It was a bold experiment with the potential to significantly impact the direction of U.S. anti-poverty policy: Give poor single mothers monthly cash payments and measure the benefit to their children’s cognitive development over the first four years of their lives. 

To conduct the large-scale study, 1,000 low-income mothers of newborns were recruited at hospitals in four metropolitan areas around the country. The study, financed in part by the National Institutes of Health, randomly assigned 400 mothers to receive an unconditional monthly payment of $333 for the first four years of their child’s life, while 600 received just $20 per month. 

The concept appears to be well-intentioned. Why wouldn’t a little extra money relieve a mother of stress and allow her to spend more time on activities that would contribute to her child’s development? 

The results of the study — called “Baby’s First Years,” which was conducted May 2018 to July 2023, however, shattered the expectations of its authors, social scientists from prestigious universities in the U.S. 

In a paper published on June 16 in JAMA Pediatrics, they reported that the more generous cash gifts made no difference in the well-being of the children whose mothers received them. There was no difference between the two groups on measures of cognitive, language, memory, self-regulation and socioemotional development. 

“Monthly unconditional cash transfers totaling approximately $15,000 over 4 years to mothers with low incomes did not improve maternal mental health, maternal or child BMI, or maternal report of children’s health,” the report concluded. 

Robert Rector, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has for decades studied the effects of anti-poverty programs from the 1960s. To Rector, the concept of the experiment represents a movement among certain social scientists and policymakers in favor of cash assistance and guaranteed-income programs. 

Welfare-Reform Legislation

In an interview with the Register, Rector said that the experiment’s findings “will take a lot of the wind out of the sails” of those who support such programs.

Rector was a key figure in shaping the 1996 welfare-reform legislation, enacted by President Bill Clinton with the help of Republicans in Congress, which required beneficiaries to work or get job training in exchange for benefits and set a five-year lifetime limit on benefits.

After opposing the law, calling it a “top-down reform with rigid rules,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops later issued a statement lending conditional support for welfare reform. The conference continues to advocate for increased welfare funding.

“The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops supports welfare policies that: protect human life and dignity; strengthen family life; encourage and reward work; preserve a safety net for the vulnerable; build public/private partnerships to overcome poverty; and invest in human dignity,” reads a policy statement on the USCCB website.

While some critics, including in the Church in the U.S., characterized reforms to the 1996 welfare system as removing the “social safety net,” Rector maintains that the nation’s persistent social problems — including crime, drug use and poverty — stemmed from the effects of President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called war on poverty. 

Reduced Financial Incentives to Marry

The destruction of the family, he explained, was precipitated by the expansion of cash payments to single mothers in the 1960s through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which reduced financial incentives to work and marry. 

Out-of-wedlock birth rates rapidly rose. In 1960, only 5% of babies in the U.S. were born to unmarried parents. Between 1970 and 1994, the rate increased from 26.4 to 46.9 of all births. Today, that number has leveled off at about 40%.

“The people who designed the war on poverty were not interested in marriage, and they were not interested in the family. They were going to subsidize single parenthood,” he said.

“What they did, effectively, was have the welfare state come in and act as a substitute father. In lower-income communities, we effectively drove the father out of the household and out of the community as well,” Rector said, adding, “We need to bring those fathers back.”

While marriage rates have never recovered, Rector points to data that he says shows that reforming the welfare system benefited lower-income communities. The birth rate among unmarried girls and young women dramatically decreased, and the AFDC caseload “melted like a snowball in July.”

Rector said that the “culture of restraint” that was ushered in with Clinton’s rhetoric in favor of welfare reform also led to a decrease in abortion.

“My research concludes that there have been 10 million fewer abortions as a result of those reforms in the 1990s,” he said, crediting the “change in messaging” with the almost immediate modification of behavior. 

“It created a climate of saying, ‘We will support you, but you’re not going to get a one-way handout for life,” he said.

Expanding Other Programs’ Requirements

Rector is now focusing on expanding work requirements to other programs, such as food stamps, housing and Medicaid.

“We want to assist people, but we want people to also participate in assisting themselves,” he said.

He also told the Register that he is also working with members of Congress to draft legislation that encourages rather than discourages marriage.

Today, 1 in 4 children are born to parents who are living together but who are not married — a statistic that Rector says reflects the welfare system’s continuing incentivization of single motherhood.

“They get them with these very large financial penalties where they can lose, say, a quarter of their joint income just by the fact that they put rings on each other's fingers. When you explain that that’s the way the system is working and show the magnitude of it, nobody says that that’s a good idea. No one — even the Democrats were like, ‘Well, that sounds like a bad idea,’” he said.

And both political parties are to blame, he says.

“Too many Republicans just want to cut some money off the side of the welfare state and are not that concerned with the actual well-being of the people that are being affected,” he added.

Government’s Definition of Poverty

Rector also has a bone to pick with the way poverty is defined, by the authors of the “Baby’s First Years” study and by the U.S. government itself.

The results of the study came as no surprise to him, he said, because he didn’t imagine that an extra $333 a month would make much of a difference to the mothers receiving the cash benefits. 

While their income may be at the poverty line, they receive far more than that from the government, he explained, from subsidies for housing, food stamps, WIC (U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children), the earned income tax credit, and the additional child tax credit. So a mother participating in this study — with one child and an income of $21,150 — would have an actual income closer to $50,000 a year, he told the Register. “The reality is that those families weren’t poor in the first place. When we talk about poverty, very few of the families that we talk about are poor. They’re not poor when you correctly count the income they have. They’re not even remotely poor,” he said. “But we’ve spent 50 years miscounting them.”

To help these families and their children, he said, policymakers should instead promote marriage, which he said “brings the income in the family up a whole lot.”

Marriage is also the most effective tool against the negative effects of poverty, he said.

“I like to call it a universal social antibiotic. For almost any problem you’re concerned with, like dropping out of school, youth violence, so forth, it has a benign effect. 

“You can’t find too many things are like that, but the one thing that is like that is marriage. So we need to take these 1-in-4 kids that are being born to cohabiting mothers and create a climate where we say, ‘Marriage is good for you; marriage is good for kids.’”