How the New Child Allowance Nurtures Social Connectedness and Supports Child Development: Reflections From a Developmental Scientist
Edited by Stephen Braren & Rose Perry Ph.D.
The new child tax credit expansion won’t just help families financially. It will alleviate significant stress and barriers that come from economic disadvantage, which researchers believe is key to promoting more positive social connections and healthy child brain development.
As part of the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the White House passed a revolutionary bill providing poor and middle-class parents a monthly check of up to $300 per child. Essentially an unconditional child allowance similar to that in other wealthy countries, the legislation will give over 69 million families cash benefits. Most strikingly, this policy is estimated to cut child poverty rates by 45 percent, and by over 50 percent among Black families. Although the bill is only set to cover one year of support, the hope (and possibility) is that it becomes permanent.
As someone who grew up below the poverty line and is now pursuing a PhD researching the effects of poverty on child development, this news struck me in more ways than one. I immediately called my mom—a strong and loving single mother who sacrificed so much for me to be where I am today—and we fantasized about all the ways that a monthly allowance could have made our lives easier when I was growing up.
To some, an extra $300 per month ($3600 per year) may not sound like a lot, but for us that would have equated to a 40% increase in income. Although it wouldn’t have made us rich or solved all of our problems, it could have made the difference in our ability to pay rent, preventing the multiple evictions we endured because we relied on unpredictable sources of income. It might have allowed me to work fewer hours in my part-time jobs as a teenager so I could spend more time studying and improving my grades. Knowing we had a reliable safety net to fall back on would have prevented arguments and stress that almost always centered around not having enough money; we wouldn’t have had to live in constant fear of a fallout from any small inconsistency with governmental support or a paycheck.
Perhaps, most importantly, that unconditional $300 per month would have given my mom more dignity and agency as a parent doing her best to raise a child in poverty.
For today’s low-income families grappling with the compounding effects of the pandemic, this monthly cash supplement could mean more stability, less stress, better relationships, and more time and energy dedicated to enriching activities—all of which are important for supporting family wellbeing and positive child development.
Before the pandemic, 41% of U.S. youth under the age of 18 resided in low-income households and approximately one in five lived below the federal poverty line [1]. In addition, families and children of color have been, and continue to be, overrepresented among the poor, given longstanding structural racial inequalities [2]. Unsurprisingly, these childhood poverty rates have risen even higher during the pandemic despite the rollout of emergency social programs [3]. And with these growing poverty rates has come widening inequities in health and wellbeing.
For instance, an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Oregon, revealed that gaps in wellbeing between low- and higher-income households have been widening since the onset of the pandemic, with low-income families experiencing greater mental health challenges. One of the biggest predictors of declining wellbeing among these families was food insecurity stemming from loss of income and access to free meals due to school closures. Furthermore, the lowest income households (i.e. those making $25,000 annually or less) overwhelmingly reported—over 8 times more than higher-income households—not only having a “very difficult” time paying for usual household expenses, but also an increased likelihood in being evicted. Parenting is already inherently difficult, becoming exponentially more stressful and emotionally draining when you don’t know how you’re going to feed your child or when you might be forced into homelessness.
As such, the newly approved stimulus package not only provides much needed short-term reprieve to low-income children and families, but stirs hope of long-term payoffs in the form of healthier child development. Research in psychology and neuroscience has consistently and repeatedly shown that growing up in low-income environments increases the risk of negative impacts on child development [4-5]. And higher family income is generally associated with better performance on assessments of children’s memory, cognition, language, and social and emotional functioning, with corresponding associations found in the structure and function of brain regions that support these skills [6-7].
But this is certainly not to say that all children growing up in poverty are predestined for negative outcomes—in fact many flourish despite economic hardship.
Such flourishing is largely tied to evidence from numerous studies that highlight the protective role that loving caregivers and positive peer relationships have on buffering against the potential harms of poverty-induced stress [8-10]. “Positive parenting is a powerful protective factor for children growing up in the context of poverty and related challenges” says Dr. Ann Masten, a Professor at the University of Minnesota, who investigates resilience. “In our studies of families experiencing homelessness, we have observed many sensitive, effective parents doing an amazing job under very difficult circumstances.” The additional financial support from the cash allowance has far reaching potential to free up families’ time and energy—energy frequently spent on poverty-related stressors—to better nurture the social connectedness that already exists within those families. As our Social Creatures team has discussed before, high-quality social interactions are fundamental in supporting positive child development.
Indeed, prior research has shown that increases in income can reduce mothers’ stress levels, which is likely to nurture and promote more positive parent-child relationships [11-12]. One study examined the role of the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the mid-90s, whereby families with two or more children received additional benefits [13]. When compared to one-child low-income families, mothers with two or more children reported better mental health, supporting the positive role that increased income can have on parents.
