Chapter 5: Using a Behavioral Economics Perspective to Boost Family Engagement in the Getting Ready for School Preschool Intervention

The challenge Alice faces in engaging parents resonates for many dedicated service providers. The behavioral economics framework offers a new perspective—and a new set of tools—to engage parents in programs and educational opportunities to reduce these kinds of intention-to-action gaps, where parents fail to follow through, even with the best of intentions.

This chapter introduces concepts from behavioral economics as an approach to boost family engagement and describes an application of these concepts in preschoolers’ mathematics for one specific program, Getting Ready for School. Described in more detail below, the interdisciplinary perspective of behavioral economics offers a complementary set of new tools that marshal and recognize how mental resources and contextual factors can influence—and thus interfere with—parents’ decisions to participate and follow through with activities that are believed to support young children’s development.