Impact of Rhode Island's Temporary Caregiver Insurance on Child Health and Educational Outcomes

• In Event: Impacts of State Paid Leave Policies on Maternal, Worker, and Child Wellbeing: New Quasi-Experimental Evidence

Abstract

The United States remains a striking international outlier in its absence of federal paid family leave, leaving individual states to fill a critical gap in family policy. Rhode Island has been at the forefront, implementing its Temporary Caregiver Insurance (TCI) program in 2014—the nation’s third state-level paid family leave program—which provides eligible workers with up to four weeks of paid leave at approximately 60% wage replacement following the birth or adoption of a child.

The developmental importance of paid parental leave is well established. Access to leave has been linked to longer breastfeeding duration, more timely pediatric visits, reduced household economic insecurity, and lower levels of maternal stress and postpartum depression—all of which shape early child health and development (Coombs et al., 2024; Pac et al., 2023; Stanczyk, 2019; Wells et al., 2025). While European evidence demonstrates broader and longer-term benefits for child health and well-being (Carneiro et al., 2015; Houmark et al., 2022), these programs typically offer substantially longer durations, limiting what policymakers can infer for U.S. policy design. Within the United States, most existing studies rely on cross-sectional data and focus narrowly on short-term outcomes around birth, leaving the longer-term effects of paid leave on children’s developmental and educational trajectories largely unexplored.

To address these gaps, we examine the causal effects of Rhode Island’s TCI on child health and educational outcomes—including birth outcomes, immunization rates, developmental screenings, school readiness, and third-grade academic proficiency—using population-level, linked longitudinal administrative data from the Rhode Island Child Health and Education Study (RICHES). We implement a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design that exploits a sharp eligibility threshold: only mothers giving birth after the fourth quarter of 2013 were eligible for TCI, generating quasi-random variation in program exposure. These findings contribute to U.S.-based causal evidence on whether short-duration paid leave programs produce meaningful and lasting improvements in child health and family well-being, with important implications for ongoing federal paid leave debates.

Authors

• Jiwan Lee, Brown University
  Presenting Author

• Margot Jackson, Brown University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author