$333 per month
Baby’s First Years has done just that. Researchers gave 1,000 low-income mothers with newborns a cash gift of $333 per month or a smaller gift of $20 per month, disbursed on debit cards, starting in 2018. Participants live in four metropolitan areas – New York City, greater New Orleans, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Omaha – and were recruited at the time of their child’s birth. Investigators currently have funding to continue the cash support until the children turn 4 years old.
When the infants were about 1 year old, investigators measured their resting brain activity using EEG.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the ability to conduct in-person testing, so the number of children with EEG data was smaller than planned. Still, the researchers analyzed data from 251 kids in the group that received the smaller cash gift and 184 kids in the group that received the larger amount. Patterns of brain activity largely tracked those seen in earlier observational studies: more mid- and high-frequency activity (alpha-, beta-, and gamma-bands) and less low-frequency activity (theta-bands) among children in the households that received more money.
Faster brain activity is associated with better scores on measures of language, cognition, and social-emotional development. Slower activity has been linked to problems with behavior, attention, and learning.
“We predicted that our poverty reduction intervention would mitigate the neurobiological signal of poverty,” Dr. Noble said. “And that’s exactly what we report in this paper.”
The study builds on decades of work showing that poverty can harm child development, said Joan Luby, MD, with Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, who served as a peer reviewer for the PNAS paper.
More follow-up data and information about the babies’ cognitive function and behavior over time are needed, but the study shows a signal that cannot be ignored, Dr. Luby said.
Dr. Luby began exploring the effects of poverty on brain development in earnest while working on a study that was meant to focus on another variable altogether: early childhood depression. The investigators on that 2013 study found that poverty had a “very, very big effect in our sample, and we realized we had to learn more about it,” she said.
The American Academy of Pediatrics likewise has recognized poverty as an important determinant of health. A policy statement that the group published in 2016 and reaffirmed in 2021 outlines ways pediatricians and social programs can address poverty.
Benard Dreyer, MD, director of pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital, New York, was president of the AAP when it published this guidance.
One lingering question has been how much low income worsens educational outcomes, Dr. Dreyer said. Perhaps other issues, such as single motherhood, a lack of parental education, or living in neighborhoods with more crime may be the cause. If so, simply giving more money to parents might not overcome those barriers.
Natural experiments have hinted that money itself can influence child development. For example, families on an American Indian reservation in North Carolina started receiving a share of casino profits after a casino opened there.
The new infusion of funds arrived in the middle of a study in which researchers were examining the development of mental illness in children.
Among children who were no longer poor as a result of the casino payments, symptoms of conduct and oppositional defiant disorders decreased.