Description:
The burden of childcare can affect parental mental health, an important determinant of early childhood environmental quality. This is especially true for low-income households. Head Start provides free and public childcare for low-income families that can potentially ameliorate the burdens of childcare by improving parental health. This paper uses random assignment under the Head Start Impact Study to test for Head Start's causal impact on parental mental health. Head Start's impact is found to differ across cohorts, with positive results found only for the three-year-old cohort in 2003, the first year of the study and this cohort's only year in the program. Further, this paper examines differences in childcare-seeking behavior to identify changes between cohorts and across time, and identifies contamination of the control group as a possible explanation for these mixed results. (author abstract)
Resource Type:
Reports & Papers
Country:
United States