environment for kids learning, talking, reading, taking kids outside the home to activities or places that stimulate their thinking. I don’t think we recognize that enough when it comes to questions of children’s skill development and success in the labor market and so forth.

Paul Rand: This insight may be an important piece of the puzzle to solving a disturbing trend.

Ariel Kalil: It is a statement of fact that the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged kids is growing.

Tape: New federal data shows that reading scores among American children and preteens have hit record lows. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Process, known as the Nation’s Report card, found that 33% of eighth graders have below basic reading skills. It’s the highest percentage in the test’s 32 year history. That number rises to 40% among fourth graders, marking the most in 20 years for that age group.

Ariel Kalil: I think what is most worrisome to me is that the inequality between rich and poor kids in their test scores is continuing to grow.

Paul Rand: Kalil has spent her career studying childhood development through the lens of parents, but her work comes from a somewhat unique perspective.

Ariel Kalil: I sit at the intersection of a couple of different disciplines. I’m trained as a developmental psychologist and I’ve always studied child development in the role of parents, but I’ve spent most of my academic life in the company of economists and statisticians and demographers. That’s really shaped how I ask questions and how I try to answer them.

Paul Rand: Why don’t all children succeed in the same way? Well, Kalil and her colleagues have observed that this gap is directly correlated with a gap between advantaged parents and less advantaged parents.

Ariel Kalil: We see correlations over and over in any kind of data that parents who have more limited income or less education interact differently with their kids than their more advantaged peers. Parents in more economically disadvantaged circumstances, let’s just say spend less time reading with their kids, less time talking with their kids, doing fewer of the things that promote their kids language development.

Paul Rand: Of course, none of this is a parent’s fault.

Ariel Kalil: We need to recognize the importance of parents and we need to figure out the right tools to support them, and we need to do that in a way that doesn’t cost, well, ideally, anything. It’s going to cost something, but that can reach all the parents that need it.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago podcast network, welcome to Big Brains, the show where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today’s episode, how growing income inequality is impacting childhood outcomes and what policies will better support parents and their kids.

Big Brains is supported by UChicago’s Online Master of Liberal Arts program, which empowers working professionals to think deeply, communicate clearly and act purposely to advance their careers, choose from optional concentrations and ethics and leadership, literary studies and tech and society. More at mla.uchicago.edu.

There’s some new data out and it’s gotten a lot of press and you were involved in some of this of understanding of how kids are falling behind in school. Talk to me about some of the new scores that have come out and why they’re concerning to you and how it relates to this.

Ariel Kalil: The new scores from the NAEP, or as it is called the Nation’s report card, are pretty alarming.

Tape: A new report card is out for American students and it’s not good news. The National Assessment of Education Progress shows fourth and eighth grade students are faring even worse in math and reading than in recent years.

Paul Rand: The things that stood out to me, one-third of eighth graders have below basic reading skills and 40% of fourth graders have below basic reading skills. Those are numbers when you think about the competitiveness of us as a society today and tomorrow ought to be pretty concerning. I’m assuming there’s some correlation between the level of hands-on parenting work that you’re trying to look at and the test scores that are being reported.

Ariel Kalil: The reason that kids test scores have declined or that gaps have between rich and poor kids have opened up, we have seen in the data that there’s increasing inequality in what parents do. Advantaged parents do more of the things that produce child skill and that inequality has also increased. Closing those inequalities in parent behavior is the right way forward to shoring up these test scores.

Paul Rand: The research is basically saying that there is different parenting behavior between different economic groups that ultimately is playing a role in this. Tell me what you’re seeing as the differences in parenting between a one group that may be less educated in lower income from another group that may be the opposite of that.

Ariel Kalil: Mostly we in fact look at parents’ education. Let’s just take a time diary data, which I use a lot in my research. In these kinds of data which we have at the population level, if you’re a parent in these data, I know how many minutes you told me you spent reading with your kid. Less educated families just have many more days of zero minutes relative to their higher educated peers.

Paul Rand: It seems very logical to say, “Well, of course,” but explain what you mean by that. Is it of course or is it actually you think it’s an of course, but people don’t really understand how deep that goes.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. What is the causal nature of that correlation? The reason why that’s important is you might say, “Well, in that case I could just transfer income to those parents.” That turns out not to be true.

Paul Rand: Why not? Well, it turns out the gap isn’t so much a problem of how much reading is happening, but a problem of no reading at all versus a little bit.

