We investigate the unintended impacts of exiting Peru’s Cuna Más public childcare program on child and maternal health. With increased public childcare use in developing countries, understanding the effects of program exit is critical. We use Cuna Más’ strict age-based graduation rule to identify causal impacts, leveraging comprehensive data from the Demographic and Family Health Survey for the period 2015-2019. Our results suggest that mothers prioritize their children’s health over their own upon program exit. While maternal mental health shows a notable decline, children’s health remains unaffected. These results have important policy implications, highlighting the need for post-program transitional support to mitigate hidden costs for mothers and enhance the positive outcomes children gain during program participation.

School entry cutoff policies establish the minimum age required to start school at a given date, determining whether a child is in a classroom with younger or older peers, which can affect their development. Existing research, particularly from high-income countries, shows that younger students face disadvantages in several areas, but little is known about the effects in low- and middle-income countries and for preschool children. We leverage the discontinuity created by government-imposed school entry cutoffs to measure the impact of late enrollment on child nutrition and early childhood development outcomes. Using data from Peru’s Demographic and Health Surveys and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we show that the laxly enforced preschool entry age policies significantly increase the probability of late enrollment, but on average they do not affect child health or early child...