Program payments are conditional on children in grades three through nine attending school regularly. In developing countries such as Mexico children are often enrolled in school but do not attend for long. The payments increase as the child increases in grade level. This gives an incentive to keep children in school longer and helps the children continue into higher grades. Initially parents of a third grader received a little over $10 per month parents of girls in ninth grade got over $35 per month. This was close to two-thirds of the income the children would receive as laborers. The overall result was to break the trade-off that parents face between higher consumption for the family to day and the higher future consumption possible when the child has completed school. Families of girls also receive slightly higher payments than boys partly because girls are more likely to drop out while the social benefits of keeping girls in school are well known from development economics research to be very high. Provided that the school and health checkup conditions are met the families not the government decide how to best spend these extra resources. Levy estimates that the average family participating in the program receives about $35 per month in combined cash and in-kind transfers which is about 25% of average poor rural family income without the program