According to a study in the United States, putting cash in the hands of mothers can help shape the brains of their babies.This is the first time that researchers have found direct evidence of how poverty drives child development in observational studies.The Baby's First Year study is attempting to assess how poverty reduction can impact the cognitive and emotional growth of young children."Growing up in poverty puts children at risk for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health, and we have known about it for many years," says neuroscientist Kim Noble from Columbia University.We haven't been able to say whether poverty itself causes differences in child development, or whether growing up in poverty is simply associated with other factors that cause those differences.A thousand low-income mothers in the US were recruited for the study after their babies were born.The parents from New York City, New Orleans, Omaha or Minneapolis/St. Paul were randomly allocated either $333 a month in cash payments or $20 a month in cash payments for the first four years of their baby's life.Due to the Pandemic, only 435 families were able to accommodate in-person tests for researchers to measure the electrical activity of their baby's brain.The data shows that giving low-income mothers financial support can change the activity of their baby's brain in the first year of life.Babies whose mothers received more cash had higher brain activity than babies whose mothers received less.There's good reason to think that these changes in brain activity might improve cognitive development.Babies born into higher-income families are more likely to have high-frequency brain activity. This type of activity is associated with higher language, cognitive, and social-emotional scores."All healthy brains are shaped by their environments and experiences, and we are not saying that one group has better brains," says Noble.Because of the randomized design, we know that the $333 per month must have changed children's experiences or environments, and that their brains adapted to those changed circumstances.The authors don't know what environmental factors triggered the higher brain waves seen in the trial. They are looking into whether household expenditures, parental behaviors, family relationships, or family stress had anything to do with the results.The impact of money on a child's development appears to be powerful.Greg Duncan from the University of California-Irvine says that the differences between the two groups were similar to those reported in large-scale education interventions.One day, the authors hope their results will inform better policies for tackling poverty. The importance of placing children at the center of interventions is highlighted in the Baby's First Year trial.Maternal labor supply is more important than child well-being in debates over income transfer policies for low-income families."Our findings show the importance of shifting the conversation to focus more attention on whether or how income transfer policies promote children's development."The study was published in a journal.
