[Early neuro-imaging results provide powerful new evidence of what
so many other studies have found — a more secure and adequate family
income alters children’s lives in concrete ways and expands their
opportunities to succeed and thrive.] [[link removed]]

CASH ASSISTANCE TO MOTHERS BOOSTED INFANTS’ BRAIN ACTIVITY, STUDY
SHOWS  
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Danilo Trisi
January 26, 2022
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
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_ Early neuro-imaging results provide powerful new evidence of what
so many other studies have found — a more secure and adequate family
income alters children’s lives in concrete ways and expands their
opportunities to succeed and thrive. _

According to results of a new study, cash assistance to mothers
boosts infant brain activity, photo by soupboy

 

[For a video talk explaining this study by Kimberly Noble, one of its
authors, click here.
[[link removed]] —
moderator]

When mothers with low incomes received just over $300 in monthly cash
assistance during the first year of their children’s lives, their
infants’ brains displayed more high-frequency brain waves when they
reached 12 months old, a major new study
[[link removed]] by
a team of investigators from six U.S. universities and released this
week by the National Academy of Sciences shows. These types of brain
waves are associated with higher language and cognitive scores and
better social and emotional skills in children as they grow older.

The expanded Child Tax Credit, which Congress enacted in 2021 and
which expired last month, provided support very much like the cash
assistance described in the new paper. The paper is a pathbreaking
combination of social science and neuroscience, is methodologically
rigorous, and adds heft to the substantial evidence
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the difference that extending the Child Tax Credit expansion would
make in children’s lives. These findings underscore why it’s
important that policymakers extend the expansion
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part of any final agreement on Build Back Better legislation.

So far the study has only followed children for a year, but we don’t
need to speculate about how cash support for families affects children
over longer periods. Substantial research indicates that, when
lower-income parents receive income support, their children grow up
healthier and do better in school, making them better prepared for the
labor market. To take three examples:

* Studies [[link removed]] of a number of
1990s random assignment anti-poverty and “welfare-to-work”
experiments in the United States and Canada by Greg Duncan and others
found that the more each program added to family income between the
ages of 2 and 5, the more it boosted students’ later academic
achievement.
* A study
[[link removed]] of
province-level differences in the generosity of Canada’s child tax
benefit found that larger benefits led to an improvement in
children’s test scores that persisted for at least four years after
the benefit was received. (Canada replaced the provincial benefits in
the study with a larger nationwide child benefit in 2016.)
* Another study [[link removed]],
examining the effects of a casino dividend limited to members of the
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, found that
an average of $4,000 in increased income for the poorest households
resulted in an additional year of schooling for the households’
children by the time they turned 21.

As a letter
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by more than 400 economists explained, citing the large body of
relevant research, expanding the credit permanently “would improve
children’s lives in important and lasting ways.”

In all of the debate about the Child Tax Credit in recent months, too
little attention has been paid to this fact. Now these early
neuro-imaging results provide powerful new evidence of what so many
other studies have found — a more secure and adequate family income
alters children’s lives in concrete ways and expands their
opportunities to succeed and thrive. That alone makes expanding the
credit an important step for families, communities, and the nation as
a whole.

Danilo Trisi [[link removed]] is
Director of Poverty and Inequality Research at the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities [[link removed]].

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