Ariel Kalil: It’s not like college educated parents spend three hours a day reading to their kids. They don’t. On average, they spend about 15 minutes a day doing these kind of cognitively stimulating activities with their kids. That’s not a whole lot of time. Most people can imagine 15 minutes in a day that a person could do that, but 15 daily minutes every day adds up to a lot of hours over the course of the child’s first five years.

What we really want to do is shift the share of parents who is not doing any of those minutes to doing some of those minutes most of the time. That’s a very important perspective when we think about what would be an intervention, how much would it cost? What’s our goal here? As it turns out, it takes more than income to be the kind of steady parent who reads to their children every night and talks to their children routinely in a way that we know promotes kids’ language development.

What does it take? When we in our research lab, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab, are trying to identify what are those things, where we land is that there’s an intention-action gap for many parents. Why is that?

Paul Rand: To find an answer, we have to look at one of Kalil’s most famous studies, the PACT study.

Ariel Kalil: The Parents and Children Together, or PACT, study was our very first experimental study in our research lab. We’re celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. That started with a puzzle. We asked parents, “Do you have books in your home?” The answer is yes. Rich parents have more books, but very few parents have no books. We asked parents, “Do you like reading?” Again, “Yes.” “Do you like reading with your kid?” “Yes, it’s my favorite time of the day. We snuggle it’s bedtime. It’s really fun.” “Do you think reading is important?” Most parents will say yes. If low-income parents are in a program like Head Start, they will have heard many times that reading at home is important. The puzzle is you have all these ingredients. Well then why didn’t you read tonight?

Paul Rand: The answer to Kalil led into a specific branch of her discipline, behavioral economics.

Ariel Kalil: Why do we make seemingly irrational decisions? We say we want to do things and we don’t do them. Why is that so? Well, the answer is that our decisions in the moment are shaped by our social context, by feelings we might have in the moment that we’re making the decision, by our belief that losing out on something is more painful than gaining the same equivalent thing or the idea that we’re impatient and short-sighted. We don’t make a decision today in the service of some long-term future goal that we can’t even imagine.

These ideas help to explain a lot about why people don’t save for retirement. Why do they buy a gym membership and not use it? Why do they eat a donut on the first day of their professed diet? In our research lab we said, “Huh, well parents are people too,” and it seems that a lot of these behavioral biases can really help to explain the gap between aspirations and actual behavior among parents.

You can compare parenting to an investment with uncertain returns. I need to invest in my child today, do the things I believe are important. I have no idea how this child is going to turn out. I get no feedback in the moment about whether I’m doing a good or a bad job. Child development is lumpy, doesn’t occur in regular intervals. All of a sudden something happens and then for a long period of time it feels like nothing is happening. My motivation for what I do is determined a lot by my identity. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Well, I might feel differently when I’m at home versus when I’m at work. I have many identities and evoking one over another can make me do something very different with my child right now.

These kinds of things that behavioral economists study all the time, as I said, we just decided they were really applicable to the study of parenting. What made it very appealing to us to adopt that perspective is that these cognitive biases are manageable to an extent. You’re not ever going to make somebody not be impatient or always think in the long run or always understand the returns to what they’re doing, but you can help people manage these cognitive biases.

If I think that the reason you don’t read with your child tonight, even though you said you wanted to, you have books, you tell me that when you do read, it’s your favorite thing to do, yet I see that you didn’t do it. Well, the day runs out, all of a sudden the day’s over. Well maybe if I reminded you at 7:00 that you have this goal and to remind you to follow through and to connect that intention with an action with a simple reminder. Maybe it’s a text message, maybe it’s a behavioral management approach through some other simple means.

Paul Rand: If behavioral economics could explain the problem, could it also provide a solution?

Ariel Kalil: We said, “Okay, let’s try to make an intervention that manages all those cognitive barriers at once. What we’re going to do is we’re going to give everybody a digital library that lives on a tablet so that we can equalize the resource question. Everybody has a tablet. What we’re going to do is measure via some fancy technology on the digital library, how much you used it to read with your child.” We put together this package of behavioral tools and techniques to try to boost the reading for the treatment group in the experiment. That included, number one, asking parents to set a goal. How much do you want to read in the upcoming week? This fancy recording digital library was able to give feedback to the parent on how much in fact they did read. It’s easy to forget. We had goal setting, we had feedback, we had basic reminder messages which were of the flavor, don’t forget that you set a goal.

Then we did a little thing which was sort of like a competition among parents. For this particular study, we recruited parents at preschool centers. There were multiple parents in the same school in our research study. What we did at the end of every week is we said, “At your school, parent number 102 in the study had the most reading minutes,” and your digital tablet would actually light up and fireworks. If you were parent number, whatever I said, 102, you could have this private moment of pride. The idea is if you weren’t, not that you would feel terrible, but that you might rather be inspired to be the winner the following week.

