Gains Seen in Programs for Teen Moms

Programs aimed at helping teen mothers stay off of welfare have succeeded in boosting their educational achievement and, in some cases, their hours of employment, as well as their children’s emotional and intellectual growth, according to a study released Friday.

But the report, compiled by the National Governors’ Assn., shows that past efforts have largely failed to delay or prevent subsequent births to young women on welfare, or to keep them off of public assistance for a sustained period.

As a result, for states faced with enforcing strict new lifetime limits on welfare aid and meeting ambitious targets for moving welfare recipients into the work force, this group could become one of the most challenging to manage, the study concludes.

In designing state programs for one of welfare’s most dependent populations, the study advocates an age-old approach to dealing with teens: Establish clear rules, repeat the point of those rules often and punish infractions even as you reward accomplishments.

And in devising programs, don’t forget the babies or their fathers, warns the study, which represents a compendium of suggestions culled from experts and program directors working in the field.

A failure to encourage greater involvement by fathers will leave a major source of support for a teen mother out of the picture, it notes. And failure to intervene to help the children raises the risk that they will follow in their mothers’ footsteps toward teen parenthood and ultimately to dependency.

Above all, say the experts who helped prepare the report for the nation’s governors, state and local officials should not become disheartened by the apparent shortcomings of past programs or conclude that concentrating efforts on teen mothers and their children is not worth the effort.

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That is because none of the experiments tried to date were conducted in the new environment created by sweeping reform to the nation’s welfare system, said the NGA’s Evelyn Ganzglass, one of several policy experts who helped draft the report.

Even those programs that met with limited success, Ganzglass said, may fare better in an era when most teen parents will be subject to lifetime limits of federal aid, when work requirements are more stringent than ever before and when virtually all teen parents will be required to complete high school and to live with a parent or other responsible adult.

“We really don’t know what the effect of these . . . new requirements will be,” said Ganzglass. “The message has changed.”

What is clear, however, is that weaning teenage parents from dependence on public aid will be key if states are going to meet the requirements of the federal bill.

Of about 4.1 million households currently receiving federal welfare payments, roughly half are headed by women who gave birth while still in their teens, making teen birth a major risk factor for welfare dependency.

More than 70% of unmarried adolescent mothers (those 17 and younger) will rely on public assistance within five years of giving birth. And 40% of those single adolescent mothers will rely on public aid for five years or more, making them one of the hardest groups to nudge into work.

“They’re more at risk of long-term dependency because they’re starting at a point when they have more of their life ahead of them, and they’re starting with more disadvantages,” said Ellen Kisker, a welfare analyst with Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J. “They’re much less likely to have any experience working that could help them get a job at some point, and less likely to have a diploma.”

Beyond that, said Kisker, “they’re teenagers. They’re just less mature and are at risk for a lot of behavior that can interfere with their success, whether or not they have a child. And the conditions that teens on welfare live under tend not to show them a lot of positive options for the future.”