The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

Although child poverty rates have fallen by half in the past 50 years, 13% of U.S. children (9.7 million in all) still live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Drawing from a recently released National Academy report on child poverty, I will briefly summarize causal evidence on the consequences of poverty for children's healthy development, as well as research on the developmental impacts of anti-poverty programs such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In light of our relative ignorance of the impact of poverty on very young children, I will describe an ongoing experiment in which low-income mothers with newborns are randomly assigned to receive either smaller or larger monthly cash gifts over the first 40 months of their children's lives. Impacts will be assessed on both children's cognitive and socioemotional development as well as on family processes thought to mediate the impacts of poverty on child well-being. Finally, I will describe the impacts on child poverty and employment of 20 program and policy approaches to reducing child poverty, which is also found in the National Academy report.