Anyway, we put all this together in a kind of kitchen sink package and if you were in the treatment group, you got all that. If you were in the control group, you just got the tablet and we said, “This is fun. There’s lots of, there’s 200 books on this. Read it as you choose.” Anyway, we ran the experiment and the treated group responded wildly. We had no idea if this was going to work. This is now 10 years ago and there was no study on behavioral economics in parenting. We did not know if parenting was or was not going to be like saving for retirement. But it turns out that it is because with these tools, the parents who got them doubled the amount of reading that they did in the study period.

Paul Rand: It’s not a matter of the money, of people not of being so worried about putting food on the table that they’re not finding the time to read?

Ariel Kalil: That’s a more subtle question. When you say not finding the time to read, my answer would be that most people who do read, as I said, are not reading very much, many minutes. I would tell you that our intervention that I described earlier, the packed intervention was with a sample of low-income parents and with the tools that we tested in that intervention, those parents found the time to read. They found the same number of relatively modest daily minutes of reading that advantaged parents do without intervention. I think the proof is in the pudding from the research that we’ve done.

Paul Rand: In the 10 years since her initial work, a lot has changed. More and more kids have their own phones and AI has advanced dramatically.

Ariel Kalil: I told you that 10 years ago we sent parents static text messages to interact with a digital library that lived on a tablet. AI allows us to make that whole process dynamic and personalized. We’re working really hard on an AI powered tool right now that we call chat to learn.

You could call it a conversation coach for parents and children. What it does is it sends parents conversation prompts. It might be a prompt to say something like it’s morning and the sun’s up. Ask Sam where you think the stars go to sleep at night? We would prefer that a parent say that to their child than, “It’s morning. What color is the sky?” Because quite honestly, Sammy’s going to learn that the sky is blue eventually. For a parent with limited attention and time, I would much rather that the parent had the former kind of conversation that led to these things I’ve been talking so much about, about sort of curiosity.

With our AI powered app, parents can either say by voice or just put in the chatbot what Sammy said, and the AI power of chat to learn then gives the next conversation prompt. It helps the child and the parent keep the conversation going. It produces new questions for the parent to ask. I mean, eventually I would hope that parents wouldn’t need my tool anymore. I want them to work their way out of my job. But what I do want is for those who aren’t in the habit of talking to their kids this way, to use our chat to learn and harness this power of AI to just open up a world of ideas and conversation.

Paul Rand: But we live in a world of increasing changes and how involved we expect the government to be in education and what support that parents expect. How does this change the way Kalil is thinking about her work in the future? Well, that’s after the break.

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You’re in the Harris School, right?

Ariel Kalil: Yeah.

Paul Rand: Part of what you’re thinking of in the Harris School are policy implications.

Ariel Kalil: Right.

Paul Rand: We know that there are interventions that actually could make a difference in people doing more of these things, possibly thereby even getting scores up. Tell me the policy implications that could be considered here or should or should not be considered.

Ariel Kalil: I think we need to just be super creative about how would I send these package of text messages to every parent in the country? We have lots of cutting edge technology. I know there’s a way, but we’d have to cooperate with institutions that interact with parents. That’s a little trickier. Kids don’t go to formal schooling until they’re five. Some kids go to preschool, only about half of kids in the US go to preschool. If I’ve convinced you that parents are important, I need to be super creative about how I’m going to find those parents. That, I just don’t have an answer for you yet.

Paul Rand: We’re at a period right now, and by the time this airs, we might even have more answers on this, but there are conversations surrounding either dramatically shrinking or even abolishing the Department of Education. This concept of education, its importance, the validity to it for our population is really under question, if not outright attack. What kind of environment do you think we’re in right now for the type of thinking and work that you’re doing?

Ariel Kalil: A very scary one.

Tape: Department of Education is very much on the Trump chopping block. Details have not fully been released yet, but President Trump has signaled plans to dismantle it and move some of its key functions elsewhere. The education department oversees student loans, federal funds for lower income students and special education programs, among many other things. Already, the Doge group and the administration have put a number of staff on leave and are stopping more than $900 million in contracts that allow for key education research on student and school performance.

Ariel Kalil: These institutions like the Department of Education, the Institute for Educational Sciences, they produce the data that we need to figure out the questions that we need to ask. We don’t have great data, and that’s a big barrier to our producing good research.

First of all, you want a population level data set if you’re going to be talking about this in a meaningful way. If you’re going to just describe the world, you don’t want to just go find 100 parents that you can convince to fill out a survey for you. You need a big population level data set. When it comes to what parents do in those kinds of surveys, it’s almost all self-reported, which make you suspicious right away.

