"I teach her at home": Home learning environments amid resource constraints

Abstract

Objective:

This study examined how mothers with low incomes think about and enact investments of time and money for their infants and toddlers.

Background:

Infancy and toddlerhood are pivotal years for development. Home learning environments in these earliest years can also set the stage for later home learning environments. Yet there are few institutional supports available to children at this age, underscoring the role of parental investments and the salience of resource access in parenting approaches.

Methods:

This analysis used longitudinal, semi-structured interviews with 80 mothers who were participating in an unconditional cash transfer experiment.

Results:

Mothers described intentionally structuring their time, allocating resources, and shaping their spaces to construct the home learning environments they desired for their young children. The analysis of their narratives resulted in four characterizations of how mothers described investing in home learning environments for their infants and toddlers.

Conclusion:

Mothers exercised agency in fostering the growth and development of their infants and toddlers by prioritizing and investing in home learning environments, highlighting how resources of time and money shaped their parenting.

Implications:

Parents exert their agency in supporting the development of their young children, which policy can potentially activate and leverage by ensuring parents have adequate resources.

The first years of life present a prime window for growth and development that can steer trajectories for the future (Rodriguez & Tamis-LeMonda, 2011). Parenting approaches and parental investments are key means for fostering this growth and development in children. Thus, parental resources, like time and money, have a role in shaping the experiences and environments to which children are exposed. Resource constraints may limit opportunities for parents to create those experiences and environments they desire for their infants and toddlers. In this case, alleviating resource constraints could support parents in creating the developmental context they want for their children. Cash transfers provide the opportunity to investigate how parents with limited incomes approach parental investments when these resource constraints are relaxed.

In the present study, we consider the role resources play in parenting approaches within the context of Baby’s First Years (BFY), a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of unconditional transfers to mothers with young children in multiple US cities. We focus on infancy and toddlerhood not only due to their importance developmentally but also because society at large provides the fewest institutional supports for children’s development during this period. Whereas in the US, public schools are available to school-aged children and Head Start and pre-kindergarten to three- and four-year-olds, there are significantly fewer options available for children before age three, and only a small fraction of eligible families have access (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022). Quantitative findings from BFY show increased parental spending on children and time in activities with children among parents receiving a $333 monthly cash gift versus those receiving only $20 each month (Gennetian et al., 2024). Building on this, we use qualitative interview data to gain a fuller understanding of how mothers think about and enact these investments of both money and time. This study advances the literature on socioeconomic variation in parenting approaches, while also helping us to understand more about how cash transfers operate for parents with infants and toddlers; this is particularly important given the growing interest in cash transfer interventions.

Background

Home Learning Environments

Infants and toddlers from families with lower incomes spend much of their time in parental care—most often with mothers—as opposed to formal or informal child care; on average, in the US, they spend about 12 hours per week in nonparental care (Flood et al., 2022). Accordingly, home learning environments are the primary setting for early childhood development for many children and play a unique role in early learning and development (Crosnoe et al., 2010). Materials and the physical environment itself, the activities engaged in, and the emotional supportiveness of the adults caring for children at home comprise meaningful elements in constructive home learning environments (Dearing & Tang, 2009). As such, we define home learning environments as the combination of interactions, orchestrated activities, and physical materials and space that are accessible to children and from which they can learn when at home. Supportive and stimulating home learning environments have myriad benefits related to child development, language and literacy, learning, and achievement (Chen et al., 2024; Puccioni et al., 2022; Rodriguez & Tamis-LeMonda, 2011; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019). Evidence indicates home learning environments can benefit children across diverse racial and SES backgrounds and international contexts (Chen et al., 2024; Iruka, 2017; McCormick et al., 2020; Riser et al., 2020; Soto-Ramírez et al., 2022). The context in which children live and grow matters, and as such, tailored parenting approaches and home learning environments may produce optimal outcomes for children (Iruka, 2017).

Early childhood home learning environments are consequential for children’s futures. The learning environments young children experience at home are associated with outcomes in later childhood and adolescence (Liang et al., 2020; Rodriguez & Tamis-LeMonda, 2011). Evidence also suggests that home learning environments early in a child’s life set the stage for the ones parents create in the future. As Tamis-LeMonda and colleagues (2019) describe, “the experiences parents provide their infants as early as the first year of life may solidify into patterns of engagement that will either continue to support or impede children’s emerging skills over time” (p. 164; see also Toth et al., 2020).

Parents shape home learning environments for their children; how they do so is influenced by a variety of factors, including their beliefs about education. Parents with low incomes and parents of color emphasize the importance of engaging their children in home learning activities, particularly those supporting early literacy and math skills (Sonnenschein et al., 2016). Indeed, parental beliefs specific to school readiness—for example, how important it is that their child knows their ABC’s before entering school—predict parental engagement in home learning activities (Puccioni et al., 2022). These parental beliefs appear particularly tied to the extent to which parents enact home learning environments targeted to specific skill development or domains of learning (e.g., literacy or numeracy; Kluczniok et al., 2013). When children are not enrolled in early care and education, parents tend to provide more opportunities for growth and development through home learning environments (Gonzalez, 2020). Mothers, who also more often provide care, tend to spend more time playing and engaging in learning activities among parents co-residing with their young children, as well (Flood et al., 2022; LaBriola & Schneider, 2021).

How parents perceive their ability to affect their children’s growth and development—also known as their parental self-efficacy (Coleman & Karraker, 2003)—is fundamental to how they enact home learning environments (Bojczyk et al., 2018; Gessulat et al., 2024; Peacock-Chambers et al., 2017). Indeed, self-efficacy facilitates how personal agency is exercised, or in other words, how goals and values get put into action (Bandura, 1990, 2018). Parents can have a generalized sense of self-efficacy about their fulfillment of their role as a parent. Their sense of self-efficacy can also be domain- or task-specific, such as how they think about their ability to teach their child literacy skills. Each may uniquely contribute to their construction of and engagement in home learning environments (Bojczyk et al., 2018; Gessulat et al., 2024). Evidence also suggests that parental self-efficacy explains, at least in part, the association between parent characteristics, child characteristics, and parental engagement in home learning environments (Giallo et al., 2013; Holloway et al., 2016; Peacock-Chambers et al., 2017). For example, how efficacious a parent feels in using home learning environments mediates the association between a child’s temperament and the home learning environments to which they are exposed (Giallo et al., 2013). This positions self-efficacy as an important factor in whether and how parents enact the home learning environments they want for their children.

