The pandemic has taught us all one thing: child poverty in America could be eliminated easily. The cash payments of $300 per child that were sent out by the Joe Biden administration as part of last year's stimulus bill, has, according to researchers at Columbia University, kept around 3.8 million children out of poverty, a nearly 30 percent reduction in the child poverty rate. (It also helped the economy). Sadly, the payments recently ran out and Biden's Bill Back Better Bill, which would have reinstated them, is dead for now in congress.
Despite the money helping so many families in a time of need, most Republicans and some conservative Democrats opposed it by implying (in a typically classist and racist attitude) that it would discourage work, or even worse, parents might spend the money on illegal drugs. (Personally, I wish that every time the Republicans pass a huge tax cut for the rich, they would consider that a lot of that money is going to wealthy stock brokers, who's passion for snorting cocaine is legendary!).
But, putting the behavior of adults aside, what about the children themselves? Does giving money to parents really benefit their children? A recent study that compared poor babies who's families received $330 a month to ones that didn't found a definite increase in cognitive development for the babies in the families that got the money.
Is this really so surprising? As someone who has taken classes in childhood development, I can attest that the single most important thing for a baby's brain development is that it have parents and caregivers that bond with it, interact with it, respond to its needs and play with it. So it makes sense that parents having a little more money will have less stress and more time to positively build an emotional relationship with their babies.
Anyone who has ever interacted with a healthy, normal baby can understand this; when you look at a baby and smile and coo at it, the baby will usually smile back, encouraging you to continue. You feel good for making the baby smile, and the baby also feels good from getting your attention. These kind of simple interactions are crucial to a baby's development. I once had a teacher in a child development class who told us about an orphanage in England during World War II where babies were cared for by nuns, who were too overworked to do anything with the babies other than feeding them and changing them. Every baby from that orphanage grew up to have mental deficiencies, a sad example of how important affectionate interactions are for babies.
I think that this can be extended beyond the years of infancy; it's no secret that children in the US have lower test scores in math and science on average than children in most other industrialized nations. While there are a number of reasons for this, one factor may be that the US is also the only industrialized nation to not have mandatory paid parental leave, robbing millions of babies of that crucial early developmental period with their parents that can, as this study clearly seems to show, give them a extra brain boost in later life.
And, and I always like to point out when discussing social spending programs, reducing child poverty benefits not only poor families but also society as a whole. Children who grow up without the negative effects of poverty are going to be better educated and get better jobs, improving the economy for everyone, and they're less likely to wind up in prison, which we all pay for with our taxes.
Hopefully, the money for parents will be written into a new form of the Build Back Better bill sometime soon, and really I think it's just the tip of the iceberg of the changes that should be made to improve the lives of poor children in this country (How about national daycare? Paid parental leave? Increased per pupil spending in low income neighborhood public schools?). Although these programs may seem expensive, they are just a drop in the bucket compared to other spending this country does (the cash for the parents program cost 80 billion dollars in one year, around a tenth of what we spend on defense), and they improve the country as a whole. Put simply, the richest country in the world shouldn't punish children for being born into poverty.
No comments:
Post a Comment