Jere Behrman

Many children in developing countries grow up in unstimulating environments, leading to deficiencies in early years’ developmental outcomes, particularly cognition and language. Interventions to improve parenting in the first 3 years of life have a clear impact on these outcomes, but the sustainability of effects is mixed, particularly for scalable interventions. There is little evidence of the effect of following-up an early life intervention with another one immediately afterwards. The objective of this study is to help fill this gap.

This paper extends analyses of association between maternal mental health and infant growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to children through age eight years, and broaden analyses to cognitive and psychosocial outcomes.