The COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected the well-being of children and families, with more disadvantaged households being the most impacted. Job losses and widespread layoffs dramatically changed household resources. School and child care closures disrupted routines and children’s learning. Families experienced intense stress, frayed social ties, and financial hardship. In response, many state governments significantly increased their investments in public resources for families as a way to mitigate the harmful effects of this tremendous and unequal increase in need.  

However, the impacts of this public spending during the pandemic are not fully understood–we don’t know to what extent these programs were effective. Existing research has not taken into account the striking, temporary increase in public spending during the pandemic funded by federal pandemic relief bills, over which states had considerable control. It is possible that children, particularly children of color and those in disadvantaged circumstances, residing in states that invested more on robust child-related policies were protected against some of the pandemic’s negative and unequal effects. To date, though, data limitations have prevented examining these associations empirically in a comprehensive way. 

Sociologist and PSTC Director Margot Jackson recently received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to study these outcomes. She and and her co-investigator, Professor of Public Policy Taryn Morrissey of American University, will engage in an innovative, interdisciplinary research project that examines how state-level public spending on children’s programs during the pandemic affected family resources and child well-being and how these impacts vary across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status in households.

To measure whether these negative consequences of the pandemic were buffered by public spending, Jackson and Morrissey will conduct a comparative analysis of public household survey data from the Brookings State Safety Net Interactive and administrative materials from the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset–a resource that provides a comprehensive accounting of public spending on children from 1997 through 2022 and was originally assembled by Margot Jackson and her collaborators at the Urban Institute as part of Jackson’s earlier study of public spending on children and class gaps in child development. 

Due to the fact that “there were dramatic expansions (and subsequent retractions) of many public investments in families with children,” Jackson explains, the investigators will analyze a variety of state programs funded by state governments such as state-level income supports, early childhood and K-12 education programming, and public health insurance. 

Using multiple sources of data, including restricted data on actual benefit receipt, Jackson and Morrissey will focus on two primary research questions: 1) How were public investments before and during the pandemic associated with family resources such as material hardship, income, program participation, and actual benefit receipt? 2) How are public investments before and during the pandemic related to children’s early educational development and the size of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic gaps? 

With this investigation, the team aims to expand upon existing research and provide insight that deepens the awareness and knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on families and children, including early health and educational development. Given the importance of the early childhood period and the well-documented socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic disparities in children’s skills at kindergarten entry, understanding the effects of public investments on broad family resources and school readiness is critical to informing both state and federal policy and practice.