Baltimore families welcoming a new child could receive a one-time cash payment of at least $1,000 through a proposed fund.
The Maryland Child Alliance hopes to establish the Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund to help lift families out of poverty and support all parents of new children. The group is collecting petition signatures to allow voters to weigh in on a charter amendment about the fund on the November ballot.
“These problems are not just happening in the present; they were happening in the past,” said Nate Golden, president and founder of the Maryland Child Alliance. “When children are born into poverty and they don’t have enough resources, it impacts their brain development and it’s going to impact them for the rest of their life.”
Golden, who teaches high school math in Baltimore City, said he sees how lack of resources in early childhood continues to affect his students as teenagers.
“Even as a high school teacher, I know that the Baby Bonus will have an impact on students when they reach me, and that they will be better resourced, better developed, and more likely to succeed in high school.”
To have the proposed charter amendment added to November ballots, the volunteer-run group needed to collect 10,000 signatures from registered voters in Baltimore City. They reached that milestone in April 2023, one year after first launching the campaign, but have continued gathering petition signatures to ensure they have enough validated by the Baltimore City Board of Elections. As of this week, they have collected 13,000 signatures.
Many students living in poverty face the stresses of living in a small, crowded home; not having nutritious and consistent food; or worrying about whether their family will be able to afford rent, said Julia Ellis, an education consultant and former Baltimore City elementary school teacher.
“All of those stressors impact the way that they show up to school and the way that their brains are literally developing,” said Ellis, who serves as the outreach chair for the Maryland Child Alliance. “It impacts their ability to focus. It impacts their ability to retain lessons and learn languages for the first time. It impacts their ability to learn how to read.”
Golden acknowledges that $1,000 may not make a large dent in the overall cost of raising a child in today’s economy – and the group hopes the Baltimore City Council will consider raising the payment amount in future years if the charter amendment is passed. But he said even this base amount could be considerable assistance for families of new children.
Hope Heikes, a pediatric speech language pathologist, visits the homes of children from birth to age 5 across Baltimore City. She and her husband are expecting the birth of their first child this Father’s Day.
Some of the families whom Heikes meets are living in poverty; many lack books, toys, and other tools that aid the development of communication and cognitive skills in early childhood, as well as other resources like nutritious food, weather-appropriate clothing, and a safe place to sleep.
“When a child doesn’t have their needs met, then that can create long-term impacts of stress on their brain development,” Heike said. “If you can give families cash right when their child is born, they can try to alleviate some of that stress on the child…. All those different things that are going to make sure that that baby has a good, strong, non stressful start.”
Ensuring families have the resources they need can also prevent the trauma of children being separated from their parents, said Carlyn Mast, a Pikesville mother and a social worker who works in interdisciplinary parental defense, helping families reunite with their kids.
Mast, who is a member of Maryland Child Alliance’s board, said parents are often criminalized for their poverty rather than being given assistance to mitigate the challenges they face. The Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund could help keep families intact, she said.
“If you’re already on CPS’s radar, they already are kind of involved in your life,” Mast said. “Any wrong move can lead to having your kid removed, so at least this money could help you with the basics. It can help you make sure that you’ve got food in the house. It can help you make sure that if you need to get to the doctors, you can pay for an Uber. It can make sure that if your WIC runs out before the end of the month and you need an extra can of formula, you have that.”
A study from the University of California, San Diego found that transferring a one-time $1,000 payment to low-income households decreased referrals to Child Protective Services. It also reduced the likelihood of a child spending time in foster care.
Many employers do not provide paid leave, which often means one parent must take unpaid time off work. That’s the case for Mast’s family as they prepare to welcome their second child next month.
“We’re taking a pay cut for a month,” Mast said. “I’m only going to take a month off, but that’s one month where I don’t have an income…. It’s a privilege to have a job where you get any sort of paid leave. A lot of us don’t have that privilege, and [the Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund] could really help with that too.”
