If a child has parents who have no interest in sitting down with it and teaching it to use crayons, scissors, paper and pencil, or take the time to feed it, there is a lot more wrong here than any program can fix.
Instead the objective must be to discourage the parents from having more of these unfortunate children. Policies that reward making babies to increase benefits must end.
The range of age when a child goes into Kindergarten can be up to a year. When you account for differences in maturation rates, boys vs girls, etc. you can have up to a three “year” difference between the “readiest” and least ready for school. And this is not accounting for how good or bad parents might be at rearing their children. When you factor that in, you can see why kindergarten teachers earn their pay.
I helped with Kindergarten screening at my school one year. Some kids had already started to read. Some did not know colors. Some, apparently, had never heard the word “no” in their lives, judging by their behavior. At the end of screening someone would have to tell a parent that their child was not “ready”. Of course that meant a loss of a year’s free baby sitting. And some kids who did get in, had to be held back (ie. they flunked kindergarten) because even after a year, they were nowhere near reading for 1st grade.
There are two or three things one can take away from all of this. The most important is that good parenting is vital for future success at school and life. Another is that good parenting can not be required or imposed or replaced by the government. And maybe most importantly, those unprepared, wild-child kindergarten kids in a dozen years will be adults that many of us will get to live near.