Many developmental scientists are well-positioned to begin studying the specific impacts of the child tax credit on children and families. Researchers at the University of Oregon are leveraging the policy rollout by treating it as a natural experiment, testing the pre- and post-credit changes across a number of wellbeing measures collected on families followed longitudinally. Before the announcement for the child tax credit, one study—the Baby’s First Years—was already conducting a randomized controlled trial exploring how monthly payments ($333) to low-income families impact children’s cognitive, emotional, and brain development. “Unconditional cash supplements like these have the real potential of being able to decrease stress and establish more predictability within the home environment, elements that we know from previous research help to foster positive caregiver-child relationships and subsequent child wellbeing,” says Dr. Natalie Brito, Social Creatures’ Scientific Director and Professor at New York University who explores the role of socioeconomic inequality on neurodevelopment. Findings from these studies and others will be critical pieces of evidence to build a case for making the child allowance permanent.
It is important to remind ourselves that $300 a month will not completely eliminate child poverty in the U.S., nor will it erase other racial, wealth, and income inequalities that are deeply ingrained in our society. It is up to all of us to vote, use our voices in the spaces we have power in, and make sustained efforts wherever we can to support the collective fight for greater social and economic equity.
Although it took a global pandemic to provide an unconditional cash allowance to low-income families, this new legislation represents a sign of hope and optimism for the future. This additional financial support will be a game-changer for many families struggling in similar ways my mom and I did growing up. Critically, it gives parents the dignity they deserve by providing the freedom to choose how they need to spend that money for their children. Combined with the fact that so many families qualify for the payments, this spending freedom fosters less stigma and a greater sense of hope, belonging, and social connectedness. Unlike other governmental assistance programs that disqualify parents who out-earn an already low-income threshold, it also empowers parents to invest in their work and careers without being penalized for achieving upward mobility. Most importantly, it sends the message that our society cares about the health and wellbeing of our youth—giving youth a real opportunity to thrive for generations to come.
In-text references
[1] Koball, H., & Jiang, Y. (2018). Basic facts about low-income children: Children under 9 years, 2016.
[2] Gibson‐Davis, C., Keister, L. A., & Gennetian, L. A. (2020). Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019. Journal of Marriage and Family.
[3] Bitler, M., Hoynes, H. W., & Schanzenbach, D. W. (2020). The social safety net in the wake of COVID-19 (No. w27796). National Bureau of Economic Research.
[4] Farah, M. J. (2018). Socioeconomic status and the brain: prospects for neuroscience-informed policy. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 19(7), 428-438.
[5] Noble, K. G., & Giebler, M. A. (2020). The neuroscience of socioeconomic inequality. Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 36, 23-28.
[6] Hanson, J. L., Hair, N., Shen, D. G., Shi, F., Gilmore, J. H., Wolfe, B. L., & Pollak, S. D. (2013). Family poverty affects the rate of human infant brain growth. PloS one, 8(12), e80954.
[7] Noble, K. G., Houston, S. M., Brito, N. H., Bartsch, H., Kan, E., Kuperman, J. M., ... & Sowell, E. R. (2015). Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. Nature neuroscience, 18(5), 773.
[8] Perry, R. E., Braren, S. H., Rincón-Cortés, M., Brandes-Aitken, A. N., Chopra, D., Opendak, M., ... & Blair, C. (2019). Enhancing executive functions through social interactions: causal evidence using a cross-species model. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2472.
[9] Perry, R. E., Finegood, E. D., Braren, S. H., DeJoseph, M. L., Putrino, D. F., Wilson, D. A., ... & Family Life Project Key Investigators. (2019). Developing a neurobehavioral animal model of poverty: Drawing cross-species connections between environments of scarcity-adversity, parenting quality, and infant outcome. Development and psychopathology, 31(2), 399.
[10] Labella, M. H., Narayan, A. J., McCormick, C. M., Desjardins, C. D., & Masten, A. S. (2019). Risk and adversity, parenting quality, and children's social‐emotional adjustment in families experiencing homelessness. Child development, 90(1), 227-244.
[11] Magnuson, K. A., & Duncan, G. J. (2002). Parents in poverty.
[12] Finegood, E. D., Raver, C. C., DeJoseph, M. L., & Blair, C. (2017). Parenting in poverty: Attention bias and anxiety interact to predict parents’ perceptions of daily parenting hassles. Journal of family psychology, 31(1), 51.
[13] Evans, W. N., & Garthwaite, C. L. (2014). Giving mom a break: The impact of higher EITC payments on maternal health. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6(2), 258-90.
