Welfare Reform and Children’s Well-Being
from Poverty Research Insights, Fall 2004
Prepared from: “The Consequences of Welfare Reform for Child Well-Being: What Have We Learned So Far and What are the Policy Implications?” by Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. This paper was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Thematic Session: “The End of Welfare as We Knew It: What Now?”, August 14, 2004. Read the full paper at: http://www.jhu.edu/~welfare/Cherlin_ASA2004.pdf.
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How have low-income mothers’ transitions off welfare and into employment affected their children’s well-being?
This is a central question for researchers and policy makers. When welfare recipients go to work, their children might experience improved well-being if their household income increases and if their mother’s self-esteem increases. On the other hand, children might experience negative effects if employment leads to increased maternal stress or if children spend longer periods of time in unsupervised settings.
In this piece, we present a summary of a recent paper, “The Consequences of Welfare Reform for Child Well-Being: What Have We Learned So Far and What are the Policy Implications?” by Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. Cherlin reviews findings from several studies to learn how children have fared post-welfare reform.
The studies
Two types of large-scale studies of this topic have been carried out over the past several years. The first type consists of evaluations based on random-assignment studies in particular communities, in which one group of families receives assistance under pre-welfare-reform rules and a second, experimental group is subject to new policies, including work requirements, time limits, and earnings supplements for the employed.
Because random assignment is used, one can compare the well-being of children in the experimental and control groups and conclude that differences are the result of some part of the experimental treatment. However, as Cherlin notes, random-assignment studies are limited in their ability to highlight the processes that cause these results. MDRC, which conducted many of these studies, conducted a meta-analysis of their data, assembled under the name “The Next Generation Studies.”
The second type of large-scale study is the longitudinal, observational study. In these studies, a population-based random sample of families is selected and then interviewed at regular intervals. The Women’s Employment Study (WES) interviewed a sample of 753 single mothers who were welfare recipients in an urban Michigan county in 1997. Information was collected at each survey wave on a particular “focal child” for the three-fourths of the mothers who had a child age 2 to10 (see the accompanying article “After PRWORA: Barriers to Employment, Work, and Well-Being Among Current and Former Welfare Recipients” for more information about WES). The Three-City Study, for which Cherlin is a co-investigator, follows a sample of families from low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, with a particular focus on children ages 0 to 4 and 10 to 14 years old living in households with incomes less than twice the poverty line. This study includes extensive measures of child well-being, including direct measures obtained from the children. Children and their families were interviewed in 1999 and 2001.(1)
The findings
Even though the various studies use different designs and collect different measures of child well-being, it is possible to compare some findings. Table 1 highlights some of these.
The two observational studies, WES and the Three Cities Study, report consistent findings: transitions off of welfare or into employment have no significant negative effects on child well-being; children are not worse off than when they started. There are also some suggestions of positive effects: WES finds that moving from reliance on welfare to a reliance on a combination of welfare and earnings from paid work appears to reduce behavioral problems among pre-adolescent children.
The Three-City Study found modest evidence of some improvement in adolescents’ mental health when their mothers transitioned into employment. WES has limited information on adolescents, but in a cross-sectional analysis of data collected in 1999, Dunifon and Kalil (2003) report that teenagers whose mothers left welfare or who were combining welfare and work were less likely to have been suspended or expelled from school than those whose mothers were nonworking welfare recipients.
The findings from the MDRC Next Generation random assignment studies are consistent with the findings of the observational studies for younger children but not for adolescents. MDRC, too, finds no significant negative effects for pre-school and elementary school children. These studies also find evidence for positive effects of programs that provide earnings supplements to mothers who were employed: children’s school achievement increased, and in some studies their behavior problems lessened.
However unlike the observational studies, the random assignment studies do find some evidence of negative effects of work requirements on the schooling outcomes of adolescents. According to parents’ reports, adolescents in the experimental group were not performing as well in school and were more likely to repeat a grade. In addition, those with younger siblings were more likely to be suspended or expelled or to drop out of school – findings which, the authors speculate, may reflect a greater burden of caring for younger siblings while mothers are at work.
Implications
Cherlin cautions that these findings may not represent the final story of the effects of welfare reform on children, for several reasons:
1. Findings from these studies represent data collected prior to the weakening of the economy in the second quarter of 2001. In a weaker economy, mothers may have more difficulty finding and keeping paid employment. And the jobs they find could place more strain on families if they are low-paying or involve evening, night, or weekend work.
2. Relatively few welfare families had reached their time limits until very recently. As of December 2001, only about 54,000 families nationwide had reached the federal five-year time-limit nationwide, and only about 8,000 had had their cases closed due to time limits and were receiving no other assistance (Bloom et al, 2002).
Thus, until very recently, many welfare exits were in some sense voluntary: facing pressure to work and under the shadow of a time-limit, parents found jobs or left for other reasons before they had to. Cherlin notes that little is known about how families will fare who are forced to leave the rolls because they have reached a time limit.
3. Findings reported so far could reflect short-term effects that might change in the long-term. Some mothers who have had initial successes in finding jobs may not be able to make a secure transition to employment. Some children who were initially doing well may experience difficulties.
On the other hand, the functioning of mothers and children may continue to improve following their exits from welfare. Mothers may move up the job ladder and improve their financial well-being and family functioning, leading children to experience fewer emotional and behavioral problems and greater success in school. Moreover, in the longer-term, the signals of welfare reform could affect marriage and childbearing rates as well as school completion and work among low-income youth and young adults.
However, Cherlin suggests that even though the “story isn’t finished,” the evidence to date is that low-income mothers can undertake paid work without negative consequences – and perhaps with some positive consequences – for pre-adolescent children, with the picture for adolescents more mixed.
ENDNOTES
(1) A third study, the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, which follows 3,000 unmarried and 1,000 married lower-income couples, also has a child well-being component, but the study has not yet published papers detailing these findings.
For additional reading on welfare reform and children’s well-being:
Cherlin, Andrew. 2004. “The Consequences of Welfare Reform for Child Well-Being: What Have We Learned So Far and What are the Policy Implications?” Paper presented at theAnnual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Available at www.jhu.edu/~welfare
Dunifon, Rachel, Ariel Kalil, and Sandra K. Danziger. 2003. “Does Maternal Employment Mandated by Welfare Reform Affect Parenting Behavior?” Children and Youth Services Review 25: 55-82.
Chase-Lansdale, P. Lindsay, Robert A. Moffitt, Brenda J. Lohman, Andrew J. Cherlin, Rebekah Levine Coley, Laura D. Pittman, Jennifer E. Roff, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. 2003. “Mothers’ Transitions from Welfare to Work and the Well-Being of Preschoolers and Adolescents.” Science 299: 1548-52.
Gennetian, L.; G. Duncan; V. Knox; W. Vargas; E. Clark-Kauffman; and A. London. 2002. “How Welfare and Work Policies for Parents Affect Adolescents: A Synthesis of Research.” New York: MDRC. Available at www.mdrc.org
Morris, P; A. Huston; G. Duncan; D. Crosby; and J. Bos. 2001. “How Welfare and Work Policies Affect Children: A Synthesis of Research.” New York: MDRC. Available at www.mdrc.org
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