Problem two is I think we have a real far too narrow shared understanding of what do we even want to measure and how would we measure it. Let me give you an example. Right now I’m really interested in children’s curiosity. If I was the czar of child learning and someone said, “What do you want children to be?” I would say, “I want them to be curious. I want them to love learning and I want them to go through life being interested and interesting.”

Paul Rand: Love that.

Ariel Kalil: Tell me how you would measure that on a survey. How would you ask a parent if their kid has any of those qualities? How would you measure any of those qualities in a way that that information would be useful to parents or to teachers? We just don’t have that. Our lack of measurement is a crisis, I think. What kind of world would we live in? I mean, my most recent reading of the paper suggests that the nation’s report card, the NAEP, is going to be spared these cuts, but who knows? I mean, if we don’t live in a world where we can even understand what’s going on, I can’t do the work that I do. That to me is the fundamental red alert that we’re in a really bad place.

Paul Rand: The questions of how this impacts policy or things such as even child tax credit. Tell me about what we have learned about the child tax credit, what it is, and it’s gone back down again. Is that important or not important to this conversation?

Ariel Kalil: Those kind of tax credit or subsidies for parents to get the child care that they need so that they can balance work and family are incredibly important, I think as a moral imperative for our country. People should have the means and the material support that they need to live to raise their children.

Paul Rand: During the pandemic, the Biden administration increased the child tax credit from $2,000 a year to $3,600 a year for each kid under six years old.

Tape: ... at payment from the expanded child tax credit is do we sign in the law as part of our American rescue plan. It’s one of the largest ever single tax cuts for families with children.

Paul Rand: Studies have shown that that increase lifted millions of kids out of poverty, but the progress was only short-lived.

Ariel Kalil: I think lifting families out of poverty is a moral imperative. It’s what we should be doing. Providing child care so that parents can work because in this country we expect parents to work and most parents wish to work. That’s also, that’s necessary, that’s critical. I’m 100% in favor of all those things, but that’s not the path to helping parents read more to their kids. If we want that to happen, which is my space in my own research, we need to do a different set of things and these things can all go together. Favoring one does not mean you disfavor the other.

Paul Rand: There’s another thing Kalil has studied that can be thrown into this mix as well, our overall happiness and satisfaction with life. Kalil and other scholars across the nation recently put out a national report card of how the country is doing. What they found was pretty telling of the current moment that we’re in.

Ariel Kalil: I worked for almost two years with this bipartisan group of scholars from all different disciplines because our task was to come up with metrics of how we are doing as a country, which ranged anywhere from national security to child mortality to feelings of social isolation, crime, income inequality and so forth. I was invited as the child person and we came up with this set of markers and that became the nation’s report card.

We also did this really cool thing where we did a nationally representative poll of the American people to see if they would say how much agreement would there be between what a bunch of academics and policy wonks said was important and actual real people. Turns out there was a lot of agreement. That was very reassuring and fun.

I think the most important finding is everyone thinks that the economy is an important metric and the data showed that the economy is doing really well.

Everybody also thinks that how people feel psychologically is an important metric of how our country is doing. It turns out many, many people feel terrible. Rates of depression and loneliness and social isolation are high and getting worse. People have lost trust in one another, institutions of higher education, science, government.

I guess I would say the other thing that people think is important and is really a problem in the US is income inequality. We’ve actually done pretty much better on poverty. We’ve lifted a lot of families out of poverty, but income inequality is very high. I think it’s not a leap to say that that’s a pretty important, if you’re not participating in the spoils of this economic engine that is roaring because at the bottom of the ladder, it is no surprise to me that you’re going to not trust the world you live in and feel bad and feel lonely and socially disconnected.

Crime in the US is a huge outlier. Violent crime we do way worse on than other countries, is a huge literature linking income inequality to crime and instability.

Part of what I thought was so interesting about that report and what we found was that it’s pretty simple and if you think about it just seems, I think it resonates with what people are feeling. It’s not very complicated to explain, as it turns out. It could’ve been incredibly complicated to explain. But as it turns out, there were two main dimensions. One was going up our economic stability and one was going down, I would say our emotional wellbeing. I would put the thing in the middle as increasing income inequality.

Paul Rand: With all of these problems facing our country, Kalil just hopes that her research can change the conversation.

Ariel Kalil: First of all, we need to be super creative about how to support parents. When I say test score, you probably immediately think school or curriculum or teacher. I want you to think parent. If everyone thought that, I would feel I had accomplished something.

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