Story first published in Sanford Research & Views January 2022
A team of researchers found that a poverty reduction intervention had a direct impact on children’s brain development. Co-author of the study, Lisa Gennetian, is co-PI of the Baby’s First Years, a randomized control trial of a direct cash intervention and the source of the data for this new study. Findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that after one year of predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families, 1-year-olds exhibited brain activity patterns associated with the development of thinking and learning.
This study was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the NIH under Awards R01HD087384 and K99HD104923. This research was additionally supported by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation; the Andrew and Julie Klingenstein Family Fund; the Annie E. Casey Foundation; Arrow Impact; the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana Foundation; the Bezos Family Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Bill Hammack and Janice Parmelee, the Brady Education Fund; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Silicon Valley Community Foundation); Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies; the Child Welfare Fund; the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund; the Ford Foundation; the Greater New Orleans Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the Jacobs Foundation; the JPB Foundation; J-PAL North America; the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity; the Perigee Fund; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Sherwood Foundation; the Valhalla Foundation; the Weitz Family Foundation; and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation; and by three anonymous donors.