Caregiver Cognitive Stimulation in Early Childhood and Child Development: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Caregivers’ provision of cognitive stimulation, which includes activities like reading, number games, and creative arts, is widely recognized as an important predictor of children’s development. While theory and empirical research support the importance of cognitive stimulation, the strength of its associations with child outcomes can vary by domain, sample characteristics, and study design features. This pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis describes the existing literature and estimates the average associations between cognitive stimulation during early childhood (0–72 months) and children’s outcomes across cognitive, psychosocial, and physical domains. We identified eligible studies through exhaustive literature searches spanning the past 25 years and prioritized extracting covariate-adjusted effect sizes, which were then converted to partial correlations, and synthesized using multilevel meta-analytic techniques. This review included 361 effect sizes from 130 studies, representing approximately 444,338 children from 60 countries. We found positive and statistically significant average associations between cognitive stimulation and all child outcome domains (rp = 0.03¬¬¬–0.07). Sample characteristics and study features did not significantly moderate the strength of these associations, suggesting that the strength of the association did not vary by child age, child sex, country-income status, study quality, and whether the model from which coefficients were extracted controlled for family socioeconomic status. Accounting for publication bias did not invalidate our results. These findings underscore the importance of caregivers’ provision of cognitive stimulation across early childhood in promoting multiple domains of development across geographic contexts.