DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37871.v1
title: Baby's First Years (BFY), New York City, New Orleans, Omaha, and Twin Cities, 2018-2019
title: Household Income and Child Development in the First Three Years of Life
title: Version 1

description: The overall goal of the Baby's First Years project is to provide the first definitive understanding of the extent to which household income plays a causal role in affecting children's cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development early in life for children born into low-income families. Some 1,000 mothers of infants with incomes below the federal poverty line were recruited in four diverse U.S. communities between May 2018 and June 2019. All are receiving monthly cash gifts via disbursement on a debit card for the first 40 months of the child's life. Parents in the high cash gift group (n=400) are receiving a cash gift of $333 per month ($4,000 per year), whereas parents in the low cash gift group (n=600) are receiving a cash gift of $20 per month ($240 per year). In order to understand the impacts of the unconditional cash gift on children's cognitive and behavioral development, the researchers will assess high and low cash gift group differences at age 3 (and, for a subset of measures, ages 1 and 2) on measures of cognitive, language, memory, self-regulation, and socio-emotional development. To understand how family economic behavior, parenting, and parent stress and well-being change in response to the cash gift, the researchers will examine high and low cash gift group differences in family expenditures, food insecurity, housing and neighborhood quality; family routines and time use; parent stress, mental health and cognition; parenting practices; and child care arrangements at child ages 1 and 2. Our four data collection points are referred to as: "Baseline", "Age 1", "Age 2", and "Age 3". The current collection includes data and related materials regarding study design from the Baseline data collection. Additional information on the project, survey design, sample, and variables are available from: The User Guide, which is included in this collection under the "Data and Documentation" tab; The project's website: babysfirstyears.com; The researchers request that all peer-reviewed papers using BFY Data: be submitted to PubMed https://publicaccess.nih.gov immediately upon acceptance for publication; include the following citation to the data in their bibliography:; Citation Magnuson, K., Noble, K.G., Duncan, G., Fox, N.A., Gennetian, L.A., and Yoshikawa, H. Baby's First Years (BFY). Baseline Public Data, 2018-2019. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-11-16. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37871.v2 include the following acknowledgement:; Acknowledgement This research uses data from the Baby's First Years study. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD087384 and by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation; Annie E. Casey Foundation; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Brady Education Fund; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Silicon Valley Community Foundation); Child Welfare Fund; Ford Foundation; Greater New Orleans Foundation; Heising-Simons Foundation; Jacobs Foundation; JPB Foundation; Louisiana Foundation; New York City Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity; Perigee Fund; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Sherwood Foundation; Valhalla Charitable Foundation; Weitz Family Foundation; W.K. Kellogg Foundation; and three anonymous donors. Principal Investigators Katherine Magnuson, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison, lead PI social and behavioral science Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD; Teachers College, Columbia University, lead PI neuroscience In alphabetical order: Greg Duncan, PhD; University of California, Irvine Nathan A. Fox, PhD; University of Maryland Lisa A. Gennetian, PhD; Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Hirokazu Yoshikawa, PhD; New York University Principal Investigators of Qualitative Substudy Sarah Halpern-Meekin, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison Katherine Magnuson, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison Study Management Lauren Meyer, Teachers College, Columbia University; National Project Director Andrea Karsh, University of California, Irvine; Administrative Director Study Co-Investigators Sarah Black, PhD; University of New Orleans William Fifer, PhD; Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Columbia University Medical Center Michael Georgieff, MD; University of Minnesota Joseph Isler, PhD; Columbia University Medical Center Connie Lamm, PhD; University of Arkansas Dennis Molfese, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln Victoria Molfese, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln Jennifer Mize Nelson, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln Timothy Nelson, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln Sonya Troller-Renfree, PhD; Teachers College, Columbia University Study Data Collectors Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under a contract from the University of California, Irvine, running from September 2017 through July 2022. SRC data collection operations are overseen by: Stephanie Chardoul, Director of Survey Research Operations and Piotr Dworak, Senior Survey Specialist, Survey Research Operations. Contact To contact the study investigators, email them at info@babysfirstyears.com Website: babysfirstyears.com
description: The overall goal of the Baby's First Years project is to provide the first definitive understanding of the extent to which household income plays a causal role in affecting children's cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development early in life for children born into low-income families. Recent advances in developmental neuroscience suggest that experiences early in life have profound and enduring influences on the developing brain. Family economic resources shape the nature of many of these experiences, yet the extent to which they affect children's development is unknown. The Baby's First Years project is designed to fill important gaps in scientific knowledge about the role of economic resources in early development.
