Why Money Matters: Low Income and Child Development

Policy perspective Many Canadian children experience poverty at some point in their childhood. According to the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, close to one in three children was poor at least once in 1994, 1996 or 1998 and about one in 10 was consistently poor over these three years.1 Persistently high levels of child poverty pose a critical challenge to policy-makers and society in Canada. Clearly, much more can be done to enhance the economic security of low-income households and to address the deleterious consequences of economic inequality for children and society more broadly. The question from a policy perspective is how best to invest time and resources to this end. Does money really matter? Or is it a marker for something else? Should governments focus on direct service and therapeutic interventions to promote children’s psychosocial development instead? Should they pursue a “targeted ” approach to transfers and benefits, or attempt to build a more “universal ” infrastructure to foster healthy child development and support families? Bringing research evidence to bear on social policy, however, is not an easy task