- Feb 5, 2002
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Subsidizing single motherhood didn’t help kids — but marriage might.
It was a bold experiment with the potential to significantly impact the direction of U.S. anti-poverty policy: Give poor single mothers monthly cash payments and measure the benefit to their children’s cognitive development over the first four years of their lives.
To conduct the large-scale study, 1,000 low-income mothers of newborns were recruited at hospitals in four metropolitan areas around the country. The study, financed in part by the National Institutes of Health, randomly assigned 400 mothers to receive an unconditional monthly payment of $333 for the first four years of their child’s life, while 600 received just $20 per month.
The concept appears to be well-intentioned. Why wouldn’t a little extra money relieve a mother of stress and allow her to spend more time on activities that would contribute to her child’s development?
The results of the study — called “Baby’s First Years,” which was conducted May 2018 to July 2023, however, shattered the expectations of its authors, social scientists from prestigious universities in the U.S.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
It was a bold experiment with the potential to significantly impact the direction of U.S. anti-poverty policy: Give poor single mothers monthly cash payments and measure the benefit to their children’s cognitive development over the first four years of their lives.
To conduct the large-scale study, 1,000 low-income mothers of newborns were recruited at hospitals in four metropolitan areas around the country. The study, financed in part by the National Institutes of Health, randomly assigned 400 mothers to receive an unconditional monthly payment of $333 for the first four years of their child’s life, while 600 received just $20 per month.
The concept appears to be well-intentioned. Why wouldn’t a little extra money relieve a mother of stress and allow her to spend more time on activities that would contribute to her child’s development?
The results of the study — called “Baby’s First Years,” which was conducted May 2018 to July 2023, however, shattered the expectations of its authors, social scientists from prestigious universities in the U.S.
Continued below.
Cash Aid to Single Mothers Fails to Improve Child Outcomes, Study Finds
Subsidizing single motherhood didn’t help kids — but marriage might.
