Early Childhood Education and Care Programs in the United States: Does Access Improve Child Safety?

The aim of this article is to assess the role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) program access and generosity on child maltreatment as measured by Child Protective Services (CPS) reports. Using administrative data capturing CPS reports in the United States, I estimate the role of Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) child-care subsidies, Head Start, Early Head Start, state prekindergarten, and universal prekindergarten programs on CPS reports using ordinary least squares and multilevel models. I exploit exogenous variation in state prekindergarten enrollment shocks to compare the CPS reports across children’s age-based eligibility using difference-in-difference-in-difference and event-history frameworks. Results suggest that the largest welfare gains in program access may occur among the youngest children (under age 3), the group for whom program access is most constrained. However, findings from state-level models provide weak overall evidence of a lower-bound benefit.