Abstract / Summary
Although caregivers' provision of cognitive stimulation (such as reading, number games, and play-based activities) is widely recognized as an important predictor of children's development, the strength of these associations can vary across developmental domains, sample characteristics, and study features. This preregistered 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 cognitive, psychosocial, and physical outcomes. We prioritized covariate-adjusted effect sizes reflecting the association between caregiver stimulation and child outcomes, which were then converted to partial correlations and synthesized using multilevel meta-analytic techniques. In total, our review included 354 effect sizes from 128 studies, representing approximately 442,749 children across 60 countries. We found small, positive, statistically significant pooled partial correlations between cognitive stimulation and all child outcome domains (rsp = .07-.17). Cognitive stimulation was more strongly associated with development among children under 48 months of age. The strength of the associations did not vary by child sex, country-income level, study quality, cognitive stimulation measurement modality, or whether the model from which the coefficients were extracted controlled for family socioeconomic status. Accounting for publication bias did not invalidate our results. Findings suggest that cognitive stimulation is modestly associated with child outcomes across developmental domains and geographic contexts, even after accounting for potential confounding factors related to child, family, and structural conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).