Lighting up young brains...literally

 My late father was a bad joke magnet. Over the course of his life, he amassed quite a collection from the coalfields of Fayette County to the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Aside from shameless puns endlessly repeated, he was fond of good news/bad news jokes of the kind that would raise expectations and then smash them. 

(For example, one of his favorites was about a general telling his soldiers the good news that they finally get to change undergarments. The bad news was they had to change them with each other…I told you they were bad.)

I thought of him when I saw a news story about a real-life good news/bad news scenario which is even less funny than any of his jokes.

A newly released study found encouraging results showing that anti-poverty measures can actually improve brain activity in one-year-old infants in ways that are associated with higher language, cognitive and socio-emotional scores later in life. That would have been the good news.

The bad news is that the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), a national program that could have helped millions of infants, not to mention kids of all ages, just got shut down when the US Senate failed to extend the program. 

Tens of millions of kids, and an untold number of infants, lost out when the expanded CTC ended in December 2021. And whether it will come back in any form is largely up to West Virginia’s senators.

The experiment, called Baby’s First Years, was planned long before a monthly CTC benefit became a reality. It involved a team of investigators from six universities around the country who conducted an experiment aimed at seeing whether a direct anti-poverty intervention would affect brain development in very young children.

Researchers recruited a diverse group of low-income mothers at four locations around the country. Participants were randomly placed into two groups. One received a nominal cash gift card worth $20 per month, while the other received a month cash gift of $333 dollars with no strings attached. By coincidence, that amount is similar to the CTC benefits of $250 to $300 per child, depending on age.

When the children in the experimental groups reached their first birthday, their brain activity was measured in their homes using electroencephalography, a process in which a cap is placed on the infant’s head to record brainwaves. Infants in the group that received the larger benefit had significantly more high-frequency brain activity than those in the $20 per month group.

According to neuroscientist Kimberly Noble at Teachers College, Columbia University, “We have known for many years that growing up in poverty puts children at risk for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health. However, until now, we haven’t been able to say whether poverty itself causes differences in child development, or whether growing up in poverty is simply associated with other factors that cause those differences.”

The design of the experiment shows that we’re looking at causation here, not just correlation.

Noble said that “All healthy brains are shaped by their environments and experiences, and we are not saying that one group has ‘better’ brains. But, because of the randomized design, we know that the $333 per month must have changed the children’s experiences or environments, and that their brains adapted to those changed circumstances.”

Researcher Katherine Magnuson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said “families are all different, and the potential promise of money as a way of directly supporting families is that it allows parents to make choices about what their children most need. Thus, there may not be just one way in which money positively affects families; money may matter in a lot of small ways.”

I have to admit I was slow in recognizing the importance of the first months after birth in shaping long-term life chances, but the evidence is clear that adverse childhood experiences, including poverty, have huge consequences. The evidence also suggests that there are critical periods in human development in which our brains and bodies are especially sensitive to outside stimuli. It seems that ground lost in those periods may not be regained later in life.

We know from stories collected from WV parents that the benefits of income supports from the CTC have helped children of all ages. Not negotiating a deal for the CTC would be very bad news for a lot of people right now, and worse news for years to come.

Now that there’s solid evidence that this kind of basic support early in life can light up developing brains, it would be a shame to let those lights go out.

That’s no joke.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail)