Dr. Kathryn Edin: Child tax credit
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As parents and guardians take advantage of the child tax credit this tax season, there has been discussion about potentially more than doubling it in the future.
On April 14, 2025, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:19]
KATHRYN EDIN: My name is Kathryn Edin. I’m the William Church Osborne professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, and I study poverty, family, and the social safety net. Though I love numbers, my main method is in-depth, close observation of real people and how safety net policies affect their lives.
Interview with SciLine
What are the current federal benefits of the Child Tax Credit, and who qualifies?
[0:00:49]
KATHRYN EDIN: Currently, for each qualifying child—that is a child under 17—you can claim $2,000 from the government at tax time in a lump sum. Now, when I say you can claim there’s a big exception, and that is for parents who don’t—who work at low-wage jobs or whose earnings are moderate, and they don’t pay in enough to the tax code to qualify for the full benefit. So, what that means is that about one in four American children don’t benefit fully from the current Child Tax Credit. That’s about 19 million kids.
There’s been talk about expanding the credit—what might that look like?
[0:01:38]
KATHRYN EDIN: Well, we actually know a lot about the answer to that question. First of all, about 140 nations around the globe—70% of all nations—have some sort of child-based cash transfer program, and in rich nations, that program looks a lot like an experiment we fielded in 2021 where we expanded the tax credit to include those 19 million children and make the benefit more generous. And what we know from research around the globe is that these programs, especially the universal programs in the richer nations, are tremendously impactful. It’s hard to name an outcome for parents or children that the credit doesn’t help, but we see huge decreases in infant mortality, increases in child birth weight, even in life expectancy, in academic outcomes, and psychological well-being. So, it’s a very robust literature coming from those 140 countries.
What does your research say about the role expanded child tax credits play in helping low-income families?
[0:02:50]
KATHRYN EDIN: Well, you know, a panel of experts was convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to evaluate all the programs on the table for reducing child poverty, and this was at the cornerstone of their recommendations. So, you know, beyond me, the numbers people, the experts, have really pinpointed this is the way to go if we want to really make the U.S. a leader in alleviating child poverty. I think what we’ve seen in our research is this dignity-enhancing effect of the credit. It’s very, very powerful when parents talk about receiving the child tax credit, they feel honored as citizens. They feel that their government is interested in doing something to help them at a time when it’s really hard to make ends meet, and it enhances their feeling that they’re worthy of dignity and that they’re citizens who are being respected for their contributions. And you know, in a country where our total fertility rate is now down to 1.6, you know—that’s below replacement per woman—we should really care about making it easier for people to have kids. The other thing that our research has shown is, you know, it’s called the child tax credit, and this really matters. It turns out that if you code something as for the kids, parents, again, just like in our earlier research, see it as the kids’ money, and both in the case of the old child tax credit and this newer, expanded child tax credit, most of the expenditures go to things that benefit kids and parents really think about the money as being sort of reserved or set apart for their kids.
What do you think was learned from the 2021 American Rescue Plan and its temporary increase of the child tax credit?
[0:04:55]
KATHRYN EDIN: First of all, we see a historic decline in child poverty at 5.2% during the year in which the expanded CTC was active. This is astonishing. Usually, child poverty rates are about 20% of the U.S. right before the pandemic, they sat at about 12%, so to see this historic drop was really, really exciting. Second, same for material hardship. Never in recorded history, we do not see lower rates of material hardship. Then in terms of benefits to parents and kids, we see huge benefits in terms of material hardship. We even see advances in health, physical health, and psychological health for both moms and kids. It’s hard to find an outcome that hasn’t been studied for which there isn’t at least one study that shows benefits. So, one analysis of the costs and benefits of making the expanded child tax credit permanent found a 10-to-one cost-benefit ratio, meaning that for every dollar we spend on this program, we get $10 in return. So, this is a great investment for society. It’s likely to lead to a more stable and well-educated workforce, and in the meantime, kids lives will improve markedly.
What do you think the future of child tax credits look like, including at the federal and state levels.
[0:06:33]
KATHRYN EDIN: So, tax credits and things done through the tax system in general are very positively viewed by the public, you know, this has been an era of retrenchment, safety net retrenchment, since welfare reform in the main, but what we see here is that the EITC and CTC, our two largest tax credit programs, have been expanded 14 times and just the short time frame in which they’ve been in existence. Furthermore, even though the program did expire and we lost all of the benefits to poverty, hardship, and so on, in 2022 and going forward, states have begun to pick up the ball, and about a dozen states, including the District of Columbia, have their own child tax credits, some of them universal, and some of them, especially Colorado, is quite generous. They don’t hold a candle, of course, to the federal program, but it’s quite exciting to see that so many states are implementing and experimenting with their own versions of the child tax credit. So, I would say, you know, there’s a lot of support, and both Republicans and Democrats, of course, have advanced some version of an expanded child tax credit in the past few years.
