Opportunities matter. There’s a powerful link between access to opportunities in childhood—like high-quality child care, excellent classroom instruction, and structured after-school activities—and educational attainment and success in early adulthood. Research from Boston College’s Center for Thriving Children underscores the power of opportunity, showing that when children from low-income backgrounds are exposed to additional opportunities, their chances of graduating from a four-year college skyrocket.
“With more opportunities, kids have better math and literacy skills, better attitudes towards school, stronger connections with teachers, and are more likely to report being hopeful about their futures. All of those things matter for how far they go in their education. But there is also something more robust that happens when children are exposed to opportunities throughout their life. They land in a culture and community of thriving that surrounds them like a river. The current of opportunity is something that’s bigger than any one of those individual impacts on a child,” said Eric Dearing, Executive Director of the Center for Thriving Children.
Dearing is a leading expert on the impact of opportunity. His research over the past two decades has emphasized the power of families, early education and care, and neighborhood supports to bolster achievement for children growing up in poverty. Now Dearing and his team have launched the Growing Opportunities Lab, a key component of the Center for Thriving Children that will reframe their work through the lens of opportunity.
“It’s a misnomer to define the differences in achievement between children as achievement gaps, because it’s not an achievement issue, it’s an opportunity issue,” Dearing said. “For most of my career I was thinking about my work from an antipoverty standpoint. But we realized how valuable it would be to rebrand the work we’ve been doing—which has been going on in various forms for more than 20 years now—to connect with the very powerful framing around opportunities. This helps us identify and inform others about the things in life that build a child’s chances of thriving.”
The Growing Opportunities Lab has a three-pronged approach to improving developmental and educational opportunities for children: research when, how, and why opportunities matter; investigate how government policies impact opportunities for children; and partner with practitioners to bring more opportunities to more children.
Researching When, How, and Why Opportunities Matter
A cornerstone of the work of the Growing Opportunities Lab is conducting descriptive studies using long-term, longitudinal data to better understand the impact of opportunity on children.
A pivotal 2024 study by Dearing and his associates analyzed 26-year longitudinal data of children from low- and higher-income families in the United States to determine the impact of opportunities on educational attainment and life success. They found that the majority of children born into low-income households experienced one or fewer opportunities for thriving at home, childcare, school, afterschool, and in the neighborhood while nearly all children born into higher-income households repeatedly gained access to these opportunities. For children from low-income backgrounds, an increase from none to four opportunities was associated with increasing the likelihood of graduating from a four-year college from about 10 percent to about 50 percent.
Now, the Growing Opportunities Lab is expanding on this work by investigating when opportunities matter most.
“How much do early childhood opportunities matter? What about middle childhood and adolescent opportunities? The short answer is that opportunities matter in all of those stages. They are all associated with going further with your education and having a higher salary. But none of them can compete with getting repeated opportunities across all three stages. Children who get opportunities at each stage, are much more likely to graduate from college than anyone else. Opportunities always matter, they matter early and they matter later,” said Dearing.
Next, the Lab is investigating why opportunities matter.
“Is it because opportunities improve your math and literacy skills? Is it because they improve your attitude toward yourself and toward school? Is it because it improves hope? Is it that it allows you to find your niche in life? We’re finding that it’s all of the above and then some,” said Dearing. “When you’re in a neighborhood, in a home, in a school, and in an afterschool context in which you are being given repeated opportunities, you are exposed to a social and cultural capital of opportunity that has an even bigger impact than any individual opportunity.”
Identifying Policies to Increase Opportunities for Children
The Growing Opportunities Lab is also working to investigate how national policies can impact opportunities for children. The team is currently partnering with the Center for Educational Equity at the University of Oslo to study the impact of Norway’s progressive universal childcare and family leave policies.
“We want to find out how variations in national policies are impacting opportunities,” Dearing said.
One study is looking at the impact of affordable, high-quality, universal childcare on educational outcomes for children. The longitudinal study of hundreds of thousands of children has, so far, found that children who attend Norway’s universal childcare see improved academic performance through eighth grade. A second study is looking at ways in which Norway’s early childcare policy affects women’s wellbeing as they return to work from family leave and how that impacts overall family wellbeing.
Partnering with Communities to Grow Opportunity
The Growing Opportunities Lab team isn’t just researching the impact of opportunity, they’re working to create more opportunities for more children. Through a number of research-practice partnerships, the Lab is working to grow opportunities for early math learning.
“For children who have less access to opportunities because of poverty, even one additional opportunity can make a really big difference. So our work with different partners to grow opportunities in health clinics and libraries and other places where families are spending their time can impact children’s life outcomes,” said Sara Schnitzer, Programs Director for the Growing Opportunities Lab.
The team has partnered with Brookside Community Health Center in Jamaica Plain and MathTalk to make playful early math learning opportunities a part of pediatric visits through physical installations outside the health center and in its waiting and exam rooms. They also worked with Math Talk and a number of community organizations to create and study the impact of physical and virtual math trails in Boston’s Nubian Square. And next year, they’ll be installing math trails in Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo.
The team is also partnering with Revere Public Library to expand early math opportunities for local families.
“Libraries are doing an amazing job already in growing opportunities for children. But how can we grow opportunities within libraries for families, especially for math? Families think about libraries as being a place for reading opportunities, but we are working with librarians to think about what we can co-design and implement to bring more math opportunities to the community that utilizes that library,” said Schnitzer.
A Critical Piece of the Center for Thriving Children
The Growing Opportunities Lab is a pivotal part of the work of the Center for Thriving Children, which also houses City Connects. Dearing and his colleagues see the two working symbiotically to grow opportunities, with the scholarly work of the Lab directly informing the work of City Connects. Dearing added that City Connects itself offers a prime example of the power of opportunities.
“The opportunities that are being provided through City Connects—when children get tutoring, when children get to be in a club or activity they really enjoy, when they get support for social and emotional needs—they are building these connections that, when combined, are greater than the sum of their parts,” said Dearing.
Eric Dearing
Executive Director
Center for Thriving Children
Growing Opportunities Lab
“When opportunities surround a child and their family, it builds to something more than just skill growth or just improved social-emotional wellbeing. It creates a social and cultural community of hope.”
