Welcome to Kidding Around - by Nate G. Hilger
I wrote my book The Parent Trap about parenting and inequality (not the movies with Lindsay Lohan or Hayley Mills, which I do love but regrettably did not contribute to in any way) because I wanted to accelerate two big shifts.
First, a cultural shift. I wanted people to start embracing that child development is too complicated to expect individual parents to do it well on their own with a little love and elbow grease — and that’s ok! We just have to help more parents leverage professionals such as well-paid teachers, tutors, counselors, and coaches, in the same way we help people leverage doctors and nurses to solve complicated health care problems. Today, it’s mostly rich parents leveraging professional support in the 90% of childhood time spent outside of K12 school. That shortchanges a lot of awesome kids and limits our big-picture economic and geopolitical prospects by limiting the kinds of contributions we set up our young people to achieve.
Second, a political shift. Kids can’t vote, their parents undervote, and so we the public spend way too little on building our own future citizens. One solution would be a more unified, bipartisan organization to represent parents’ interests modeled on the American Association of Retired People, which has secured massive public support for seniors in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Another would be a coalition of pro-child forces such as Children Now in California, modeled on the business coalitions we find in Chambers of Commerce. Any solution must recognize that parents compete for political attention with business, labor, and retirees. Doing this will require big, coordinated political campaigns – not a zillion mom-and-pop charities jostling for crumbs.
This blog will build on The Parent Trap, but in a punchier format. I plan to write at least once a month. You’ll enjoy this blog if you like to think critically about data-driven research on kids, opportunity, and inequality. I’ll discuss cool new policies and studies, highlight surprising implications of prior research, and bring a critical, kid-focused perspective to many other topics. I’m writing to be FUN, nonpartisan, informative, and personal – not outraged or technical. A lot of writing about kids can read like a cry of anguish or a congressional white paper. I want to help more people get excited about how much We The People can improve life for kids, rather than feeling bad or bored – to help more people enjoy thinking about these issues as much as they enjoy thinking about things like music and golden retrievers.
So here’s a first post profiling an amazing new study that asks what happens to kids when their parents suddenly get a lot more money. If you like it, please subscribe and share! And if you’re still not sure, here are some other topics I plan to write about in future posts:
Why the growing focus on marriage and two-parent families is a red herring when it comes to promoting upward mobility, even if it’s useful to acknowledge these things are good.
How I square my own skepticism toward the federal government with my advocacy for a much larger federal investment in child development.
How progressive taxation and generous social insurance can accidentally undermine child skill development.
Why we should consider a “third way” political vision summarized as “big government for kids, limited government for adults.”
Why I don’t care all that much if elite colleges give an admissions advantage to super-high-income students.
Why charter schools, school vouchers, and other K12 school reform efforts will never close much of the giant opportunity gaps separating rich and poor kids — and what policies would actually work.
Why some ethnic minorities achieve so much faster upward mobility than others, and why “culture” is a poor guide to understanding these differences.
Occasional reflections on parenting, history, labor markets, children’s books, fiction, writing, technology, and other good stuff.
What a landmark new study can, and cannot, teach us about the importance of money in parenting.
I wanted to profile an incredible ongoing study that more people should be excited about: Baby’s First Years (BFY).
BFY is a big randomized clinical trial testing the importance of money in parenting. It reminds me of Oprah’s “You get a car” stunt because it’s literally dropping about $20,000 into people’s lives out of the blue. It’s the kind of thing young researchers might dream of doing but consider obviously out of reach — but now it’s real.
Researchers want to measure the causal effects of money on children’s outcomes (not just the correlations) because giving parents more money is one of two main ways people try to expand opportunity for lower-income kids, including through big real-world public policies such as Earned Income Tax Credits.
The other way people try to expand opportunity is to invest directly in kids by funding skill development programs, i.e. child care, tutoring, college, health care, and so on. In The Parent Trap I argue we should prioritize this approach over all other approaches because it’s the only way to give kids from all classes and races a similar shot at success and capitalize on the untapped human potential of our own citizenry. But just giving money to parents is simpler and a lot of people think it’s the better bet, and moreover if money itself helps kids do better in life that means a lot of other redistributive policies indirectly affecting kids also may offset their cost to the government by growing kids’ future income and tax payments. So we can think about the causal impact of money on kids’ long-term success a little like one of the key constants in physics, and BFY as a tiny Hadron Collider for social scientists designed to measure this key constant.
Here’s what BFY did. In 2018 the research team recruited 1,000 low-income women who had just given birth at maternity wards in 12 hospitals in four cities around the U.S. The team then randomly assigned these women into one of two groups: 400 women got assigned to a treatment group that began to receive $333/month for 52 months, and 600 women got assigned to a control group that would receive $20/month over the same time period. That means each woman in the BFY treatment group received $4,000 per year and $17,300 in total from the study. And this may get closer to $24,000 as the researchers raise more money to extend the benefits through kids’ 6th birthdays. Due to the usual sorcery of random assignment, the difference between the treatment and control groups going forward will tell us persuasively how important all that money really is to the mothers and their kids.
Why is this study innovative? BFY is the kind of study you might assume happens all the time – of course people should do clinical trials to answer big questions! Couple reasons. Americans don't like giving people money (“unconditional cash transfers”) – we only begrudgingly give people money if they work, or study, or stay super poor, or spend the money on certain narrow things (“conditional cash transfers”). So we don’t have a big prior study on the impacts of pure cash.
Another reason these big clinical trials are rare is that it’s expensive and complicated to do them well, and public funding around kids is stingy. BFY has already spent nearly $10 million in funding from the nation’s leading public institute for research on kids – the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD, whose origins I profile in the first chapter of my book – alongside massive additional support from private philanthropies. This budget would be a rounding error for R&D departments answering far less important questions in health care, transportation, energy, and other big industries, but is considered large when it comes to research on kids. In a sane world, BFY would include 25,000 mothers instead of 1,000 and we’d have a lot more studies on this scale every year – but I’ll write more about that in future posts.
