Welfare-reform plans that include education, job training, and high-quality center-based daycare for children offer the greatest promise of moving parents from welfare to work and fostering their children's cognitive potential, according to research reported in the May/June issue of Child Development.
"Welfare recipients who received the highest levels of educational, job training, and center-based child-care assistance had the highest levels of earnings, and their children had the highest scores on math and verbal achievement tests in middle childhood," says Hirokazu Yoshikawa of New York University, New York.
Yoshikawa notes that welfare reform efforts have largely ignored children in the rush to move parents into the low-wage workforce. "If one pays attention to children's outcomes, there are clear indications that some types of welfare reform efforts are better than others," said Yoshikawa.
In particular, states and local governments are faced with a crucial choice between welfare programs emphasizing immediate job search or "workfare" and those that focus on long-term rises in wages through education, job training, and other support services. Yoshikawa found that the long-term support service approach benefited not only the mothers but the children as well.
"Welfare reform initiatives should tailor their package of incentives and support services to match the needs of differing groups among the welfare population," Yoshikawa says. "Attention should be paid to the quality of non-relative family day care, as the number of providers surges to meet new demands from child care voucher programs."
Yoshikawa examined data from 614 six- to eight-year-old children drawn from the ongoing National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Mothers of the children had received welfare benefits for 2.6 years, on average, during the children's first five years of life; 49 percent of the mothers reported being employed while receiving welfare benefits.
Mothers with the highest earnings after six years had received the highest levels of child support, education, and training, Yoshikawa found. The effects were strongest for mothers who worked more while receiving welfare benefits and among mothers who received benefits for the shortest periods.
The children's scores on math and verbal achievement tests were not related to the amount of time their mothers received welfare benefits, their history of paid employment while receiving benefits, or the degree of "cycling" on and off welfare, Yoshikawa says.
Instead, the children's verbal and math achievement tended to rise with increasing care in center-based daycare.
The benefits of job training, education, and child care were not uniform among all families, however. Job training and education boosted earnings the most among most job-ready mothers - those with the highest levels of previous education and job training. Education, in contrast, benefited children whose mothers were the least job-ready. But among these most disadvantaged children, those cared for by non-related babysitters showed cognitive deficits compared with children in more high-quality daycare settings.
The research was supported by a grant from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Child Development is the bimonthly peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. For information about the journal, please contact Jonathan J. Aiken, 734-998-7310.
Posted by the Center for the Advancement of Health http://www.cfah.org. For information about the Center, call Petrina Chong, pchong@cfah.org 202-387-2829.
Journal
Child Development