Parental self-efficacy is a particularly strong predictor of parents’ deployment of home learning environment strategies among parents of color (Ardelt & Eccles, 2001). Suizzo and colleagues (2014) examined how mothers of various racial and ethnic identities enacted home learning strategies in line with their beliefs, finding African American and Mexican American mothers “expressed a strong determination and sense of empowerment that propels them to intervene in their children’s learning rather than to observe and trust their environments” and cited using games, songs, and rhymes to engage their children (p. 278). Jarrett and Coba-Rodriguez (2019) described the self-efficacy of Black mothers with low incomes whose children attended Head Start as they leveraged a variety of resources and materials like learning websites, puzzle books, and flashcards to prepare for their child to transition to kindergarten, often tuning in to skill areas they viewed as a struggle for their children.

Parental Investments

Research indicates that although families across SES believe in the importance of learning at home, parental investments and opportunities for children may be fewer when their parents face resource constraints (Flood et al., 2022; Sonnenschein et al., 2016). While researchers have continued to study inequities, including facets related to family dynamics, financially-demanding parental investments, and the quality of experiences supporting child development (Flood et al., 2022; LaBriola & Schneider, 2021), some evidence suggests convergence across SES over time when it comes to certain early experiences of and parental investments in young children (Bassok et al., 2016). Mothers with less education are dedicating more time specifically on activities that promote social, cognitive, and linguistic skills than in the past, thus narrowing previous gaps by SES in parental time focused on child development (Cha & Park, 2021).

Socioeconomic factors—financial resources included—are associated with parental investments and both physical and psychosocial aspects of home learning environments (Lugo-Gil & Tamis-LeMonda, 2008; Mao, 2022; Votruba-Drzal, 2003). As such, increased financial resources may have the potential to promote different parental investments, including in home learning environments. Indeed, increased income is associated with improvements in the quality of home learning environments, particularly for families of infants who had the least income and fewest stimulating materials to begin with (Dearing & Taylor, 2007). Evidence suggests financial resources may also have cumulative effects on early childhood development, highlighting the importance of the very earliest years (Lugo-Gil & Tamis-LeMonda, 2008). While these studies indicate both time and money invested in home learning environments may play a part in early childhood outcomes, monetary investments are also associated with more parental time spent engaging children at home (Yeung et al., 2002). In contrast to these quantitative analyses focused on child outcomes, in the present study, we qualitatively explore how mothers of infants and toddlers think about and execute investments of time and money, which gives insight into the different ways home learning environments are developed and implemented.

Directing public investments to families has the potential to support early learning. For example, public income support programs for families are associated with increased child development-oriented expenditures among families who had fewer economic resources for such spending (Jackson & Schneider, 2022). Cash transfers could be one type of income support. With unconditional cash transfer programs, parents have the discretion to deploy increased resources how they deem best for their families, given the options they see available. The autonomy unconditional cash transfers allow may facilitate parents achieving their own goals and priorities regarding the environments they construct for their children and the ways in which they spend their time with children (Gennetian et al., 2021). This could include creating and leveraging an enriching home learning environment.

Parental Agency

Transforming parental investments into home learning environments may seem straightforward. However, parents face different options, means, and constraints as they consider the early experiences and environments they want and can provide for their infants and toddlers. Simply put, agency is “one’s ability to pursue goals that one values” (Alkire, 2005, p. 122) and embodies both the freedom to choose what to pursue and the power to act on those choices (Alkire, 2008; Sen, 1985). Self-efficacy serves a foundational role in personal agency; self-efficacy interacts with elements, like forethought and self-regulation, to then mediate the activation of agency (Bandura, 2001, 2018). In addition, agency serves an important function in the capability approach, which emphasizes what people can be or do, as opposed to the resources they have (Davis, 2015; Robeyns, 2021). For example, instead of focusing only on the resources parents have or need to support their children’s early learning, the question becomes whether parents are able to create the developmental context they desire for their infants and toddlers. The capability approach considers whether people can use their resources in transforming opportunities into realities. A wide range of personal, social, and environmental factors determine the extent to which this can happen (Robeyns, 2017).

Studies of how parents approach school readiness, skill development, and academic socialization at home have rarely focused on the role of parental self-efficacy and agency together. Without this perspective, we miss how it is that parents’ beliefs in their abilities translate into actual parental engagement, a pivotal understanding for better structuring policy and programs to support parents in realizing the goals they have for their young children’s development. In one exception, Coba-Rodriguez and colleagues (2020) described the agency Latina mothers with limited economic resources exhibited in preparing their preschoolers in Head Start for school. Mothers evaluated their children’s development, leveraged their creativity and resources in using educational materials, wove learning into daily routines, and created stimulating experiences. Specifically, “mothers demonstrated agency by purchasing material that would benefit their children’s academic competencies” (Coba-Rodriguez et al., 2020, p. 2692). Head Start performance standards emphasize family engagement in children’s development and early learning, but many children and families do not have access to such programs, especially most infants and toddlers. From existing work, we also cannot discern whether programs like Head Start induce certain parental approaches or leverage existing parenting attributes (e.g., do parents without children in Head Start engage in similar practices). In the present study, we expand on this prior work by gaining insights into how parents think about and enact investments in home learning environments outside of the context of these types of early care and education programs. We consider the perspective and experiences of mothers with infants and toddlers, the majority of whom are not enrolled in high-quality early education programs, like Head Start.

