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The purpose of Even Start Family Literacy is to help break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy by improving the educational opportunities of low-income families through the integration of the following four components into a unified family literacy program for parents and children , primarily from birth through age 7 . An Even Start project must use federal Even Start funds to support the cost of providing family literacy services that involve parents and children , primarily from birth through age seven , in a cooperative effort to help parents become full partners in the education of their children and to assist children in reaching their full potential as learners . The National Institutes of Health report that 80 percent of tooth decay is found in just 25 percent of children , primarily from low-income families . However , white children ages 1 to 4 have a drowning death rate that is twice that of black children , primarily from residential swimming pool drownings . White refugee children , primarily from Eastern Europe , were 2.8 times as likely to have caries experience compared with white U.S. children and over nine times the risk of having untreated decay compared with white U.S. children .