Supporting low-income families with cash could protect infants from the deleterious effects poverty has on brain development, research published Monday finds.
The preliminary results from an ongoing clinical trial found that infants whose families received an extra $4,000 in annual income were more likely to show brain activity patterns associated with the development of thinking and learning.
The findings come just weeks after the Child Tax Credit, which provided additional money to low-income parents, expired.
Previous research has shown that growing up in poverty has an impact on brain development, including lower rates of college attendance and high school graduation among children who grew up poor. In the past decade, dozens of studies have shown differences in brain matter and brain activity in both kids and adults living in poverty.
But the new study goes a step further, demonstrating the cause-and-effect link between poverty and brain development.
“All of the past work has been correlational,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, a professor of neuroscience and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who co-authored the study. “We could say based on past work that poverty is related to these differences, but we couldn’t say poverty is causing these differences. From a scientific perspective, the only way to answer that question is through a randomized clinical trial.”
That clinical trial is the Baby’s First Years trial, the first of its kind. It started in 2018 with the goal of asking a simple question about a complicated issue: What impact does regular cash income for low-income families have on brain development of the children in these families?
Noble, along with researchers from six universities, recruited low-income women who had recently given birth in New Orleans; New York City; Omaha, Nebraska; and Minnesota’s Twin Cities. The mothers were randomized to receive either a debit card with a monthly gift of $333 or a nominal monthly gift of $20. This amounted to an extra $3,996 or $240 in annual income. There were no stipulations on how the money could be spent by the mothers, who are mostly Black and Latina.
By intervening in this way, the researchers are able to see whether or not there is a direct cause-and-effect link between cash support for low-income families and childhood development. The larger amount was chosen because it’s a feasible amount that could be included in policies that provide stipends to families living in poverty.
Throughout the four-year trial, the team will make yearly home visits to measure the children’s brain activity, have the mothers fill out a questionnaire and observe the mother and baby together.
Year one
Results from the first year of the trial were published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These findings focused on brain activity in 435 one-year-olds in the study.
According to Noble, everyone has both slow and fast brain activity patterns. As kids get older, they tend to have more fast, or high frequency, brain activity. This fast brain activity early in childhood is associated with the subsequent development of skills needed for learning.
The babies in the families that received more money from the study had more of these fast brain waves compared to those in families that received the lower amount.
Dr. Joan Luby, a Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig professor of child psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said that brain development does not happen evenly across a lifespan.
Neuroscientists are beginning to home in on specific periods of time, particularly in early childhood, in which brain development happens rapidly, said Luby, who was not involved with the new study. During these times, the brain is extremely sensitive to environmental factors.
“There are windows of opportunity or vulnerability when the brain changes in response to the psychosocial environment. It’s important to enrich, not deprive, children during these crucial periods of time,” she said. The cash support given in trial “provides families living in poverty with the resources that they can use to provide food, get child care, give the parents a little bit of latitude so they can potentially spend more time with their child. Those are all the things this small cash infusion does during this very critical period of time.”
The research team is working to gather more information about how the money was spent and what circumstances may have led to the changes in brain activity. But because the trial was randomized and controlled, “we know that the $333 per month must have changed children’s experiences or environments, and that their brains adapted to those changed circumstances,” Noble said.
