Kids Give You Headaches? Universal Prekindergarten and Maternal Prescriptions for Pain-Relief and Hormone Medications

High-quality prekindergarten (pre-K) programs can promote school readiness and generate lifetime benefits. However, little is known about how pre-K programs affect mothers. We examine the effects of New York City's universal pre-K program (UPK) on the health of low-income mothers enrolled in Medicaid. We use a difference-in-regression-discontinuities approach that exploits the introduction of UPK and cutoffs for participation of children, to address potential confounders. We compare mothers of children born just inside the eligibility cutoff and mothers of those born just outside the eligibility cutoff, before and after the initiation of UPK. We find that the effects of UPK differ between single and non-single mothers, and that the effects also differ between mothers whose 4-year-old is the youngest child in the household and those with other, younger children at home. Specifically, the introduction of UPK was associated with significant reductions in use of non-addictive pain-relief drugs and in use of hormones (e.g., for birth control and menstrual disorders) among (single) mothers whose eligible children were the youngest in the household. While we do not find evidence of the effects of UPK on other types of utilization, these results reveal a new dimension on which UPK may affect maternal wellbeing.