News Release

Ending poverty, not just welfare, may be key to helping mothers and kids

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Center for Advancing Health

Without programs to help women who no longer receive welfare earn a living wage, families will continue to be caught in a cycle of poverty, suggests a new study published in the September/October issue of Child Development.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (welfare reform) includes time limits on welfare receipt, as well as tough new work requirements for recipients.

“An untested implicit assumption made by some policy analysts and the public at large is that because the new welfare policies limit the availability of public assistance and mandate increased self-sufficiency of the mother, they will have positive benefits for families and their children,” says lead study author, Judith Smith, Graduate School of Social Services at Fordham University and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Teachers College, Columbia University.

However, the results of Smith’s study suggest that this is not the case, at least when the family does not leave poverty, as well as welfare, behind.

Smith and her co-investigators followed 833 low birth weight infants and their mothers for the first three years of the child’s life. When the children were 1 and 3 years old, the researchers asked mothers about family income and whether they were receiving public assistance. Mothers’ parenting behaviors and children’s IQs were measured when the children were 2 1/2 to 3 years old.

At both 1 and 3 years, the parenting skills of the mothers, and the IQs of their children, were significantly lower in the families who remained on welfare compared with those who had never received public assistance. Intelligence scores were no higher, however, in the children whose family went off of public assistance compared with those who remained on welfare during the course of the study.

Parenting skills did improve for some of the mothers who stopped receiving welfare, but only for those women who were no longer living in poverty.

“The current welfare reform mandates are geared toward moving mothers with young children off welfare, without attention to whether the families move out of poverty," says Smith. "Data on the characteristics of the jobs that most welfare mothers will be able to find reveal that the jobs are in the lowest wage occupations, do not provide health insurance and tend to last only 46 weeks or less than a year.”.

“To help families with young children who are giving up public aid, programs and policies need to facilitate both a mother’s ability to move from dependence on public assistance and her ability to leave poverty,” she says.

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The study was funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Research Network on Child and Family Well-Being and by the March of Dimes Foundation.

Child Development is the bimonthly peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. For information about the journal, contact Jonathan J. Aiken at (734) 998-7310.


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