Early Childhood Research Quarterly 45 (2018) 143–154 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Early Childhood Research Quarterly The acute effect of community violent crime on maternal engagement in cognitive and socioemotional stimulation Jorge Cuartas a,* , Dana Charles McCoy b , Andrés Molano c a School of Government, Universidad de los Andes, Cra. 1 No. 19-27, Block AU, Third Floor, Bogotá, Colombia b Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Larsen Hall, Room 704, 14 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States c School of Education, Universidad de los Andes, Street 18 A#0-19 East, Second Floor, Bogotá, Colombia a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 15 November 2017 Received in revised form 15 April 2018 Accepted 6 June 2018 Keywords: Community crime Maternal stimulation Caregiving Violence Acute stressor Colombia a b s t r a c t Parental cognitive and socioemotional stimulation in early childhood is a strong predictor of children’s skill development and future life success. At the same time, little work has examined the effect of envi- ronmental risk factors on parents’ engagement in stimulation practices. The present study estimates the acute effect of geocoded community violent crime on 491 Colombian mothers’ reported engagement in stimulating activities with their children younger than five. We exploit naturalistic exogenous variation in the timing and location of a violence incident relative to a mothers’ participation in a household survey to identify internally valid estimates. Findings show that mothers reduced their engagement in stimulating activities, on average, by 0.23–0.30 SD following an incident of violent crime in their residential neighborhoods. The estimated effect was larger for mothers living in the poorest neighborhoods and for mothers exposed to domestic violence. Implications for research on the effects of violence on children and their caregivers as well as for interventions at different ecological levels are discussed. © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Globally, it is estimated that at least 300 million children younger than five have been exposed to community violent crime (Walker et al., 2011). This burden is especially relevant in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Colombia, which has experienced recent increases in urban criminality (Mejia, Ortega, & Ortiz, 2015) with effects on local inhabitants’ development, behavior, and wellbeing that are not entirely known. Recent evi- dence suggests that community violent crime may interfere with children’s development (Foster & Brooks-Gunn, 2015; Leventhal, Dupéré, & Shuey, 2015; McCoy, Connors, Morris, Yoshikawa, & Friedman-Krauss, 2015), sleep and cortisol patterns (Heissel, Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, Grant, & Adam, 2017), cognitive per- formance (McCoy, Raver, & Sharkey, 2015; Sharkey, 2010), and emotional processing and regulation (McCoy, Roy, & Raver, 2016; Sharkey, Tirado-Strayer, Papachristos, & Raver, 2012). At the same * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ja.cuartas10@uniandes.edu.co (J. Cuartas), dana mccoy@gse.harvard.edu (D.C. McCoy), a.molano@uniandes.edu.co (A. Molano). time, relatively little is known about how community violent crime may impact family processes more broadly. Theoretical and corre- lational evidence suggests that the occurrence of threatening and stressful crimes in residential neighborhoods may be linked to dif- ferences in parents’ and primary caregivers’ attitudes and practices (Cuartas, 2018; McCoy, 2013). Yet, there is very little empirical work that has examined the causal impact of community violent crime on parents and caregivers’ attitudes and behaviors, which may serve to either buffer or exacerbate the effects of external threat on chil- dren’s outcomes. To fill the aforementioned gap in the literature, the aim of this study is to assess the acute effect of recent community violent crime on Colombian mothers’ engagement in stimulating activities with their children younger than five. Moreover, we perform exploratory analyses to understand whether these effects differ based on fam- ilies’ exposure to a set of risk and protective factors, including exposure to neighborhood poverty and domestic violence, differ- ent levels of maternal education, and families’ participation in early childhood social programs. We use a quasi-experimental approach to assess the acute effect of geocoded, objective police reports of community crime on mothers’ self-reported stimulation practices, exploiting geographic and temporal variation in the occurrence of violent crimes relative to participants’ homes location and house- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.06.001 0885-2006/© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.