Families Can’t Live on Wedding Rings Alone

Can Washington fix the American family? President Bush seems to think so, given his welfare reform message last week.

Bush’s proposals are rich in moral symbols--extolling the virtues of hard work, marriage and abstinence--but impoverished in sound policy ideas that are likely to work.

Kicking off congressional debate over how to improve the landmark 1996 welfare reforms, Bush set a surprisingly divisive tone, seeming to blame poor mothers for their fate and threatening to take social engineering to new heights.

Tough love, the president believes, should get even tougher for single mothers, who make up 95% of adult welfare participants.

Bush would more than double the number who must work, from about one-third to 70% by 2007. And these mothers, a majority of whom have preschool-age children at home, would be required to work 40 hours each week, up from 30 hours.

While praising the “heroic work” of single mothers, Bush asked for $300 million for federal experiments aimed at “encouraging healthy, stable marriages” and discouraging sex out of wedlock.

The administration, apparently, has discovered a way to regulate the right kind of romance.

Welfare reform indeed has demonstrated how the gears of government, often viewed as sluggish and ineffectual, can be energized with clear moral messages: Get a job, get off welfare, become self-sufficient.

This has shaken the employment behavior of many women. The number of families on welfare has gone from 5 million in 1994 to just 2.1 million in 2001.

Yet Bush now seems to believe that Washington should up the ante, pushing deeper to re-engineer women’s private lives. He and his advisors appear not to have learned these lessons from earlier, ill-fated liberal attempts at social engineering:

* Rules without resources rarely work. Bush’s new work rules would require 500,000 more women to move into jobs each year. To do this, most of them would require full-time child care support. But Bush has proposed no increase in Head Start spending and hopes to cut federal child care spending after adjusting for inflation. Where will these mothers leave their infants and toddlers? And while Bush’s new work requirements would be costly to states and counties, which would have to hire more staff to help place women in jobs, he opposes even an inflation increase for local programs.

* Low-wage jobs for mothers don’t necessarily improve children’s lives. The president’s own welfare director, Wade F. Horn, has said that he is more concerned with children’s well-being. Horn understands that family poverty will not diminish until children’s daily settings improve. And this requires improved training for women to push wages upward and increased child care aid.

* Social engineering leads to unanticipated consequences. The rising employment rate of poor women has done little to raise marriage rates or lower birthrates. Findings due out in April from a UC Berkeley-Yale research team show that Connecticut’s welfare reforms actually lowered the marriage rate for women with young children. As their incomes climbed, these mothers saw less need for husbands.

Another unanticipated effect speaks to mothers of teenagers, who now work in the afternoons when their teenagers get out of school. Evaluations from four states reveal that these adolescents achieve less in school and drink and smoke more compared with children of women who face little pressure to work.

Minnesota requires some mothers to work just part-time, with case workers providing intensive support with child care and health services. The result has been discernible gains in children’s early development, an effect that few other work-first programs have shown.

All parents yearn for stronger supports and basic security, from affordable child care to better schools to safer neighborhoods. But the president should not ask poor families to live on moral symbols alone. If Congress swallows such half-baked policies, we will squander an opportunity to truly strengthen family supports and further reduce child poverty.