In Flint, Michigan, an Ambitious Program for New Moms

A $500 payment each month might not sound like a lot. But for Hailey Toporek, it's life-changing. The 19-year-old learned she was pregnant just 10 days before delivering a baby boy. Two days after giving birth, she arrived at pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha's office for a checkup and learned she would receive $500 in cash aid each month for the first year of her baby's life, per NPR. She's not the only one. Every new mother in Flint, Michigan, where almost 70% of children live in poverty, will receive the same cash aid, plus an initial $1,500 to encourage prenatal care, through the program dubbed Rx Kids, funded in part by community organizations and the state, per PBS.

Toporek's mother, who had to take a day off work to drive her daughter to the appointment, said the money could mean the difference between Hailey dropping out of high school and heading to college. And that's the goal. As NPR reports, "a baby's birth is also a peak time for poverty" as a new mom may be unable to work or forced from a job while confronting the overwhelming cost of child care. "We just had a baby miss their 4-day-old appointment because mom had to go back to work," Hanna-Attisha, a Michigan State University public health professor and co-director of the program, tells NPR. Rx Kids is "about a new vision of how we fundamentally should be caring for each other," she adds, per PBS.

The US is "an outlier" among wealthy nations in not providing child cash allowances and benefits, which have been shown to reduce food insecurity and improve mental and physical health for both mothers and children, per NPR. Though many cash aid pilot programs have started up, they're usually limited to lower-income households. With Rx Kids, "there are no income requirements or restrictions on how participants spend the money," PBS reports. More than $43 million has been raised to continue the program for at least three years. During that time, Hanna-Attisha and co-director Luke Shaefer, a poverty expert at the University of Michigan, will track how the money affects the health of the mother and child, financial wellbeing, and more. (More Flint, Michigan stories.)