Community violence and early childhood language development: the moderating role of maternal efficacy and satisfaction

This paper estimates the effect of community-level homicides on language development in early childhood. It also explores whether maternal efficacy and satisfaction moderate this relationship. It uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey of Chilean children and their mothers matched to municipal level homicides. The empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in the timing of survey data collection and municipal-level homicides. We find that children in municipalities with homicides one month before the language assessment scored between 0.18 and 0.46 standard deviations lower on the language test compared to children in the same municipality but for whom homicides happened one month after the assessment. Negative effects are largest for children within the most violent municipalities. Maternal efficacy and satisfaction both moderate this relationship, though efficacy is more important in the most violent settings. This paper provides strong evidence that community violence does not need to be very localized to affect child development. It also adds to the body of work that shows the interactions of various social environments are essential to shape the outcomes of young children.