Supplementing household income in early childhood
12/06/2024
Meeting material basic needs is essential for children’s health, development and wellbeing.
This includes stable and suitable housing, nutritious food, and necessary school supplies. Low household income can be very stressful for families, and is associated with poor health, developmental and wellbeing outcomes for children.
Household income can be supplemented through policy interventions, like cash transfers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments provided extensive income support, like the Job Keeper payment, that played a significant role in reducing the economic impact of the pandemic on households. There is an opportunity to continue such policies post-pandemic.
The Changing Children’s Chances project team used existing data and analytical approaches to test what would happen if we provided a hypothetical AU$26,000 supplement to lower-income families (33% of families in the study) during their child’s first year of life. We assessed the potential for reducing the equity gap across child health, development and wellbeing, and parental mental health.
We found that providing a hypothetical supplement to lower-income families:
- Reduced the risk of poor mental health of the child’s primary carer; equal to a 7% improvement in equity
- Reduced children’s risk of poor social-emotional outcomes; equal to a 12% improvement in equity
- Reduced children’s risk of poor physical functioning outcomes; equal to a 10% improvement in equity
Reduced children’s risk of poor learning outcomes; equal to an 11% improvement in equity.
Despite these promising findings, supplementing household income alone will not eliminate the outcome equity gap. Stacking or combining a range of complementary policy interventions in the early years is required, incorporating income support alongside other services and initiatives to achieve substantial progress towards equity.
Professor Goldfeld’s recent paper highlights the essential nature of material basics for children’s health, development and wellbeing. Attending to these material needs of children seems a basic commitment of any just society. Societies that front-end their investment, spending more on childhood, are healthier societies.
