If you want to know what raising a family might look like under a Kamala Harris presidency, look to Flint, Mich.

For years, Flint has been something of a cautionary tale. A decade ago, lead in the water supply poisoned the city’s children. As of last year, it still had one of the highest child poverty rates in the nation.

But Flint aims to reinvent itself with an innovative, pro-family program that has become a key plank of Harris’s economic agenda: giving newborn babies $6,000 in cash, no strings attached.

In Flint’s pilot (and Harris’s national iteration), families are entrusted to use this windfall however they see fit. Every family’s needs are different, after all, even if nearly all face the same financial challenge: When a new baby arrives, household earnings usually plummet. But the kid still requires all those dang bottles, diapers, pumps, cans of formula, wipes, cribs, onesies, strollers, car seats and more.

“Babies are expensive,” summarizes Mona Hanna, co-founder of Flint’s Rx Kids program.

Hanna (known to locals as just “Dr. Mona”) is the relentlessly upbeat, baby-obsessed public health advocate and Michigan State University professor whose research exposed the Flint water crisis. She’s also a practicing pediatrician. Over the years, she’s grown frustrated by how little she can improve the health of her tiniest patients, who often cope with inadequate nutrition, unstable housing and stressed parents.

Rx Kids is so named because it “prescribes” cash for pregnant moms and babies. Since January, city residents have been eligible for $1,500 at 20 weeks’ gestation and then another $500 for each of the 12 months after birth (so $6,000 total for a baby’s first year). There are no income tests, making the program cheaper to administer and perhaps less stigmatized.

Of course, Flint is also very low income, so there probably aren’t many millionaires claiming a baby bonus.

So far, about 1,000 families (including 98% of all babies born in Flint) have received money. Cash is administered through debit cards or direct deposits, managed by the nonprofit GiveDirectly. Having secured $91 million through a combination of federal, state and private funds, Rx Kids will launch programs next year in several other low-income communities across Michigan. The state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is keen to expand it.

So, it turns out, is our vice president.

Hanna gave a presentation about Rx Kids at the White House earlier this year, and staff fell in love with it. A version of the program made its way into Harris’s presidential platform: offering every family with a newborn $6,000 as a refundable child tax credit, available in monthly installments. At campaign stops around the country, Harris has marketed this promise as a centerpiece of her agenda to reduce the cost of living.

Harris’s overall child tax credit expansion would cost around $1 trillion over a decade. What might that investment buy us? In addition to all the existing research on child allowances, Rx Kids offers some instructive takeaways.

Hanna, in partnership with University of Michigan professor H. Luke Shaefer, has been using surveys and administrative records to track outcomes for families in the Flint pilot. The researchers compare results to several control groups, including demographically similar families outside the city and prior cohorts of Flint moms and babies. The program is less than a year old, but early results are promising.

So far, enrolled families show less smoking in the third trimester and fewer babies born with very low birthweight. They also report less food and housing insecurity. In fact, there have been zero evictions in the treated population (versus 2% to 8% in the control groups).

Hanna acknowledges it’s hard disentangle whether improvements are due to the cash itself versus other factors. Parents are not required to participate in any other social or parenting programs as a condition of receiving the money. But many do; in fact, enrollees received more prenatal care and at earlier stages of pregnancy than parents in the control groups. That might be because they learn about other available support services when joining Rx Kids. “Free money” advertises itself, and can get people in the door who might not otherwise apply for other programs.

It may also soften the (reasonable) distrust some people harbor toward local services. Which is part of the point, Hanna says.

“We are trying to rebuild the social contract, rebuilding trust in government and health-care institutions,” Hanna says. “We are trying to show families that they are loved and valued.”

A federal cash-for-babies program administered through the tax code likely wouldn’t feel as warm and fuzzy.

But for lower- and middle-income families struggling with their new, expensive bundle of joy, the money would still be more than welcome. Flint leaders and families are proud of the prospect of serving as a model for an innovative national pro-family policy, rather than the poster child for failed government.

“For a long time we have not wanted to be remembered as the city that poisons its kids,” Hanna says. “We want to be remembered for what we do next.”

Email: crampell@washpost.com.