The Current Study

In the present study, we draw on the narratives of 80 women participating in BFY to examine how mothers think about and enact investments of time and money with their infants and toddlers, focusing on facets of parenting that may be most resource dependent, like creating stimulating home learning environments. Much of the research on parental investments and engagement in home learning environments has been quantitative, and when focused on early childhood in the US, has often drawn on older datasets describing children born 25 or more years ago (see, for example, Iruka, 2017; Riser et al., 2020; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019). Much of the qualitative work exploring the related perspectives of families with limited economic resources has typically engaged parents of preschoolers, many of whom attended Head Start (see, for example, Coba-Rodriguez et al., 2020; Jarrett & Coba-Rodriguez, 2019), limiting understanding of the perspectives and experiences of parents of infants and toddlers and of parents with limited access to this kind of early childhood education. How parents view their role in their child’s growth and development during the first years of life, and engage their children accordingly, can foreshadow their future engagement in their children’s learning and academic success (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019; Toth et al., 2020). Given the limited institutional supports available for infants and toddlers in the US, parents are often left to their own devices in setting this foundation in these first years of childhood. Thus, understanding how mothers conceptualize their responsibilities as parents to infants and toddlers, and perform said roles can inform the design and implementation of effective early childhood development supports.

Baby’s First Years (BFY)—an experiment examining the impact of unconditional cash transfers on early child development—provides insights into how mothers approach parental investments when resource constraints are eased. One thousand mothers with limited incomes from four metropolitan areas in the US, diverse in population and policy landscape, were randomly assigned to receive either a monthly gift of $333 or $20 on a debit card for the first 76 months of their child’s life. In the first three years of receiving the cash gifts, differences emerged in parents’ child-specific expenditures and time on child-enriching activities. Mothers receiving the large cash gift were more likely to purchase books and toys and spent more on these types of expenditures (Gennetian et al., 2024). This shows how additional cash resources can allow mothers to invest in materials that, in turn, support their child’s development. However, this alone does not tell us how mothers use these material investments. Mothers may simply provide the materials to their children, shaping the physical environment in which their children grow. Yet, mothers in BFY with the large cash gift also reported reading books and telling stories more often than mothers receiving the small cash gift, and they spent more time engaging in these and other play-based activities with their children (Gennetian et al., 2024). Together, these maternal monetary and time investments indicate that when resource constraints are relaxed, changes to home learning environments occur through specific expenditure decisions and time allocations that mothers make. There are limits in what we can glean from the quantitative data alone, however. We cannot discern how mothers think about these time and money investments. These perspectives are important to understand because their views of and decisions about said investments provide key insights into how policies like unconditional cash transfers can tap into their sense of agency in ways that promote early childhood development.

We uncover how BFY mothers seek to foster their child’s development and how they organize daily life and child activities. Our findings contextualize the BFY quantitative findings that demonstrate the impact of an unconditional cash transfer on parental investments made for their infants and toddlers (Gennetian et al., 2024). As cash transfer programs garner more policy attention, understanding how we can expect parenting behavior to respond is important in evaluating this intervention tool. Our study sheds light on how mothers with limited incomes see their role in early learning and the parenting approaches they use with their young children while providing additional insights into the role that resource constraints may play in shaping the parenting of infants and toddlers.

Method

As a randomized controlled trial, Baby’s First Years (BFY) tests the effect of a monthly unconditional cash benefit on child development. Recruitment of 1,000 mothers living below the federal poverty line occurred in hospitals across New York City, New Orleans, Omaha, and the Twin Cities, where mothers were approached after giving birth to the focal child in the study. To be eligible, mothers had to be at least 18 years old and to have had a single birth that did not require neonatal intensive care. After consenting to participate in a child development study, mothers agreed to be randomly assigned to receive $333 or $20 each month; they received this money for 76 months. The cash gift—disseminated via debit card—came with no conditions; mothers spent the money at their discretion and faced no requirements to continue to receive it (see Halpern-Meekin et al., 2024 for implementation details). For most public assistance programs, the gift did not count against eligibility or level of benefits, nor was it taxable.

When focal children were infants and toddlers, Baby’s First Years: Mothers’ Voices (BFY: MV)—the qualitative companion study to the RCT—engaged 80 mothers in ongoing, semi-structured interviews. Due to resource constraints, BFY: MV initially included only two of the four BFY sites. We selected mothers using stratified random sampling to ensure inclusion of mothers from New Orleans (50 mothers) and the Twin Cities (30 mothers) proportional to the larger study, equal numbers of mothers receiving the large and small cash gifts in each site (40 total mothers in each gift group), and adequate representation of first-time mothers in each site (29 percent of mothers total; see Table 1). Ten percent of mothers were Hispanic. Sixty-five percent of mothers identified as Black, 15 percent identified with multiple racial identities, 11 percent identified as White, and 9 percent identified with another racial identity. When we first interviewed BFY: MV mothers, their ages ranged from 19 to 42 years, with a median of 27; the focal children were between 10 and 21 months old, with a median age of 13 months. At this time, 56 percent of mothers were in a romantic relationship, and for most, their partner was the father of the focal child. Mothers’ households ranged from two to 12 members, with a median of four. Forty percent of mothers lived with their romantic partner, and 32 percent lived with a member of an older generation, such as their own parent or grandparent. Thirty-eight percent of mothers reported formal employment at this time, and 38 percent routinely used nonparental care for the BFY focal child. At Wave 2, 45 percent of mothers were formally employed, and 45 percent of children were routinely in nonparental care, though not all mothers who worked used nonparental care.

Table 1.

Descriptive Characteristics of BFY: MV Mothers, Focal Children and their Households

	#	%	Median	Min	Max
Mothers
Ethnicity
Hispanic	8	10
Non-Hispanic	72	90
Race
Black	52	65
Multiple	12	15
Other	7	9
White	9	11
Age (in years)
Wave 1	80		27	19	42
Children
Number at Wave 1	80		2	1	6
Had Child after Focal Child	10	13
Formal Employment
Wave 1	29	36
Wave 2	32	45
BFY Gift Amount
$333 per month	40	50
$20 per month	40	50
Focal Children
First Born	23	29
Age (in months)
Wave 1	80		13	10	21
Wave 2	71		23	21	31
Regularly in Nonparental Care
Wave 1	30	38
Wave 2	32	45
Households (at Wave 1)
Site
New Orleans	50	63
Twin Cities	30	38
Full-Time Residents	80		4	2	12
Co-residing Romantic Partner	32	40
Co-residing Older Generation	25	31

Note: N=80 at Wave 1. N=71 at Wave 2. One mother’s employment status was unknown at Wave 1. Regular nonparental care may reflect any amount of time spent in care.

