Welfare Children Still Hurting, Study Says
The first comprehensive study of the effects of welfare reform on young children suggests that poor children’s lives do not improve when their mothers go to work.
Reformers overhauling the nation’s welfare system in 1996 said they were ending the “cycle of dependence” many families experience generation after generation. Mothers who work to support themselves feel better about themselves, they said, and their children benefit too.
But a study by UC Berkeley and Yale University researchers shows that most poor children in welfare families are no better off than they were before the reform effort. Child care is hard to find, and many children spend long hours in settings that do little to prepare them to succeed in school, the researchers found.
Although it is too early to determine whether the new rules of CalWORKS--California’s welfare-to-work program--actually harm children, the study shows that they do not live up to the promise of improving children’s lives.
“If CalWORKS stays its present course, the outlook for poor families is grim,” said Doris Ng, an attorney for Equal Rights Advocates, which produced a separate, much smaller study whose results parallel those of the Berkeley-Yale research.
The Berkeley-Yale report, the first phase of a four-year examination of mothers and children in the new reform climate, found some disturbing trends. Children in welfare families were generally being placed in low-quality child care settings that were frequently unclean and relied heavily on television and videos to occupy their time. A large percentage of mothers did not take advantage of child care subsidies, either because they didn’t know they were available or didn’t think they could be used to pay the neighborhood baby-sitter.
The mothers themselves, the study found, showed a high incidence of depression--up to three times the national average--a factor that can have a negative impact on infants’ and toddlers’ early learning. At least a quarter of the women appeared to be “socially isolated.” In California, 41% of the mothers interviewed said they felt “alone as a parent.”
University teams interviewed 948 single mothers with preschool-age children in San Francisco and San Jose, and in cities in Connecticut and Florida. The 473 California women were questioned in the summer and fall of 1998; two follow-up studies are planned.
“If the main goal of welfare reform is to get people off welfare . . . [it has] been remarkably successful,” the study said. “Yet if the broader goal of welfare reform is to reduce the nation’s rate of family poverty and raise poor children’s quality of life, the jury is still out.”
CalWORKS recipients, the study noted, are going to work in record numbers. The average caseload dropped 12.45% in the first year of welfare reform, from 732,154 to 640,989.
But most California mothers in the study, the researchers pointed out, earned just $7.41 per hour, well shy of the $12.50 or so it takes to be self-sufficient.
And without Medi-Cal, food stamps and a child care subsidy, their children’s futures are questionable, the study said. Almost a third of the mothers questioned said they ran out of food or used only cheap basic foods that lack nutrition to feed their children.
Difficulty finding child care is forcing many mothers to use mediocre or low-quality arrangements, researchers found. In California, a shortage of licensed facilities has caused more than half the mothers to call on friends and family.
Yet the research shows that those are the providers least likely to read to the children--essential for later success in school. And children watched television about four times more often in those homes than in licensed centers.
Professionally run facilities were rated the best form of child care, but much depended on the ratio of children to teachers. More than 11 young children per group are too many, and California centers averaged 15, the study showed.
One surprising finding was the low number of women who take advantage of vouchers to pay for child care. Only half the state’s eligible mothers know about them or find convenient centers where they can use them.
The university researchers called the women’s ignorance about benefits “worrisome,” because it may indicate they don’t know about other available services their children may need, such as Medi-Cal and food stamps.
In an interview, Alice Walker Duff, president of the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, said the importance of reliable, subsidized child care cannot be overemphasized. All too often, parents run up a bill with one provider to save up enough to pay another caregiver, patching in between with friends and relatives.
“It takes a big toll out of the person doing the work, the parent and the child. The determination of quality care is consistency, and what happens is children go from pillar to post.”
Duff agreed with the study’s conclusion that government agencies need to make a solid investment in new centers. Legislators have finally started to see the crucial connection between reliable child care and employability, Duff said, and not a minute too soon. “The infrastructure needs a lot of work. We need to generate more help for providing higher quality child care.”
In the Equal Rights Advocates study released shortly before the Yale-Berkeley findings, researchers tracked 50 women in Sacramento, Tulare and Los Angeles counties. They found that although the reform effort was leading more welfare women into the work force, the jobs they were getting were low-paying and did not offer economic self-sufficiency, Ng said.
Reaching time limits on support services, such as the child care subsidy, could devastate some women, Ng said. The state pays for child care for two years after welfare recipients start working.
“Once women hit that [limit] and lose their subsidy, I think we’ll find that women won’t be able to keep their jobs and they will cycle back onto welfare.”
