Giving cash to liquidity- and asset-constrained folks with high-value spending needs (like raising a kid) makes a huge difference if you can even roughly target the intervention to them. It's almost impossible to theoretically bound the benefit, it could be very large indeed. Even if some money were wasted on "bad" spending, and even though redistributing it is inherently costly, it's the kind of thing that's absolutely worth trying. It has all the well-known benefits of UBI, except on an even larger scale.
Judging by the article, quite a large difference.
>there must be better solutions than solidifying the systematic problems which capture this segment of the population.
We're talking about poor children here. The systemic problem of this segment of the population is that they are poor. It's easy to talk about poor adults and prescribe behavioral adjustments, it's a way of assigning desert. It's much harder to talk about poor children because it's obvious that no child deserves to be poor.
Surely this makes a difference in the lives of these people but on large scales, how much of a difference have you actually made?
Effectively what you've erected is a subsidy for high rent and low wages which target the poor, there must be better solutions than solidifying the systematic problems which capture this segment of the population.