For the present study, we draw on data from the first two waves of interviews with BFY: MV mothers. The majority of first wave interviews, which began in July 2019 occurred in-person; the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a transition to phone interviews that continued into the second wave of interviews, which concluded in August 2021. Of the original 80 participating mothers, 71 completed the second wave interview. Approximately 9 to 12 months elapsed between interviews, when focal children were between 21 and 31 months old, with a median age of 23 months, at the second interview. As not to overwhelm mothers with research communications and requests, we planned semi-structured interviews so that some time typically elapsed between our conversations and the data collection for the larger BFY study (Gennetian et al., 2024).

Each interview covered a wide range of topics related to family life and parenting, as well as finances and experiences with BFY. More specifically, in each interview we asked mothers to tell us about a typical day for each of their children that included probes about care or school arrangements for their children, as well as how they made decisions about expenditures for their children (see Appendix A for key questions from the semi-structured interview guide relevant to the present study). Notably, we did not explicitly ask about home learning environments, rather this emerged spontaneously in mothers’ narratives, nor did we discuss with mothers their sense of agency. We recorded and transcribed interviews at each wave.

Our analytic strategy included deductive and inductive approaches to coding transcripts, completed using the qualitative data analysis software, Dedoose 9.0. We applied deductive codes developed from prior literature or aligned with the interview guide, such as Children’s Daily Activities, Allocation of BFY Money, and Expenditure/Consumption Decisions. At this stage of analysis, we used an ongoing process of coding consistency checks to ensure a shared understanding and application of codes across coders. From mothers’ discussions related to home learning environments, we inductively developed the themes and typology that compose our findings. Note that mothers did not use the term home learning environments in their narratives; rather, we identified these instances using our definition of home learning environments (discussed above). Although mothers more often spoke in depth about their infants and toddlers, their accounts were not exclusive to the focal children, as home learning environments may serve all the children living in the home.

Findings

From their narratives, we learned about mothers’ desires to create meaningful early learning experiences for their children, as well as motivations, intentions, and self-efficacy for doing so. In alignment with the quantitative BFY findings regarding expenditures and time use (Gennetian et al., 2024), mothers described deploying resources—both money and time—to support their children’s early learning at home. Exercising their agency, mothers discussed engaging their children in a wide variety of activities, including reading books and singing nursery rhymes, and they said they did so to foster their children’s skill development.

Most BFY: MV mothers described facets of home learning environments in at least one of their interviews when their child was an infant or toddler. Their discussions varied in content and depth. Some mothers gave more expansive descriptions, explanations, or demonstrations, while other mothers made more focused comments or provided specific examples. In general, these narratives covered topics such as how they viewed their role in home learning, their intentionality in constructing home learning environments, including their choices of materials and activities, and their educational and developmental goals for their young children at home. Some mothers made general references or broad statements related to learning at home, such as generic mentions of play occurring at home, materials they had at home, and a willingness to purchase various learning materials. Because we did not explicitly ask mothers about home learning environments, we likely do not capture a full picture of mothers’ actual engagement in cultivating home learning, as there may be mothers who engage in other ways but did not offer such accounts unprompted.

From the narratives, we learn how mothers exercised agency as they engaged their children in the home learning environments they constructed, which is reflected in examples of their sense of self-efficacy, the intentionality in their efforts, the forethought they gave, and the motivation they drew on. In conjunction with accounts of interactions, activities, and environments taking place at home, we find that mothers could often be characterized as dynamic engagers, selective cultivators, aspirational adopters, or procurement agents. Dynamic engagers, about one-fifth of mothers, more often expounded on their intentions, plans, and motivations and portrayed their sense of self-efficacy in supporting their children’s development. Their sense of agency came through as they spoke about facets of home learning environments, including interactions, experiences, and physical spaces and materials, and often described resourceful ways to cultivate them. Selective cultivators, about one-fourth of mothers, gave accounts in which they exercised their agency in focused ways, often addressing particular elements of home learning environments. Some of these mothers emphasized their responsibility to teach their young children, whereas others highlighted how they invested time or money in constructing stimulating environments at home. Some mothers’ narratives indicated they were aspirational adopters (around one-twelfth) in which they expressed a desire or attempts to cultivate home learning environments but faced barriers in making these a consistent reality. Lastly, about one-third of mothers’ narratives centered on evaluating, endorsing, acquiring, or curating materials oriented toward early learning or child development, taking on a role as procurement agent. Below, we provide examples of mothers from each of these groups as we discuss overarching themes.

Because we did not explicitly ask mothers about home learning environments, it’s important to keep in mind that these categorizations are based on what mothers chose to share when elements of home learning environments came to mind in response to our questions. Had we asked more explicit questions about home learning environments, the categories and their distribution might look different. Be that as it may, these characterizations underscore that parental agency in cultivating child development at home is not experienced as all or nothing. In the following sections, we describe how self-efficacy showed up in mothers’ narratives, the intentional ways mothers cultivated home learning environments, and the materials procured and deployed for home learning environments. Note that we use pseudonyms for all mothers and children to maintain confidentiality.

Mothers’ Sense of Self-efficacy

We heard that many mothers trusted their own abilities to facilitate their children’s development, expressing confidence in their abilities to support their young children’s early learning and, ultimately, their preparation for school. When we first met Khadisha, a Black mother of one from New Orleans, like many of the mothers, she shared hesitations about enrolling her 12-month-old in an early care and education (ECE) program:

When [my daughter] learn how to talk, that’s when I want to bring her to, you know, let her go to school. Maybe. But she don’t know how to talk now. So, like Head Start and all that stuff like that, I don’t know about that, because she can’t talk, she can’t say if somebody did something.

