Elaine Maag, Stephanie Rennane, C. Eugene Steuerle, Tax Policy Center, April 2011. The individual income tax contains multiple provisions that favor families with children. They range from credits targeted towards low-income families to deductions that favor higher income families. Some provisions benefit a family by virtue of the family having children, others try to incentivize behavior such as work and going to school. This paper describes the various child-related provisions and shows the distribution of who benefits from the provisions.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=412329