Before I dive into early findings, I want to highlight some key choices the researchers made in designing the study that really matter for understanding the results.
BFY, it turns out, doesn’t just give parents money after all. It gives money to parents in ways designed to maximize spending on kids. Moms get a separate, special debit card branded “4MyBaby” and do an extensive interview with a BFY researcher while still in the maternity ward. BFY then deposits funds onto each mother’s card on the day of the month on which her baby was born, sort of like a little birthday present for their individual baby. For example, if your baby was born on July 7th, you would get $333 deposited into your 4MyBaby debit account on the 7th of each month.
Now, most people describing BFY call this “money” and claim BFY answers the question “how does money alone help parents and their kids?” The researchers themselves confirm this impression by saying their work is “poised to provide the strongest evidence to date as to whether family income in and of itself is the cause of many of the negative outcomes faced by children living in poverty.” This suggests the findings tell us what would happen if we reduced child poverty in many other ways, for example by increasing earnings of low-income parents, or by expanding tax benefits such as the Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income families.
But that’s not quite right and in other places the researchers say as much. Even if BFY has no strings attached in theory, in practice it is framed to make parents feel extra good about spending BFY money on their kids, or extra guilty about not spending BFY money on their kids, and that means there are strings attached even if these strings are psychological rather than legal. In fact the researchers’ own excellent early work indicates that parents spend about 7 times more of their BFY income on certain kid-centric things such as books and toys than they tend to spend on these things out of other income, such as wages. So we might expect impacts of BFY on kids to be larger than we’d see from increasing other kinds of income that parents spend quite differently.
Why did the researchers design BFY this way? Probably because they wanted to learn just how powerful money for parents could be if it came with all the best behavioral tricks they could imagine to maximize impacts on kids. That’s ok, but BFY is not meant to be an intellectual curiosity; it’s meant to inform policy. And for now there is no policy on the table that looks all that much like BFY. In particular, forcing parents to use a separate debit card, disconnected from their normal bank accounts and financial tools, makes it harder for parents to keep track of their overall financial health.
Take food stamps, for example – which are not money and can only be spent directly on food, but are a cautionary tale for BFY. Like BFY, they require people to use special cards (“EBT”) that are separate from normal bank accounts, and this turns out to cause big headaches for beneficiaries who can’t even check their balances without buying something at a store, calling into a phone number, or downloading a special third-party app on their smartphones. We don’t want the government to spin up more payment methods just to build in cute behavioral nudges.
The bottom line is that if we want to give parents money in convenient, respectful ways, then we might expect them to spend it how they spend other kinds of income, with potentially smaller impacts on kids.
So with these considerations in mind, let’s dive into the results.
It’s still early days for BFY but it already has some big findings. The surprising story for parents themselves is how little the money seemed to matter from their own perspective. It had no “statistically detectable” impacts on mothers’ mental health, relationships, work, sleep, substance use, or well-being. Like most real research these results scramble ideologies in mischievous ways. Liberals will cite BFY to show that more money won’t cause parents to quit their jobs and devolve into drug abuse as claimed by some conservatives. Conservatives will cite BFY to show that more money for parents won’t dramatically reduce the stress associated with being poor as claimed by some liberals. Interesting!
But there’s another big caveat: these measurements are very noisy. Too noisy to reject arguments on either side of key debates with all that much confidence. The researchers’ preferred term of “not statistically detectable” does not mean “there is no important effect,” as many readers will assume. In this case it actually means “we aren’t sure if there’s an important effect.” Which is why I (and the researchers themselves, no doubt) would love BFY and studies like it to include 10,000 or 25,000 mothers instead of 1,000. That way it could deliver precise answers actually capable of resolving debates rather than pointing gently in certain directions.
But now for some exciting glimmers. Despite null effects on parents, results so far point toward meaningful benefits for kids. Parents don’t feel all that much better about their lives, but they do spend more money on kids and they spend more time in healthy play activities with kids such as reading and storytelling. A messy preliminary study applied a technology called “electroencephalography” that places sensors around babies’ heads and found that the money had increased kids’ brain activity in areas associated with cognitive function, and increased it by almost exactly the amount we might have guessed based on prior research.
That finding strikes me as tentative but plausible, and amazing. If money for parents – or at least “BFY bucks for parents” – changes kids’ brain chemistry, it might tap into Americans’ intuitions about merit and blame in useful ways that create more political support for these kinds of policies.
How big would these impacts be in economic terms? For now we can’t answer that without heroic assumptions. So let’s do it but just for fun, knowing we’ll get far better results in coming years.
If the tentative impacts on kids’ brain activity increase their future earnings at the same rate as, say, increased test scores from exposure to better teachers in public schools, then giving $17,300 to a parent yields around $30,000-$60,000 in overall lifetime benefits to parents and kids, or $1,500 to $3,500 in economic benefits per $1,000 spent. Ignoring many other (very real and important) potential benefits on health, crime, peers, and so on, this would imply that BFY’s “bang for the buck” would be worse than many other direct investments in child skill development, but better than most public spending on adults. Remember these impacts are probably larger than impacts of real-world policies that give money to parents due to the special and, in my view, unscalable design of BFY.
So for now I’m still not convinced money for parents warrants priority over direct investments in kids such as child care and tutoring. But I do believe that money for parents – especially if it can be nudged respectfully toward spending on kids – warrants priority over most programs serving adults. And I can’t wait to see what we learn from BFY as this little Hadron Collider revs up.
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