Perhaps when her daughter is old enough to start pre-kindergarten, Khadisha said she might use ECE, but she asserted that until then, “I can teach her stuff myself during that time.” Khadisha, a dynamic engager, saw herself as her daughter’s first teacher, and she was not alone in this sentiment, as other mothers also conveyed their agency in creating a supportive learning environment for their young children. Shanice, a Black mother of two in New Orleans, was also not using ECE for her 14-month-old son when we spoke to her. She told us that for now, she was “teaching him myself because now he knows his head. He knows his eyes. He knows his ears. He knows his nose. So, he plays his little games throughout the day.” Shanice, also a dynamic engager, added that her own mother—an ECE teacher—shared with her the strategy of information and skill repetition throughout the day, a strategy she had adopted. Deja, a Black mother of one in New Orleans, outlined her morning routine with her 12-month-old son. “I try to teach him so many different things like in the morning. I turn the TV off, and we’ll just sit and talk.” A dynamic engager as well, she reiterated that some of her favorite parts of motherhood included “just teaching him.” Yasmin, a Black mother of three in New Orleans, the youngest being 23 months old, reminisced about how things like the pot and pan drum sets and pillow forts that she had created with her children at home “lets their imagination flow.” She was a dynamic engager, emphasizing play and fun, as she told us, “I feel like I’ve done a good job with, you know, helping them express themselves and also learning at the same time.”

Though many did, not all mothers felt similarly to Khadisha, Shanice, Deja, and Yasmin. Precious, a selective cultivator, was a Black mother of 21-month-old and 4-year-old daughters who attended an ECE program in New Orleans. She reflected on how she saw her role, “[I] feel like they learn better at school. I feel like I’m not the type of parent who does well with teaching.” She explained, “I think that it is important to know, like, your strengths, and it’s just not one of my strengths.” Rather, while her children learned outside of the home, Precious felt her time could be allocated in other ways for her family: “I can pay bills and … I can just get housework done.” Like the mothers above, Precious valued her children’s learning early in life, even if she didn’t see herself as their best teacher. However, we later learn below, this view did not preclude her engagement in activities that supported her daughters’ development.

Like Precious, Deiondre, a Black mother of four in New Orleans, saw the benefit of ECE and enrolled her daughter, Seneca, in Early Head Start before she turned two. However, from Deiondre’s perspective, this did not displace her role in her daughter’s early education. She described, “[J]ust like I expect for them to teach her, I teach her at home.. . I know that I could tell the difference when, you know, like when they teach her and I teach her. Like that’s going to guarantee her to learn versus she just learning it from one place.” As a dynamic engager, she didn’t view what ECE had to offer as a substitute for the home learning environment she provided Seneca. Rather, Deiondre believed both were valuable and together could best ensure her daughter’s early learning.

Intentional Home Learning Environments and Approaches to Parenting

Mothers often had a clear idea of what they wanted their children to know and be able to do in the first few years of life and what they needed to be ready for school, a priority and motivation for many. For example, Eve, an Asian mother of one in the Twin Cities and a selective cultivator, explained her priorities in helping her 21-month-old son learn, describing that he “really loves learning his ABCs, the colors, the numbers, and his animals.” Mothers used various tools to support children learning these concepts at home, including technology, media, books, and toys. Simone, a Black mother of one in New Orleans, shared that she’d purchased an iPad for her two-year-old daughter, with which she watches programming Simone sees as educational. As a procurement agent, she explained the purpose and value of her purchase, “[S]he knows the videos word for word, she knows her shapes and colors and numbers from one to 10.” Ana, a Latina mother of three in New Orleans, was a selective cultivator. She contrasted her learning priorities for her school-aged daughters, which included reading, writing, and math, to those for her 17-month-old daughter, Mia, noting the materials she sees as fitting, “[F]or example, Mia’s case—distinguish colors, numbers, shapes—those types of toys. It is more appropriate to spend on her now that she’s starting to learn.” Mothers’ ideas about the skills their children needed to develop guided the decisions they made in constructing their children’s home learning environment.

We learned from mothers how they intentionally wove into their days opportunities for their infants and toddlers to develop skills. Chantel, a dynamic engager, was a Black mother of three in New Orleans. When we met her for the first time, her children were all under the age of five, with her youngest, Logan, 13 months old. She described her routine with her children, walking us through their day:

I sing the nursery rhymes and they follow along. We do art work. Cardboard art work but we do art work. Like I say, they’re babies so it’s beautiful but, you know, it’s baby work. We color, we draw, we trace. We’re working on handwriting with my four-year old. That’s fun. Yeah. It’s at that stage where the ‘b’ is a ‘d’ and the ‘r’ is backwards so, yeah, it’s cute. .. We flew kites the other day. That was fun. .. Yeah, like some dollar kites from Wal-Mart. And my daughter had the hang of it, and she’s really fast. So, when she runs, it’s like way up in the air. And I let [my 2-year-old son] hold one and Logan, he didn’t care too much. We have bubbles. I don’t know what it is about kids and bubbles, but we play with bubbles. I have this little thing you just turn it on, and the bubbles just go. Best creation in the world.

Chantel orchestrated a range of play-based experiences and drew upon different materials to engage her children. From using gross motor skills while flying kites and chasing bubbles to practicing language and literacy skills through nursery rhymes, she structured diverse early learning experiences at home, targeted at each of her children’s developmental stages. She had thought out objectives for her children’s learning and development, which was evident in her explanation of the opportunities that she structured for her children to practice their fine motor skills, but she also presented these as “fun,” not just as skill building.

Raven, a dynamic engager, was a mother of one in New Orleans who identified as Black and American Indian, who took great care in structuring a range of experiences for her 22-month-old son, Ryan, so that he had the opportunity to learn and develop skills. She expressly attended to Ryan’s verbal skills after identifying an issue with his hearing when she was worried that he wasn’t more verbal. While they waited for him to get ear tubes to help his hearing, Raven wasted no time in supporting Ryan’s speech development. She started early in the day with activities her son liked, saying, “He will wake up around like, eight-ish, 8:30. I would give him a cup, give him his coloring book and some colors, because he just happens to want to draw on everything.” Continuing with their day, Raven gave examples from their daily routine of the ways she engaged her son in learning and explained why she used those strategies:

I would possibly put on one of his favorite TV shows, Cat in the Hat, Word Party, something that’s fundamental. If we have free time, if it’s not raining, or what have you, I would get on my bike, which has a little baby seat in the back, and I would take him for a ride around the neighborhood. We’ll come back in, I’ll give him a snack. We’ll read a book. Or, if we don’t read a book, I’ll try to help him with flashcards. If not flashcards, I would do this video one of my family members sent me like a long time ago. That kind of helps them with production of words and sounds and clapping and smiling and different facial expressions and stuff like that. I will put on something like that to soothe him… He’ll wake up from his nap, he’ll eat dinner. We’ll sit down, possibly try to do something else that’s fundamental because I’ve been really pushing the issue of him talking. And around like 8:30 or nine o’clock, he’ll be out for the rest of the night.