description: The Baby's First Years project is a randomized controlled trial that will estimate the causal impacts of unconditional cash gift payments on the cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development of infants and toddlers in low-income U.S. families. Mothers of infants with incomes below the federal poverty line from four diverse U.S. communities (New York City, NY; New Orleans, LA; Omaha, NE; and Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) were recruited after giving birth at one of 12 hospitals across the four study sites. Screener and baseline interviews were administered verbally at the respondent's hospital bedside, with responses recoded by the interviewer on a laptop computer. Mothers who agreed to participate in the study will receive monthly cash payments for the first 40 months of the child's life. Mothers were randomly assigned to high and low cash gift groups. The high cash gift group mothers (n=400) received $333 per month, while the low cash gift group mothers (n=600) received $20 per month. Quantitative data are collected at four points: baseline after child is born, at one year old, two years old, and three years old. At follow-ups for years 1 and 2, mothers will be invited to participate in an at-home visit. The year 3 follow-up will take place at local university settings. All consent forms and data collection instruments will be available on the study website: babysfirstyears.com.
description: Baseline measures include newborn birth weight; mother and biological father race, ethnicity, education level, and relationship status; maternal work history before and after pregnancy; child care assistance; a household roster with demographics for all adults and children (relationship to respondent, age, sex, contribution to household income); income and net worth; maternal mental health; neighborhood safety; social services receipt; and use of alcohol and cigarettes before and during pregnancy. During data collections for Age 1, Age 2, and Age 3, mother-focused measures will include: household economic hardship, social services receipt, labor market and education participation, expenditures for child, housing and neighborhoods, family and maternal perceived stress, happiness and optimism, physiological stress, mental resources, physical and mental health, substance abuse, chaos in the home, relationships, parent-child interaction quality, epigenetic age, DNA methylation, frequency of parent-child activity, and discipline. Child-focused measures vary across waves but will include: language development, executive function and self-regulation, socio-emotional processing, IQ, brain function, health (BMI, physiological stress, sleep, etc.), epigenetic age and DNA methylation, and school achievement and behavior.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Presence of Common Scales: The baseline data collection included one scale - the CES-D index for maternal depression [Cole, J. C., Rabin, A. S., Smith, T. L., and Kaufman, A. S. (2004). Development and validation of a Rasch-derived CES-D short form. Psychological assessment, 16(4), 360]. All scales used for outcomes at ages 1 through 3 are listed in Appendix Tables 1 and 2 in the User Guide. Please refer to the User Guide and P.I. Codebook, available under the "Data and Documentation" tab, for details.
description: Response Rates: The construction of the sample is represented in the Consort diagram (Appendix Figure 1) in the User Guide. Its complicated nature precludes a simple response rate calculation, so instead a full description is presented. A total of 13,482 mothers who had given birth in the maternity ward at one of the study recruitment hospitals were identified for assessment of study eligibility and 8,243 were assessed through a Screener interview. Some 6,839 did not meet the inclusion criteria (described below), 341 did not sign consent forms, and 12 did not start the baseline interview for other reasons. Both the Screener and Baseline interviews were administered verbally at the respondent's hospital bedside, with responses record by the interviewer on a laptop computer. Baseline interview data were obtained from 1,051 mothers. After completing this interview, mothers were offered and asked to agree to receiving cash gifts of unspecified monthly amounts "from charitable foundations that want to help support families with new babies". Of the 1,051 mothers who completed the baseline interview, 47 mothers did not agree to receive the gift and an additional mother refused to provide any contact information for follow-up and therefore was not offered the cash gift. The remaining 1,003 accepted the cash gifts and were randomized into the high or low cash gift groups. Of the 1,003 mothers who were randomized by site, 3 mothers were excluded because they notified the interviewer within a few days after completing the baseline interview that they wanted to withdraw from the study, and had not spent any of the money on their debit cards. The result is a sample of 1,000 mothers. The n=1,000 sample is referred to in this documentation as the target sample.
description: Datasets: DS1: Baseline Data
description: face-to-face interview
description: on-site questionnaire
description: Mothers of infants with incomes below the federal poverty line from four diverse U.S. communities (New York City, NY; New Orleans, LA; Omaha, NE; and Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) who gave birth at one of 12 hospitals across the study sites during the baseline data collection period. Smallest Geographic Unit: City
description: Between May 2018 and June 2019, 1,003 mothers with incomes below the poverty threshold in four metropolitan areas in the United States were recruited in 12 hospitals shortly after giving birth. "Recruited" here means that they were judged to be eligible based on the information they provided in the screening interview, consented to and were administered a baseline interview, and were offered and agreed to receive a debit card with the monthly cash gift deposit. Three mothers subsequently declined further participation in the study. The intention was to recruit 250 mother/infant dyads in each of the four sites. Due to a number of IRB and other hospital-related recruiting challenges, the sample is distributed as follows: 121 mother-infant pairs in MN, 295 in LA, 295 in NE, and 289 in NY.