Burchinal, MargaretWhitaker, Anamarie A.Jenkins, Jade Marcus2023-02-012023-02-012022-07-11Burchinal, M., Whitaker, A. A., & Jenkins, J. M. (2022). The promise and purpose of early care and education. Child Development Perspectives, 16, 134– 140. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.124631750-8606https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/32184This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Burchinal, M., Whitaker, A. A., & Jenkins, J. M. (2022). The promise and purpose of early care and education. Child Development Perspectives, 16, 134– 140. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12463 , which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12463. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited. This article will be embargoed until 07/11/2023.Early care and education (ECE) evolved around two goals: allowing parents of young children to work (the purpose) and promoting early childhood development (the promise). An extensive body of research has examined how ECE promotes child development. A much sparser body of research has studied how ECE access affects families' economic and psychological well-being, particularly from a developmental perspective. These imbalanced literatures have created an incomplete picture of the role of ECE in developmental science, and this gap in knowledge limits the extent to which both the purpose and the promise of ECE can be fulfilled. In this article, we argue that developmental researchers should pay more attention to the parent and family outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that depend on stable, high-quality care (the purpose), and how these downstream cascades influence child development in the short and long term (the promise). While these issues are international, in this article, we focus on the development of and research on ECE in the United States to illustrate how the focus on both the purpose and promise of ECE could expand policies and research in the area.en-USchild developmentearly care and educationfamily well-beingArticle