Giving Compass' Take:

• A study published in the American Economic Review found that more money in family budgets leads to better child behavior and outcomes. 

• What role do school and education have in changing childhood behavior patterns? 

• Read about how social-emotional learning prepares students more for life challenges. 

So-called “soft skills” are important for success in the labor market, and in life, as work by scholars such as Jim Heckman and Angela Duckworth demonstrates. Our behavior and personality matter. These skills or traits are not fixed, but are at least to some extent malleable.

Improvements in child personality traits and behaviors have positive long-run implications for educational attainment and success in the labor market. But on average, children in poorer households are less likely to develop non-cognitive skills, contributing to intergenerational inequality.

But there may be a simpler way to help children in poor families develop these skills: make their families less poor. In a study published in the American Economic Review, my co-authors and I examine the impact of a boost in household incomes on child personality traits and behavioral or emotional disorder symptoms. We find that money matters.

The precise causal pathways are necessarily hard to identify. But our results are clear. More money in family budgets can improve child behavior and personality traits – and likely better long-run outcomes, too.

Read the full article by Randall Akee about child behavior from Brookings