Family policy is in the news these days, as both Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly keen on spending money and tweaking policies for the benefit of parents and children.
While Republicans talk about getting couples to have more babies, and Democrats talk about getting women into the office full time, a more immediate concern of family policy may be the thriving of children: How much are students learning? How healthy and well-fed are our children? Are they growing into well-adjusted, law-abiding adults?
Specifically, to these ends, do we help parents and children by giving them extra money through government benefits?
Two new studies, comprehensive in their own ways, address exactly these questions and come up with answers that are not quite contradictory, but are certainly in tension — a very telling tension.
Larger child tax credits for parents in various countries all seem to have improved their children’s health and school performance, and eventually boosted their wages in adulthood. Those were the findings of University of Michigan scholar Katherine Michelmore in a working paper published in May that comprehensively reviews all of the research on these countries’ tax credits.
At the same time, a separate study, this one involving a randomized control trial, concluded that four years of large benefits to poor parents of newborns seems to have no measurable impact on the newborns’ well-being.
What’s going on here?
For starters, the methods of the studies differed. More importantly, perhaps, the two studies looked at different types of grants to parents.
Diving deep into this research suggests that relationships between income, poverty, and childhood thriving are not as straightforward as the average antipoverty activist might think.
The Michigan study was a large observational study of child tax credits and similar policies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The conclusion: “Overwhelmingly, the evidence from these three countries suggests that tax credits have positive impacts on children on a host of different outcomes, including infant birthweight, childhood health and achievement, educational attainment, wages, and poverty in adulthood.”
It is not easy to parse out how the child tax credit or similar policies affect families, in part because they are so widely distributed. In the U.S., for instance, about half of all parents get the CTC. When different countries increase or expand these tax breaks or cash benefits, it’s hard to tell which children benefit from the influx of cash and which ones improve for other reasons.
By bringing together peer-reviewed research and government data from multiple policies in three countries, Michelmore hopes that the large sample size will help point toward causality. Again, they found that children thrive when their parents receive large child tax credits or similar benefits.
The second study is more rigorous in methodology. Randomized controlled trials are carefully calibrated to sniff out causality. The trial here was called Baby’s First Years. The National Institutes of Health and many nonprofit organizations collaborated to perform this experiment.
A few hundred low-income parents were given a significant child allowance: $333 per month or $4,000 a year. A few hundred similar parents were given a negligible amount, $20 a month. These parents were chosen randomly, and the group that got the large benefit was no different from the group that got the tiny benefit.
Four years later, the researchers studied childhood outcomes. The result: “We find no statistically significant impacts of the cash transfers on four preregistered primary outcomes (language, executive function, social-emotional problems, and high-frequency brain activity) nor on three secondary outcomes (visual processing/spatial perception, pre-literacy, maternal reports of developmental diagnoses).”
Translated: The children whose parents got real money seemed no better off than the children whose parents got peanuts.
This baffled the researchers because they knew that poverty was highly correlated with bad outcomes. It was reasonable to suspect, then, that low income caused these poor outcomes. After all, lower-income people have a harder time affording healthy foods and school supplies, and they might have fewer resources with which to get their children to school on time or to give them other enriching activities.
These problems of poverty are real, but these studies suggest that financial struggles aren’t the only thing to blame. Instead, the struggles of children in poor families might have deeper roots. In other words, the same cultural pathologies that make it hard for the parents to have financial success also make it hard for the children to thrive. Fixing one of the symptoms, low cash flow, doesn’t address the core issue.
WHICH STATES ARE THE MOOCHERS NOW?
Michelmore’s study, the one that found large effects of cash to parents, was a study of tax credits. That is, the parents getting that money were working parents. The Baby’s First Year study involved unconditional cash gifts to poor women, meaning many of those recipients were unemployed single mothers.
This all points toward a conclusion that the nonprofit organizations and researchers might not like: Work and marriage are both good things. Children who grow up with the blessing of married parents and earned success tend to thrive. Those deprived of those blessings tend to suffer.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
