Decade-Long Mentoring Program Shows Small Wins in Childhood—Bigger Test Still to Come

Eddy, J. M., Martinez, C. R., Jr., Herrera, D., Wheeler, A., Cearley, J. J., Gau, J. M., & Grossman, J. B. (2026). The child study: The launch of a randomized controlled trial of the Friends of the Children program. In J. M. Eddy & K. P. Haggerty (Eds.), Handbook of professional youth mentoring (pp. 301–311). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05580-4_20

Agyemang, E. O., Skinner, M. L., Haggerty, K. P., & Eddy, J. M. (2026). The young adult study: Continuation into young adulthood of a randomized controlled trial of professional youth mentoring. In J. M. Eddy & K. P. Haggerty (Eds.), Handbook of professional youth mentoring (pp. 313–322). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05580-4_21

Introduction

Most mentoring research has focused on short-term, volunteer-based programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters. Eddy et al. (2026) and Agyemang et al. (2026) describe something different: a randomized controlled trial of Friends of the Children (FOTC), a program that assigns full-time, salaried professional mentors to at-risk children starting in kindergarten and continuing through high school graduation. The last comparable long-term trial, the Cambridge-Somerville Study launched during World War II, found no benefit and later found evidence of harm. The authors set out to determine whether a modern, theoretically grounded version of intensive mentoring would perform better.

Methods

The Child Study enrolled 281 children (278 analyzable) across four cities, randomly assigning them within sex to FOTC or a referral-only control condition. Caregivers and children were interviewed annually across five years using the Child Behavior Checklist and the Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale. The companion Young Adult Study, a five-year follow-up funded by the National Institutes of Health, will reassess the same 278 participants near high school graduation and again roughly two years later, examining juvenile justice involvement, graduation rates, and delayed parenthood as primary outcomes.

Results

By the end of elementary school, caregivers rated FOTC children as showing significantly less growth in school-related troubles and significantly more growth in positive school behavior than children in the control group. Every comparison favored the intervention group, and the pattern held despite real-world disruptions: the Great Recession forced one of the four chapters to temporarily swap professional mentors for supervised social work students partway through the study. Fidelity data suggest the program was delivered largely as intended elsewhere, with children averaging over 300 mentor contacts and roughly 650 hours of mentoring time across five years, most of it one-on-one rather than in group settings. Intensive, roughly 13-year mentoring produced small but consistently positive effects during childhood, a meaningfully better result than the Cambridge-Somerville precedent, though modest in magnitude relative to the program’s cost.

Discussion

The authors note that the effect sizes observed are not dramatically larger than what shorter, far less expensive volunteer mentoring programs typically produce. Whether early gains translate into meaningful differences in adulthood, the outcomes that matter most for justifying the program’s expense, remains unanswered. More importantly, the Child Study only captures outcomes through elementary school, and the behaviors that matter most for justifying a program of this scale and expense, avoiding the juvenile justice system, graduating high school, delaying parenthood, only become measurable once participants reach late adolescence and early adulthood. That is the explicit rationale for the Young Adult Study, whose results were not yet available at the time of writing.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

For programs considering a sustained, professional mentoring model over the traditional short-term volunteer approach, these findings offer cautious encouragement. The Child Study demonstrates that a well-implemented, long-term mentoring relationship can produce improvements in childhood behavior, But the financial and organizational commitment required to sustain full-time mentors, ongoing supervision, and multi-year caseloads is substantial, and programs should not assume that childhood-stage gains will translate into meaningful differences in the outcomes, like graduation rates or justice system involvement, that ultimately determine whether this model justifies its cost. Organizations considering this investment should watch for the Young Adult Study’s results before drawing firm conclusions about long-term return, and in the meantime should treat fidelity monitoring, as essential to replicating whatever benefit the model can offer.

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