July 15, 2024 | Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy

Rachel Chazen Cohen will work with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood and HDFS Associate Professor Caitlin Lombardi to support Connecticut families with young children

In a child’s first three years of life, more than 1 million neural connections will form each second. Brain development is dependent on the stimulation and responsive interactions provided by adults in the child’s environment. Thus, these early years which are critical for the development of foundational skills necessary for future well-being, are an opportune time to support adults caring for children.    

Early childhood programs have been found to positively impact child development and family wellness. As families of infants and children face historic challenges like systemic racism, gun violence, climate change, and social instability, these programs have become increasingly valuable.  

Rachel Chazen Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) and Principal Investigator at InCHIP. She has spent her career studying the biological, interpersonal, and environmental factors that influence child development and how to improve early childhood programs. 

Cohen (PI) and HDFS Associate Professor Caitlin Lombardi (Co-I) recently received a $10 million grant from the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) to launch the Early Years program. The project seeks to study how Connecticut’s early childhood programs can better support children’s school readiness and family well-being starting in the earliest years of development. Specifically, they are providing community childcare settings with “family consultants,” trained individuals who can work with families to help them meet their unique needs and connect them to appropriate services. Lombardi is a co-investigator on the project.  

“Childcare settings are an underutilized setting to reach families with the youngest children,” says Cohen. “Families have trusting relationships with their children’s childcare providers, and this is a perfect way to reach working families who need some support, including knowledge of child development and parenting strategies as well as broader services like housing, education, health and mental health services.”  

By embedding professional family consultants in care settings, Lombardi and Cohen hope that families will be able to access more social, emotional, and financial support.  

The Early Years Project will focus on low- and mixed-income families in New Haven and Hartford and will bring the expertise of federally funded home visiting programs and community-based childcare settings to enhance these programs’ impact.   

OEC has provided funds to early childhood education programs to increase the number of spaces for infants and toddlers. These programs were invited to participate in the CT Early Years program. Half of the programs will be randomly selected to  be paired with professional consultants who will work with parents to determine their needs and connect them to appropriate resources while the other half of the programs will continue with business as usual. The UConn team will then follow children and family to see what impacts CT Early Years has on service receipt as well as child and family wellbeing.   

While the project focuses on parents, Cohen expects the Early Years program will have a positive effect on children’s emotional well-being and readiness for school.  

Cohen joined UConn’s HDFS department in August 2020 and co-directs the Applied Research on Children (ARC) lab at UConn alongside Lombardi. Cohen also serves as the Director of the UConn’s Early Childhood Program and is involved with UConn’s Collaboratory for School and Child Health (CSCH).  

She has worked on interdisciplinary initiatives including one funded through the Pritzker Family Foundation that established a consortium of early childhood researchers and practitioners to determine effective services and programs to prepare children for formal schooling and expand equitable access to early childhood education programs. The consortium developed a research agenda that identified services to improve educational experiences, increase family and community engagement in Early Head Start, and bolster family self-sufficiency.  

In addition to her research, Cohen has considerable experience working in research and policy roles.  

Before her career in academia, Cohen worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for 11 years where she served as a social science research analyst and coordinator of infant and toddler research.  

In these roles, Cohen developed and directed large-scale projects evaluating federal programs, like Early Head Start, to better serve low-income children and their families.