Welfare reform, family support, and child development: Perspectives from policy analysis and developmental psychopathology (original) (raw)
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Family Poverty, Welfare Reform, and Child Development
Child Development, 2000
Our review of research suggests that family poverty has selective effects on child development. Most important for policy are indications that deep or persistent poverty early in childhood affects adversely the ability and achievement of children. Although the 1996 welfare reforms have spurred many welfare-to-work transitions, their time limits and, especially, sanctions are likely to deepen poverty among some families. We suggest ways policies might be aimed at preventing either economic deprivation itself or its effects.
Children and Youth Services Review, 2007
How are children and families faring a decade after welfare reform? Evidence from five non-experimental panel studies The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA; P.L. 104-193) of 1996 formalized a shift in the nature of welfare policy in the United States. Although PRWORA instituted broad changes across multiple programs and policy arenas, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Food Stamps, child support, child protection, child care, and child nutrition programs, perhaps the most significant (and certainly the most debated and studied) changes dealt with the provision of cash welfare. The replacement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ended the entitlement to cash welfare for poor families in the United States that was first created by the Social Security Act of 1935. In addition to providing states with some latitude in the design of their TANF programs, PRWORA also conditioned federal match dollars for cash assistance on work requirements and time limits. At the time of PRWORA's passage, critics argued that these changes would lead to widespread increases in poverty and material hardship, as well as decreases in child and family well-being among low-income single-mother families (Jencks, Winship, & Swingle, 2006). More than a decade after the passage of this landmark legislation, welfare caseloads have decreased and employment rates for single mothers have risen (Blank, 2002; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 2004). It appears that PRWORA has not brought about substantial changes in child and family poverty, hardship, or well-being. Evidence linking welfare reform to children's outcomes is mixed, with effects varying by child age and developmental domain (Chase
Welfare reform and child well-being
Children and Youth Services Review, 2006
This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine how the pre-and post-1996 welfare reforms influence measures of children's well-being. Despite a large body of research relating welfare reform policies to family structure, employment, and income, fewer studies have used econometric methods on data from multiple states to examine how changes in welfare policies in the pre-and post-TANF periods have influenced children. The results from this study have the potential to shed light on whether policy choices adopted by states are related to children's well-being. Overall, the results do not show evidence that state welfare policies are systematically associated with parenting behavior or child outcomes.
Welfare Reform and Children: A Synthesis of Impacts in Five States
2004
The Project on State-Level Child Outcomes is a collaboration among researchers, federal agencies, foundations, and representatives from state welfare offices to examine child and family well-being in the context of welfare reform. The project originated in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the leadership of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). In an initial phase of the project, HHS awarded one-year planning grants to 12 states to augment their ongoing experimental evaluations of welfare waiver policies with studies of how welfare reform affects children. During the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997, state and federal representatives, researchers from the firms conducting the state evaluations of adult outcomes (MDRC, Mathematica Policy Research, and Abt Associates), researchers from Child Trends, and members of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Family and Child Well-being Research Network, met to establish common terminology for discussing child outcomes, develop a conceptual model for how welfare policies affect child well-being, and choose the factors to be assessed in the evaluations.
Although it has been assumed that increasing maternal education or family income will improve children's well-being, considering the impact on child care arrangements and home environment raises the possibility of negative effects. This paper reviews experimental evaluations of seven programs designed to enhance welfare families' self-sufficiency, and develops a model describing the mechanisms through which these programs affect children. Variables included in the model are maternal education, family economic status, maternal subjective well-being, child care arrangements, and home environment. For each pathway variable, the review identifies specific markers that have been examined, whether program impacts have been detected, and whether differences emerge in the short-or long-term. The review finds that changes were most universally examined in type of child care used and less consistently examined in maternal well-being, movement out of poverty, and quality of child care used. Conclusions differed depending on how variables were measured and how long data were collected. Program impact was reported on earnings and AFDC receipt. In evaluations measuring both educational attainment and achievement, none showed impact on achievement. There were significant program impacts on participation in mental health services or counseling but no reported effects on depression, locus of control, or stress. Programs clearly affected children's participation in formal nonmaternal care, but one evaluation found that program participation was tentatively related to reduced quality of care. Four of the studies found that program mothers were more warm and less harsh with their children. (Contains 10 references.) (KB)
Do Child Characteristics Affect How Children Fare in Families Receiving and Leaving Welfare?
PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000
Assessing the New Federalism is a multiyear Urban Institute project designed to analyze the devolution of responsibility for social programs from the federal government to the states, focusing primarily on health care, income security, employment and training programs, and social services. Researchers monitor program changes and fiscal developments. Alan Weil is the project director. In collaboration with Child Trends, the project studies changes in family well-being. The project aims to provide timely, nonpartisan information to inform public debate and to help state and local decisionmakers carry out their new responsibilities more effectively.
Children and Youth Services Review
Although not part of its stated aims, current welfare legislation is assumed to benefit children through increased parental employment and self-sufficiency. Research findings on the extent to which parental welfare participation improves child well-being are inconclusive. This study investigates the behavioral outcomes of young children whose mothers have received TANF using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2169). Controlling for maternal demographic characteristics, current financial status, and health risks, we found that the difference between children's externalizing behaviors in families of former TANF recipients relative to children of mothers who had never been on welfare decreased the longer mothers had been off welfare. However, overall, externalizing behaviors were significantly higher among children of former TANF recipients relative to children whose mothers had never received welfare. The findings suggest that ensuring healthy development for children requires long-term supports to help mothers as they transition off welfare.
Poverty, Welfare, and Children: A Summary of the Data. Child Trends Research Brief
1999
While most American children are not poor, the proportion of children living in poverty has remained at or near 20 percent since the early 1980s. Childhood poverty can have short-and long-term negative ,consequences for children. Growing up at or near the poverty line can affect the quality of a family's housing, children's access to nutritious food and adequate health care, and parents' ability to provide toys, books, and recreational or educational opportunities for their children. Poor children are also more likely than children who are not poor to experience difficulties in school, to become teen parents, and, as adults, to earn less and be unemployed more often. The effects of being raised in a family with income substantially below the poverty line are correspondingly more damaging. Until 1997, many poor families with children received cash assistance from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a 60-year-old entitlement program. Welfare reform legislation enacted in August 1996 replaced AFDC with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, which, among other changes, sets time limits on families' receipt of welfare. Several studies are currently underway to assess the effects of TANF on children's well-being, but it may be some years before researchers can speak definitively to the long-term effects of welfare reform on children. (KB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
2002
This policy brief describes children from "Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study," using data from the first wave of the study which involved a random-sample survey of about 2,400 low-income children and their caregivers (mainly mothers) in low-income neighborhoods. Researchers collected information from mothers on their employment, income, family structure, welfare participation, mental health, and parenting. They also collected various measures of social development, problem behavior, and. school performance for the children. Analyses of 1,885 low-income preschoolers and adolescents found that preschoolers and adolescents were more developmentally at risk than middle-class children in national samples. Adolescents whose mothers were on welfare in 1999 had lower levels of cognitive achievement and higher levels of behavioral and emotional problems than did adolescents whose mothers had left, or never been on, welfare. For preschoolers, mothers' current or recent welfare participation related to Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.