As we heard Raven describe their day together, her intentionality was apparent in how she outlined different points in the day when she orchestrated experiences for the benefit of her son’s development. Her very clear developmental goals for Ryan’s speech came through, as she described her motivation for using books and media to support specific facets of her son’s verbal skills and fundamentals of communication. Raven created a routine full of opportunities for learning and practicing skills through play and favorite activities, as well as times for interaction and bonding between mother and son.

Mothers specified an array of aims for their children’s development and learning from the fine motor and literacy skills that Chantel described to the verbal skills essential to Raven. For Wendy, a White mother of one in the Twin Cities, social skills and dual language learning were her early learning priorities for her 21-month-old daughter, Karina. Wendy, a dynamic engager like Raven and Chantel, highly valued skill development and creatively pooled a range of resources to ensure her child had opportunities to practice skills. She explained that they had a big family with upwards of 20 cousins near her daughter’s age, “So she gets a lot of socialization with kids her age, which is nice, you know, because that’s, like, one thing I think, like, if I didn’t have that I’d probably want to seek out.” Wendy leveraged the advantage of having her big family to support her daughter’s development of social skills, but that’s not the only way she supported her daughter. She and Karina’s father were teaching their daughter foundational concepts like colors, body parts, and numbers, something Karina felt confident doing. In fact, they set up a part of her room to be dedicated to learning:

She’s a very, like, hands-on person. So, whether that be, like, you know, a book, like flashcards or, like, an electronic—Like, she has a little, like, activity desk and, like, little tablets and, stuff like that. And then she is bilingual, so she has a lot of her toys. .. speak both English and Spanish, which we think is cool, and she doesn’t watch a lot of TV.. . She’s always running around, but she does like one show, Pocoyo. And when she watches that show, she watches it in English and Spanish, which I think is cool.. . Like, she’s very vocal, and she speaks, like, half of it will be English, half of it will be Spanish.

Wendy felt she was in tune with her daughter’s learning style, using this knowledge to find the best matches in toys and materials for Karina, particularly in support of her language learning. Confident in their abilities to support their children’s early learning, mothers like Wendy, Raven, and Chantel exercised a great deal of agency as they constructed home learning environments and created meaningful early learning experiences. With a clear sense of the skill development they wanted to foster, they made purposeful decisions about investments of time, money, and space in their homes to cultivate enriching environments for their kids.

As we heard from some mothers though, their intentions didn’t always come to fruition as they had hoped. Abigail, an aspirational adopter, was a mother of one in New Orleans who identified as White and American Indian, who shared with us that engaging with her 13-month-old daughter was a priority, but that it could be challenging at times, with the outcome feeling outside of her control:

You know, a lot of times she doesn’t want to learn. I don’t know where she gets that. She must get that from her dad because I like to learn. She doesn’t. She’s not interested in, like, books and stuff. I try to read to her, and she shuts the book, you know? I try to get her to put the animals in the hole, and she doesn’t want to do it. She wants to throw them on the floor. She would rather not.

Despite her attempts to engage her daughter in early learning, it often hadn’t turned out as Abigail wanted. Trinity, a White mother of four in the Twin Cities, was also an aspirational adopter. She described difficulty balancing all the responsibilities of parenting infants and toddlers:

[A]s a mother, as a parent, we don’t always have time to sit there and teach our children either, like numbers and words. So, like, I know I do work on that a little bit with my little ones. But for the majority of the time, I am cleaning or cooking or trying to provide.

With time a limited resource, providing and caring for her children demanded most of Trinity’s time, leaving less for explicit home learning.

We also heard some accounts from mothers that emphasized how they set the stage for activities but let them unfold as they may. That is, they deployed agency in setting up the environment for their kids to engage in developmentally appropriate activities but focused less on that teacher role. For example, Nakeisha, a Black mother of two, described her 22-month-old son’s play, “He be in his own little world. Once he gets his toys, he’ll be playing. He really doesn’t bother you.” As a procurement agent, Nakeisha provided the time and materials for her son to engage independently in solitary play. However, she wasn’t explicit in whether she took an active role in play or had particular developmental goals in mind as he played. Precious, who explained above that she saw her children’s child care as better at teaching than she was, described her time with her daughters, “I chill with my girls. We do things. We’ll color. Like I say, we’ll just sit on the balcony and just chill.” Her description of their time suggests she has no agenda during the time they relax. Precious presents coloring as a leisure activity in which they are enjoying their time together, rather than a learning activity to develop fine motor skills or identify colors.

Material Investments in Home Learning Environments

Like we’ve seen in narratives so far, mothers employed a variety of materials, including books, puzzles, media, toys, art supplies, and technology to promote their children’s early learning. The engagement we see as mothers supported knowledge acquisition and skill development represents one type of investment in their infants and toddlers, in which they dedicated time and cognitive resources in planning and implementing. The tangible materials mothers purchased and used for skill development are another type of investment they made in their infants and toddlers. Mothers talked about materials in varied ways, including defining selection criteria, endorsing certain types of materials, evaluating specific options, referencing their home inventory, and describing how materials promoted their children’s development and learning.

Mothers invested in materials from which they believed their children could learn. For example, Soledad, a Latina mother of three in the Twin Cities, described purchasing toys that supported her 13-month-old son’s development, like a toy that taught shapes and spatial relations; to make sure her son would like the toy, she chose one featuring his favorite character, Mickey Mouse. Sasha was a mother of a 31-month-old in New Orleans and identified as Black and American Indian. She described how she purchased books and toys that promoted early numeracy and literacy. “I just want to make sure they have lots of numbers or ABCs … [C]ertain toys you can press a button, and it’ll say numbers, like it’ll say a number to them, the ABCs, colors, and stuff like that. Try to pick out stuff like that.” Both Soledad and Sasha, who were procurement agents, carefully considered their purchase of materials, using their self-determined criteria to decide the types of toys and books in which to invest. Centering their selections on their sons’ learning, both mothers chose items that fostered varied facets of learning—such as cognitive development and fine motor skills—while ensuring these selections would be engaging for their children—Soledad through favorite characters and Sasha through interactive features.

