Study Calls Welfare Plan a Peril to Infants

Gov. Pete Wilson’s welfare initiative, one of the few proposals to suggest that mothers of young children should work, will harm thousands of infants in poor families, a Stanford University researcher reported Tuesday.

By reducing welfare benefits even for women who have newborn babies, the study said the initiative will force many single mothers into the workplace during their children’s critical first year.

The study said most experts believe that infants should have either full-time parental care or high-quality child care--a service poor mothers can ill afford. Without such child care, the study said, many mothers will turn to a succession of relatives and neighbors, exposing their infant to multiple care givers--”the worst possible situation.”

Echoing what many conservative “family values” advocates have long argued, the study said that the first year of life is a critical time for parent-child bonding, and that without such bonding, “children are at much greater risk for emotional, academic and social problems.” At any given time, it said, about 200,000 of the children on welfare are infants.

“This is the only proposal ever that would force mothers of infants to work without adequate child care,” said Michael Wald, the Stanford law professor who wrote the report. “Inadequate child care is dangerous to all children, but it is terrible for babies. They require the most attention, and they do not do well when they are shuffled around from one adult to another.”

The study--funded by the Stanford Center for the Study of Families, Children and Youth--analyzes the effect Proposition 165 would have on the thousands of poor children who derive their support from the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program. The privately funded center is a research arm of the university and draws on scholars who have expertise in children’s issues.

Amy Albright, press secretary for the campaign to pass the initiative, dismissed the Stanford study as one more “report out of liberal academia that says the main problem with our welfare system is that we’re not spending enough money on it.”

Noting that Wald is a policy adviser for Children Now, an advocacy group for children, she accused him of authoring the analysis to give the initiative’s opponents academic cover for their arguments. However, Children Now’s president and founder, James Steyer, said Wald has no part in the organization’s governing board or policy decisions and serves only as one of 28 academic advisers who check data in the group’s issue papers.

“It’s sad when you stop making substantive arguments and fall into political stereotyping,” Steyer said.

Wald said he had had no position on the initiative before he began his analysis, but after studying its provisions, he said he had decided to vote against it. “I don’t see this as a Republican or Democratic issue,” he said. “I’m interested in what happens to children.”

Although the November initiative is designed to influence adult behavior, Wald said its greatest impact will be on the 1.6 million California children who are AFDC recipients. He said the report was prompted by concerns that AFDC children have been overlooked in the debates over welfare reform.

Wilson has been a prime advocate of changes in the system, proposing an initiative that attempts, by severely cutting the cash benefits paid to AFDC recipients, to accomplish two goals: encouraging parents to work and reducing welfare costs.

The initiative would cut cash benefits initially by 10%--about half of that reduction has already been made by the Legislature in its new budget--and then six months later it will reduce them another 15%. The only exceptions are for those families in which the parent is disabled, over 60 or a teen-age mother regularly attending school. Wilson says families can make up for the reductions by going to work part time.

But Albright said she believes that the analysis grossly exaggerates the initiative’s impact on children. She said the Wilson Administration had not excluded mothers of infants from the cuts because it believed they would have to work only a few hours a week to make up for the lost revenue.

The two reductions would cut cash benefits for a mother and two children from $663 a month to $507. To make up the difference, Albright said a mother would need to work only six to 10 hours a week at a job that paid $5 an hour. “The suggestion in here that children are going to have earaches and dizzy spells if their moms work two three-hour shifts a week is preposterous,” she said.

The study presented a different argument. It said the Administration had failed to include the costs of working--transportation, clothing and so on--in its figures and had inaccurately calculated child-care costs by assuming that a mother would not need baby-sitters during the time she was traveling to and from work. If those factors are considered, it concluded a parent would have to work a minimum of 20 hours a week at a $5-an-hour job to break even.

While the analysis acknowledged a need to reform welfare to help recipients become more self-sufficient, it predicted that many AFDC recipients would not be able to find work. About half of the AFDC parents, it said, lacked a high school education, making it particularly hard in recessionary times to get jobs. And proportionately more recipients live in rural areas--primarily Central Valley agricultural areas--where jobs are much scarcer than in urban areas, the report said. In addition, many parents will be prevented from working by their failure to find adequate, affordable child care, it said.

Although the state has never conducted extensive research on the subject, the study said there is substantial evidence that a large number of recipients lack proficiency in English--a major barrier to jobs. The analysis also reported that among the two-parent families who make up about 20% of the welfare rolls, a third are refugees, many of whom speak little or no English.

If the initiative passes, the analysis estimated that more than half of the AFDC parents will be unable to find work. In these families, it said, children will be plunged deeper into poverty.

Welfare rates in California are already below the poverty level, and pushing them lower, the report said, would only increase the likelihood that poor children will have academic problems, emotional problems and health problems.

Observing that a Santa Clara County study found that 3,000 AFDC families there would have their grants reduced to a level below what they now pay for rent, the study predicted that the initiative would cause more AFDC families to be homeless.