In his first State of the Union address in early March, President Joe Biden broached a tax policy question that neuroscientists and pediatricians also see as a scientific one.
President Biden urged lawmakers to extend the Child Tax Credit “so no one has to raise a family in poverty.”
Apart from the usual political and budgetary calculus, physicians and social scientists are actively examining the ramifications that such policies could have on child development and long-term health outcomes.
To do so, they have turned to brain scans and rigorous studies to better understand the effects of being raised in poverty and whether giving families more cash makes a difference.
Initial results from an ongoing study known as Baby’s First Years suggest that providing extra money to mothers may influence brain activity in infants in ways that reflect improvements in cognitive ability.
Researchers, doctors, and advocates say the findings cement the case for policies such as the expanded Child Tax Credit. Others argue that reducing child poverty is a social good on its own, regardless of what brain scans show.
The new findings were published Jan. 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as lawmakers were weighing whether to resume an expansion of the tax credit, which had temporarily provided monthly payments akin to the $333 a month looked at in the study.
The expiration of the expanded credit in December left some 3.6 million more children in poverty, bringing the total number to more than 12.5 million and pushing the child poverty rate to 17%.
Philanthropists and research teams have partnered to conduct other guaranteed income experiments around the United States, including one in New York called the Bridge Project, which is evaluating different levels of financial support for mothers with babies.
Some mothers are receiving $500 per month, others twice that amount.
Angelina Matos, 18, receives $1,000 a month, allowing her to attend college and pay for necessities like diapers, clothes, and toys for her nearly 1-year-old daughter.
As one of 600 mothers participating in the project, Ms. Matos periodically answers questions about her daughter’s progress, like whether she is eating solid foods.
Megha Agarwal, BS, executive director of the Bridge Project and its funder the Monarch Foundation, said she was thrilled to see the early results from Baby’s First Years. “We are looking for ways in which we can strengthen our future generations,” she said. “It is exciting to see that direct cash and a guaranteed income might be part of the solution.”
A scientific perspective
Growing up in poverty is well-known to increase the likelihood of lower academic achievement and chronic conditions such as asthma and obesity. Relative to higher income levels, poverty is associated with differences in the structure and function of the developing brain. But whether interventions to reduce poverty can influence how newborns develop is less clear.
“There would be plenty of people who would say, ‘Well, it’s not poverty. It’s all the things associated with poverty. It’s the choices you make that are actually leading to differences in outcomes,’” said Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, New York, and a coauthor of the PNAS study. Regardless of ideology, she said, the best way to address that question from a scientific perspective is through a randomized controlled trial.
“You can’t, and wouldn’t want to, randomize kids to living in poverty or not, but you can take a group of families who are unfortunately living in poverty and randomize them to receive different levels of economic support,” Dr. Noble said.