When we first met Leila, a Black mother in the Twin Cities, her three children were between 14 months and 6 years old. As she told us how she had structured their summer mornings, we learned that her children had time dedicated towards literacy activities. She spent time with her youngest, Jamal: “I sit down with him, teach him. We have picture books, you know, try asking him questions.” Here, Leila, a dynamic engager, described the intentional approach she took with Jamal, setting routines for reading, looking at picture books together, and asking questions to engage him in reading comprehension as they go—a description suggestive of key elements of dialogic reading, an important process for early literacy (Flynn, 2011). She invested in their home learning environment, purchasing selected materials, such as “some books I buy for [my 6-year-old], like writing books, coloring books, you know, and that’s—puzzle book. Yeah. So, he does those ones, and his sister, she does the kindergarten book that I got for her.” Not only did Leila purchase these kinds of materials, but she also created a playroom for her children where “they have a trampoline. .. a kitchen playset for my daughter and then for my son he has—they have different, basically different kinds of toys. Puzzles and different toys. All of them.” Again, we see the purposeful presence of materials that support skills across developmental domains and encourage different types of play. We see that books were a particularly important purchase for Leila, as she used them to promote literacy at home.

Serena, a Black mother of three from New Orleans, told us about a community dance class for babies she attended with her 11-month-old daughter, Harmony. Gesturing to the nearby literacy materials they received at the event, she shared, “[S]o they got two little books to read. And you know, we do our reading time. She do her nursery rhymes. She really love her nursery rhymes.” Serena, a dynamic engager, described Harmony as “very observant,” explaining that is how her daughter learns. She gave an example of the exchanges she has with Harmony. “[Y]ou know, they have peek-a-boo, and she like, she doing me. She holding the curtains and—so it teaches her, you know. So, and I just go on her vibe, like what she wants to do.” Serena had modeled how peek-a-boo works, and Harmony had taken on the role of hiding. In Serena’s descriptions, we see the “serve and return” process of parent-child interaction (Komanchuk et al., 2023) being fostered through her responsiveness and use of materials she has for Harmony. Serena followed her daughter’s lead, building on her interests—an effective approach to early learning (Shue, 2009)—to support her learning at home. Although a willingness to spend money on educational materials and toys that promote learning was prevalent among mothers, Serena gave a less common example with the community dance classes. Mothers did not often discuss leveraging external opportunities outside of ECE specifically for their children’s early learning and development beyond occasional trips to venues like the children’s museum, parks, or the zoo. They did, however, express a desire for more community resources for young children (Barnes et al., 2024).

Overall, mothers described their choices regarding toys, books, and other materials that they invested in for their infants and toddlers, including items that presented novel experiences for their children and fostered their early learning. Mothers were not just purchasing or acquiring materials for their children; they curated the materials to be in line with their children’s developmental needs and to play to their children’s likes and interests, and then mothers purposefully used them to engage with their children. Although accounts of materials were central to the narratives of procurement agents, we heard similar discussions across all four groups.

The Baby’s First Years Cash Gift

Similar proportions of mothers receiving the large and small BFY cash gifts discussed home learning environments in their narratives. Regardless of whether they were experiencing a larger increase in cash resources via BFY, we heard from mothers on the role of home learning environments and their efforts to construct them. This is a critical point in that it speaks to the question of what role resource constraints play in parenting approaches. The commonalities across gift groups suggest that home learning environments matter to these mothers, available resources notwithstanding. However, the quantitative BFY results demonstrated greater likelihoods, frequencies, and amounts of money and time investments among mothers receiving the larger gift; they spent more on child-specific goods, including books and toys (Gennetian et al., 2024). In the present qualitative study, we did not ask mothers for a full accounting of the BFY expenditures to be able to analyze their use of these funds specifically to construct home learning environments. However, mothers did see the BFY gift as ‘the baby’s money,’ with 89% of mothers spending BFY funds on the focal child, including all mothers receiving the large gift (Halpern-Meekin et al., 2024). Though we interpret these marginal differences with caution, slightly more dynamic engagers and selective cultivators received the large BFY cash gift, and slightly more aspirational adopters and procurement agents received the small BFY cash gift. Together, these findings suggest that resource constraints shape the extent to which mothers may be able to exercise their sense of agency in constructing home learning environments by limiting parental investments of time and money.

Discussion

Mothers purposefully structured their time, invested their resources, and shaped their spaces to create meaningful home learning environments. In their words and actions, we see mothers’ priorities for their infants and toddlers that served to motivate intentional efforts, and their confidence in their own choices and abilities, which coalesced into a sense of agency in scaffolding their children’s development that could be acted on, even with limited financial resources on hand. Though early learning and development were shared values among most mothers, we saw differences in how efficacious they felt and how they considered and enacted home learning environments, as reflected across the groups in our findings.

The present study extends the body of research on parental investments and home learning environments in important ways. Our findings shed light on the perspectives and experiences specifically of mothers with infants and toddlers, a compelling developmental phase as it may represent the earliest initiation of home learning environments which matters because past home learning environments predict future home learning environments (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019; Toth et al., 2020). Our findings align with research revealing a convergence in parental time investments among parents across socioeconomic status (Bassok et al., 2016; Cha & Park, 2021) and contextualizes quantitative results that mothers with limited incomes allocate additional resources toward investments in home learning environments (Gennetian et al., 2024). Altogether, this suggests that resource constraints may be drivers of socioeconomic differences in parents’ approaches to supporting early learning. Lastly, we gain insights into how parental investments and agency work together to facilitate the cultivation of home learning environments.

