Study Undercuts Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development

If the government wants poor children to thrive, it should give their parents money. That simple idea has propelled an avid movement to send low-income families regular payments with no strings attached.

Significant but indirect evidence has suggested that unconditional cash aid would help children flourish. But now a rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being, a result that defied researchers’ predictions and could weaken the case for income guarantees.

After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development.

“I was very surprised — we were all very surprised,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine and one of six researchers who led the study, called Baby’s First Years. “The money did not make a difference.”

The findings could weaken the case for turning the child tax credit into an income guarantee, as the Democrats did briefly four years ago in a pandemic-era effort to fight child poverty.

That effort, in 2021, provided most families with children monthly checks of up to $300 per child and helped push child poverty to a record low, though it did not receive the kind of rigorous evaluation of its developmental impacts the new study offers. It lapsed after a year, and Democratic efforts to extend it failed amid unified Republican opposition. Many Democrats are pushing to bring it back.