Centering parents and parenting in randomized evaluations of cash transfers to families

The Baby’s First Years evaluation is a J-PAL-supported study evaluating the impact of poverty alleviation on child development and families. In this post, Lisa Gennetian (Duke University) and Sarah Halpern-Meekin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), two researchers involved in Baby’s First Years, discuss the importance of centering parents and their experiences to better understand the impact cash payments have on families. 

Nearly all parents want to be good parents; they want their children to have good childhoods, and they want their children to be happy. Regardless of income, wealth, or stress associated with work and poverty, parents will talk about their children with pride, joy, compassion, and a desire to protect them. Parenting is a fundamentally emotional and relational role. However, prevailing theories of parenting and child development generally focus on time and attention but don’t account for the vast and complex role of emotions and experiences. This omission presents dilemmas for guiding analyses of parenting in evaluating interventions. Expanding our understanding of parenting and development by considering these emotions can potentially strengthen the validity and relevance of results of randomized evaluations.

As researchers involved in a randomized evaluation of an unconditional cash transfer to mothers and families residing in or near poverty with young children in the United States, we are paying particular attention to how leading theories help and hinder us from fully assessing the impact of cash transfers to families.

Prevailing parenting theories and their limitations in practice

In the economics literature, theories relevant to parenting include both altruism (care about the child and the child’s future “utility”) and paternalism (parents doing for the child what they see as good for the child). These, in turn, shape the types and quality of the inputs (what economists call the technology or production function) that influences parental investment of financial and time resources in children. Such an approach offers conceptual guidance on how parental resource allocations can affect children’s “human capital”—skills related to education and job preparation.

In the child development literature, theories of parenting center on quality of interactions, including the responsiveness of parents to children’s cues, and certain styles of parenting. Here, emotions may be implicit in affecting interactions and parenting styles (e.g., authoritarian parenting may intersect with being angry or less emotive).

But what if time spent reading a favorite book together at bedtime, for example, was as impactful as a weekly outing to a coffeeshop to get a cake pop, or taking a stroll to the park? Economic theories attune us to the first activity as an investment in children’s human capital. However, they are largely agnostic (or potentially dismissive) as to the “meaning” of the cake pops or the visits to the park as their own independent influence on children’s wellbeing. Existing tools assessing child development attune us to the “conversational turns” between parent and child during these activities and to the presence of an “engaged parenting style” as capturing quality while reading together. But the role of laughter, shared positive experiences and emotions, and the creation of meaningful family rituals and memories from the coffee shop and the park are only interpreted indirectly or implicitly.  

These prevailing theoretical perspectives may be limited in offering a robust picture of family life; they also do not map on to what we directly hear from parents. 

Expanding beyond these theories

Recently, a mother we interviewed described using some of her cash gift for the month to get holiday decorations. She showed us a photo of her girls, four and nine, each decorating half of the front door. We heard mom’s warm memories and felt her kids’ excitement, as she described how the photo showed “all their personalities that were going on right there; because it was like, ‘This is my side, and this is your side.’ … They are just adorably cute! … They’re good at sharing, but I try to get them, like I try to get them more working together.” This mom had the family put up holiday trimmings little by little across December, boosting her kids’ anticipation and joy as they decorated their way toward Christmas. And it’s not just for her kids, she said, “I’m excited. … God has been good. … I’m just able to see them be happy.” Many of these holiday extras, she explained, she was able to buy with her monthly cash gift.

If we only focus on human capital investments or parent-child interactions, the importance of these positive emotions and this annual family ritual, of the ways that this mom scaffolds her daughters’ relationship with each other by encouraging them to cooperate on projects together, could get missed in direct measurements during planned data collection moments. This might preclude uncovering certain types of effects on parents and children or shape interpretation of findings in limiting ways. 

Addressing these blindspots matters for a variety of reasons: 

Applying new, expansive theories to rigorous evaluation

The hypotheses we as researchers develop as we evaluate the wide array of cash transfers families experience—from government sources, like the Child Tax Credit or the Alaska Permanent Fund, as well as from philanthropic sources, like the various unconditional cash gift experiments underway across the country, including our own Baby’s First Years study—must be informed by a broad set of theories. These theories should attend not just to the financial and time investments parents make in their children, but also to the emotional and relational experiences of parenting and family life. 

With such an approach, we can better anticipate and understand the trade-offs and decisions parents make about how to spend their money and time. We can also make more informed choices about the outcomes and metrics by which we assess policy or intervention success. Parents care about bedtime stories and cake pops and park visits, and they spend accordingly. Yet, our current research approaches are not designed to capture these “preferences” or “interactions” beyond what is observable or measurable with our current tool set of validated outcomes.

Here are some examples of how to do this:  

Pursuing these insights has important implications for evaluating and measuring the impacts of ongoing and future randomized evaluations of cash transfer programs and policies.