A new policy roadmap charts a course for how states can help children thrive in their first three years of life.

The Prenatal-to-3 State Policy Roadmap 2020 was just released by the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The roadmap is “a guide state leaders can use to develop and implement the most effective policies to strengthen their state’s prenatal-to-3 (PN-3) system of care,” the roadmap’s executive summary explains.

“The science of the developing child is clear: Infants and toddlers need loving, stimulating, stable, and secure care environments with limited exposure to adversity. However, to date states have lacked clear guidance on how to effectively promote the environments in which children thrive.”

The roadmap calls on states to:

• prioritize science-based policy goals to promote infants’ and toddlers’ optimal health and development

• adopt and implement effective policies and strategies to improve prenatal-to-3 goals and outcomes

• monitor the progress being made toward adoption & implementation of effective solutions, and

• track outcomes to measure impact on optimal health and development of infants and toddlers

The roadmap says states should have 11 effective policies and strategies in place.

The policies are:

• expanding income eligibility for health insurance

• reducing the administrative burden of accessing SNAP food benefits

• offering paid family leave

• having a state minimum wage of at least $10 per hour, and

• have a state earned income tax credit

The strategies are:

• having evidence-based comprehensive screening and referral programs

• setting state child care subsidies at the federally recommended rate of 75 percent of the current market rate

• investing state funds in group prenatal care, which is “an alternative model of prenatal care facilitated by a trained healthcare provider, but delivered in a group setting, integrating health assessments, education and skills building, and peer social support”

• investing in evidence-based home visiting programs

• investing in Early Head Start, and

• setting inclusive criteria for Early Intervention Services

 The roadmap assesses where states are in this work and points to how they could move forward with accompanying individual roadmaps for each state. Massachusetts, for example, is credited with achieving four out of five policy goals, all of them except paid family leave, which is in the works and slated to begin in 2021. However, Massachusetts has only made “substantial progress” on one of the six strategies, which is implementing Early Intervention Services.

The roadmap will be updated annually, and the next one will “dive deeper into understanding the return on investment of each policy and strategy. Lawmakers not only want to know if a policy works, but also how much it costs and how to pay for it. Some of this information is provided in this Roadmap, and more is provided in the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Clearinghouse at pn3policy.org, but we plan to conduct more rigorous analyses of the costs and measurable benefits associated with each effective solution, to answer these questions more fully.”

As we blogged last week, there’s also a new roadmap from the Alliance for Early Success that covers some of the same ground and focuses closely on advancing the early childhood profession.

Please check out the report and share it with your elected officials, state policymakers, and other early childhood stakeholders.

As the report concludes, “the science is clear with regard to the conditions necessary to help children thrive. Previously, states lacked clear guidance on which effective policies foster those conditions, and they didn’t know where to start. Although the evidence base will continue to expand over time, the solutions are clearer, and states can use this Prenatal-to-3 State Policy Roadmap to get to work building a solid prenatal-to-3 system of care.”