Mothers placed a great deal of value on developmental opportunities for their young children. The capability approach lends itself to better understanding whether and how mothers are able to create the developmental contexts they desired for their infants and toddlers. The fact that mothers raised the topic of home learning environments and practices without explicit prompting is telling. It suggests not only that home learning environments are at the forefront of their minds when thinking about how their infants and toddlers spend their days, but also that home learning environments represent to them a real opportunity to support early learning, and one that many felt they could act on. Mothers often chose to pursue this avenue for early learning and demonstrated how they transformed resources—particularly the parental investments of time and money—into home learning environments.

In theory, home learning environments are not the only opportunity for early learning; early care and education (ECE) is another. However, most mothers had not enrolled their infants and toddlers in any type of early care and education, often due to high costs and distrust (Hoiting et al., 2026). In this way, we see how external factors might shape how mothers are able to convert resources for early learning purposes. If high-quality, trustworthy ECE is either unaffordable given the resources available or inaccessible to communities, it no longer represents a viable opportunity. In contrast, we see how mothers center their homes as the backdrop for parental investments, the setting for early learning in which they may perceive the most autonomy and control in using their resources. The self-efficacy mothers expressed, particularly among dynamic engagers and selective cultivators, meant they were primed to leverage those resources to create the home learning environments they desired. Indeed, mothers conveyed a sense of agency and exerted that agency in cultivating home learning environments for their infants and toddlers.

Prior studies have documented feelings of self-efficacy and demonstrations of agency among mothers with preschoolers in Head Start in engaging in learning at home (Coba-Rodriguez et al., 2020; Jarrett & Coba-Rodriguez, 2019). Our findings suggest these home learning environment trajectories are not launched only once children are in formalized early care and education but that this path of parental engagement started in the first two years of life. Furthermore, our findings indicate this sense of agency among mothers is not emerging only once their children reach preschool or only if they are engaged in certain educational institutions that promote parental engagement. Rather, many mothers feel efficacious in shaping how their infants and toddlers learn and grow at home. This is not to diminish the value of programs like Head Start and the ways they can contribute to high-quality home learning environments. Rather, it is to say that this sense of agency is an asset some mothers bring with them into their children’s ECE environments. Future research could examine how service providers, like Head Start, home visiting, and parent education programs, could identify opportunities to foster parents’ self-efficacy, leverage parental agency, and address barriers that may negatively impact parents’ ability to transform resources into realized early learning opportunities. That is, intervention programs could investigate how they could support aspirational adopters, for example, in realizing their home learning visions to become selective cultivators or dynamic engagers.

This qualitative work sheds more light on the quantitative findings regarding the effect of the BFY cash gift on maternal investments. Consistent with BFY findings of increased child-specific spending, including the purchase of books and toys, and increased engagement with young children among mothers receiving the large cash gift (Gennetian et al., 2024), the narratives of BFY: MV mothers reveal their intentions and practices around early learning, especially skill development, their use of time, space, and money to accomplish their goals, and the planned purchases made to support their infants and toddlers. Our findings indicate that some of the mothers of infants and toddlers use their financial resources to exercise their agency, deploying them to create the home learning environments they want for their children.

Using this increased income for these types of purchases may be self-reinforcing. Mothers experience positive emotional responses and a renewed sense of self-efficacy when making purchases that go beyond just meeting the basic needs of their children (Mistry et al., 2008), which can fuel their sense of agency. Parental investments in early learning materials, like the books and toys Sasha and Soledad described carefully selecting for their sons, may encourage increased investments of time engaging with their children (Yeung et al., 2002). Positive feelings from these purchases and time spent engaging their children in the home learning environments they have constructed can then serve to bolster ongoing motivation for continued learning at home (Maloney et al., 2015).

Alleviating resource constraints through policy can take many forms from cash assistance like the BFY gift to in-kind benefits like SNAP to development-focused programs like Head Start; each has their benefits and limitations. However, if we adopt a policy objective concerned with whether parents are able to create the developmental context they desire for their infants and toddlers, unconditional cash transfer interventions may be a uniquely positioned policy response. Such cash transfers lend themselves to the sense of agency observed among the BFY: MV mothers. By design, these interventions proffer autonomy and choice (Gennetian et al., 2021). Reviving the Child Tax Credit expansion, for example, would be an option likely to activate parents’ agency to invest in their infants and toddlers due to the prioritization of parental autonomy. The unconditional nature would allow for parents to choose to invest resources in the manner that best fit their assessment of their families’ needs. For some, this might be the purchase of ECE experiences outside of the home. However, this would also enable investments in home learning environments like those mothers described in the present study. Parents could change how they use the money as their child develops or as their family’s needs change. A prescriptive policy, such as the provision of a package of home learning materials, may not have supported mothers in tailoring their investments to the needs of their young children in the same way, though future research could explore that possibility.

While our qualitative study is limited in making comparisons between the large- and small-gift groups, we contextualize our analysis using the results from the quantitative BFY study that is designed to detect statistically significant differences between mothers receiving the large and small cash gifts. Our qualitative findings provide a deeper exploration of the way in which mothers think about and shape home learning environments for their young children using their resources. That said, our findings reflect the experiences of this particular group of mothers from two different metropolitan areas in the US. Mothers in other geographic areas may have different approaches, and the practices of these mothers may evolve as their children get older. Because we did not systematically ask mothers about these topics, we likely did not capture the full frequency and range of ways in which mothers may support their children’s learning and development. Asking different questions might result in different responses. However, that the topic arose so commonly across mothers without specific prompting speaks to its importance in how mothers parent and leverage their resources to align with their parenting values.

Our findings suggest that if resource constraints explain, at least in part, SES differences in parenting approaches, policies to alleviate these constraints, like unconditional cash transfers (e.g., Child Tax Credit) offer a potential response. By alleviating the cost barrier experienced when income is limited, families can more fully enact their desired parenting approaches. Unconditional cash transfers, in contrast to benefits in other forms, like child care subsidies or program placements that prioritize early learning outside of the home, distinctively maximize parental choice while minimizing distribution costs and can channel parents’ sense of autonomy and competence to promote investments parents believe will work best for their family, whether that is through home learning environments or ECE (Gennetian et al., 2021). In this way, mothers may choose to exert their agency in cultivating home learning environments to facilitate their infants’ and toddlers’ development.