What the $300 a month child benefit could mean for a family on the edge

Pullups for a toddler who is potty training. A bicycle. Clothes that aren't hand-me-downs. A home with heat and working plumbing. A trip to the zoo.

Four in 10 children in the U.S. live in households struggling to afford basic expenses, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Now, as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the House and Senate have passed a child benefit, the first of its kind in the United States.

It would provide $300 per month per child under age 6, and $250 per month for children over 6, to families making up to $150,000 a year. This benefit, combined with other enhanced benefits in the package, could cut child poverty in the U.S. by half, according to an analysis by Columbia University.

Unlike many benefits aimed at poor children in the United States, this one comes without lots of red tape, time limits or work requirements. The current bill calls for the IRS to send a check every month to families that qualify.

How might such a benefit be spent? Well, the city of Stockton, Calif., recently piloted a program where residents living below the median income received $500 a month, with no strings attached. The researchers found they used it for basic necessities, paying down debt and supporting friends and family. And perhaps counterintuitively, recipients were more likely than a control group to start working full-time while receiving the payments.

To learn more about what this assistance would really mean, NPR spoke with three mothers about their needs and hopes for their children.

Shewona Ford, 40, St. Louis. Household earnings this past year: About $17,000

Ford has eight children who range in age from 1 to 18. At the beginning of the pandemic, she lost her job at a nursing home, where she made $10 an hour. Then she got a job in a homeless shelter, but she was fired in June for being late because, she says, day cares had closed and she didn't have steady child care.

Ford lives in subsidized housing, paying about $850 a month, but she is facing a nonrenewal of her lease next month. When winter storms and single-digit temperatures hit her city in February, the heat failed and the pipes burst.

She gathered her children into bed for hours to stay warm, turning on '80s sitcoms to pass the time. "I was playing ‘Alf’ for them, and ‘Small Wonder’ — all these things that I used to watch with my mom when I was a kid."

When we spoke a few weeks later, the pipes were still broken and they were still boiling their drinking water. Ford saw on the news about the new child benefit and posted it on Facebook with the comment, "Yes, Lord."

The first thing she says she would do when and if the money comes through is move out of the apartment with no heat or hot water and find a place big enough so she and all her children can be together. Some of them have been staying elsewhere, with a relative and a family friend.

Then, she says, the teenagers can help her watch the little ones, and she can get a day job as well as a night job. Her dream is to someday start her own nonprofit, helping the homeless.

Across households, transportation tends to be the second largest budget item after housing. With the new benefit, Ford would replace her car, which isn't running right now, with a van. Riding the bus to apply for job assistance and child care programs can take all day.

The other day, she said, she had to hitchhike to find a store that had space heaters in stock. "It was bone cold. We could see ourselves talk in the kitchen. We barely could come out of our rooms."

Her monthly grocery bill can easily come to $400, which she uses Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits to pay for. But if she had a little extra, she'd buy everybody their favorite prepared meals, like fried fish.

And her two youngest, a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old, are always in need of diapers. "There's a diaper bank, but I don't think they're giving out pullups. And pullups are way higher — like $26.99 for one box and I have a boy and a girl, so I have to buy two of them."

Ford says she would also like to get the kids some help with their mental health for all that they have been through — homelessness and neighborhood violence. "I'm ready to work on God's kingdom. I'm ready to get myself in line, to get my children back in line. Like, we need counseling, because we have been so hurt so many times."

And she'd like to take the kids to the zoo. She says the younger ones have never been.

Christina Holley, 29, Philadelphia. Household earnings this past year: $40,000

Holley's children are 8, 10 and 12 years old. Her husband works in institutional food service, an essential job that has had longer hours this past year. Holley, meanwhile, got laid off from her job at an indoor children's play space that closed due to the pandemic.

She loved working with children, so losing the job "took a huge toll on more than just our income, but like, how I identified as a person."

Getting another job wasn't easy. The only openings she could find were for front-line positions. Not only was there her kids' remote learning to supervise, but Holley is also a full-time undergraduate at Temple University, studying sociology. "It was a lot dealing with the scheduling with my husband," she says, "let alone putting myself and the children at two times the risk, because both of us would have had to be outside."

But there was a twist: The federal stimulus and enhanced unemployment benefits due to coronavirus actually gave Holley higher earnings this year than she's ever had in her life. In 2019, as a single mother, she made about $8,000.

And she is really grateful for the extra time she's been able to spend with her children. She was a teenage mother, and she says she's gotten to know her kids in a new way this year.

"I was so stuck on grinding and gaining money and bringing in income that I couldn't find the time or the energy to focus on my children."

With the child benefit, Holley says, the first word that comes to mind is "sovereignty."

She grew up in public housing, and says, "A lot of government programs make you prove your poverty. They make you jump through hoops. If this could come with dignity, and the basic understanding that this is the baseline of what people need to survive, this is something that people shouldn't have to, like, fight for," the new benefit, she says, would help in both abstract and concrete ways. "I think that it would allow for me to continue to have the time that I need to develop not only as a mother, but as a professional woman." She wants to finish her undergraduate degree and work in higher education administration.

She has affordable Internet access for the kids' schooling, but it's been unreliable, so she'd like to upgrade. And her kids need some social outlets. With the long months of isolation, "my kids are socially damaged, you know, like just really broken."

Her daughter wants to try gymnastics. And she would like to replace her son's bicycle, which was stolen. Bicycle prices have risen during the pandemic, she notes: "$250 or $300 is not something we can do right now."

Antonia Gonzalez-Caro, 38, Moxee, Wash. Household earnings this past year: About $55-65,000

Gonzalez left her job as a high school teacher when her younger son was born in June. "It was maternity leave, and also the coronavirus — I was going to take just one term [off], but it's all this crazy stuff." She is going back to teach this month.

Her husband works putting up drywall, but shifts have been erratic during the pandemic, which makes it hard to estimate their income. In any case, getting by on one income has been hard; they've gone through their $12,000 savings and borrowed $6,000 from her parents. Their mortgage payment is $1,500 a month; her husband's truck, which he needs for work, is about $700 a month.

Grocery prices are up these days; minimum $400 a month. They put about $3,000 on the credit card last month.

With the child benefit, Gonzalez-Caro says her first priority would be to pay back the debt to her parents. She would love to get some sports equipment for her older son, who just turned 4. "He loves soccer, he loves baseball, he can do pretty much any sport."

She wants to get the baby a new stroller; the one she has is passed down from her sister, and she'd love to have one that they could take on a hike.

And she'd like to get them both at least a few outfits that aren't hand-me-downs. "I was lucky that one of my sister's kids is a little bit older than mine. So I'll be honest with you, I haven't really bought any new clothes for my kids."

She's worried that strangers might judge her for having the kids in old clothes, especially now that the boys are going to go back to day care: "I don't want to think about the prejudice of people, but ... it's tough."

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