For Melissa and Naga Willem, the fund could impact their decision whether to have a second child. The Patterson Park couple is expecting their first child in less than a month, but they aren’t sure they can afford any more kids beyond that.
“Without that financial help, my partner and I wouldn’t even consider having a second child even if we really wanted one because we don’t think we could afford it,” Melissa said. “But having that additional income would reduce that pressure, so we would be able to entertain the idea of having a second child if we wanted one.”
As Baltimore’s population continues to decline, Melissa believes the city needs programs like the Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund to attract new residents and encourage current families to raise their children here.
“It’s not only good for us, but I also feel like it’s good for the city,” she said. “As people are raising families and expanding their families in the city, it increases the population…. Also, it provides a city with more money ultimately. Because if you’re building your family inside the city, you’re living in the city, you’re entertaining in the city, all these things are happening, so I feel like it’s a mutual benefit.”
The one-time payment would be distributed as a direct deposit or prepaid debit card to parents who have new children either through birth or adoption. Golden envisions a partnership with regional hospitals to identify these families.
The Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund would be funded by an appropriation equal to 0.03% of city property value, while not raising property taxes. The funding structure is modeled after the city’s Children and Youth Fund, which itself was passed as a charter amendment in 2016.
Maryland Child Alliance says the Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund would be a first-in-the-nation program because it would be available to all Baltimore families, with no income limits or other means testing. The group argues that such restrictions would have been prohibitive to many families.
For example, taxpayers must have earned income of at least $2,500 to qualify for the federal Child Tax Credit, and the credit is phased in at 15 cents on the dollar after that, leaving out families at the lowest end of the income spectrum, Golden said.
“If you’re a single mother with three kids, you need to earn over $40,000 before you’ve got the full federal Child Tax Credit,” he said.
To avoid such limitations, the Maryland Child Alliance prioritized developing a program that was universal to all Baltimore families.
“By providing the Baltimore Baby Bonus Fund to everyone, I think it’s a great way to really stabilize families during a very unstable and delicate time in their lives, and helping prevent families from falling into poverty,” Ellis said.
There would also be no restrictions for how families can spend the money. That means families would be free to use the cash to pay for childcare, supplies, rent, food, transportation, family fun, or other purposes they deem fit.
“People know what to best spend their money on,” said Emily Yu, a Baltimore high school English teacher and the Maryland Child Alliance’s campaign manager.
Yu continued, “There is no one thing that every single parent needs. One family might already have a stroller and might not need that. Or one family may not need daycare because they have a relative supporting at home.”
Naga Willem, the soon-to-be father in Patterson Park, supports the idea of leaving it up to families to decide how to spend the payments they receive.
“Not requiring very specific restrictions on how the money is used helps it be more equitable across all socioeconomic statuses,” he said, “because a poor family’s needs are going to be different than a middle class or upper middle class family’s needs, therefore how they use that money will be different, but equally important.”
With the open-ended nature of the cash payment, one question the Maryland Child Alliance receives frequently is what happens if a parent uses the money to spend on drugs, alcohol, or other “temptation goods”? But Golden said research shows that isn’t the case.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found no significant increase in spending on alcohol and tobacco (among other categories) after the expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Another study found that cash transfers actually decreased spending on temptation goods.
Early childhood is “the most crucial time in your life,” Golden said, and Baltimore must do what it can to help its youngest residents.
Mast, the social worker, echoed that sentiment.
“I don’t think there’s another time in our life where our brains grow so fast and so intensely,” she said. “In my line of work, that attachment between a parent and their child, that’s the time right when you learn and form a secure attachment, that’s the time when you learn that your parent is a consistent caregiver and you’re safe in this world, and learn how to navigate the world based on those assumptions.”
She added, “If there’s anything that we can do to ensure that parents are able to stay with their children as an intact family, that’s what I would be in support of. The Baltimore Baby Bonus is one of the best ways to keep parents and kids together.”
