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Work, Welfare, & Child Well-Being
Since the passage of federal welfare reform in 1996, a bipartisan consensus has emerged that the success of the reformed system will be judged in large part by whether it improves the lives of low-income children. In short supply, however, is reliable evidence to guide policymakers’ efforts to maximize the positive effects (and minimize the negative ones) of welfare reform on children. Over the past several years, MDRC and its research partners have built an important base of knowledge about how policies that are aimed primarily at changing the economic circumstances of low-income parents can also affect the well-being of children and adolescents. Leading our efforts to draw policy conclusions in this area, the Next Generation project is bringing together information from evaluations primarily conducted by MDRC. Its syntheses of results across studies have shown that the effects of welfare and work policies on children differ substantially depending upon the age of the child and whether total household income rises as mothers enter the workforce. One important aspect of this project is aimed at understanding how — and under what conditions — low-income children and adolescents are influenced by changes in parents’ employment and income.
MDRC’s research on how employment and economic security affect children includes more then a dozen random assignment studies that examined the effects of welfare reform strategies on both parents and children. The first of these, the New Chance demonstration, provided education and parenting services to teen mothers who received welfare. Subsequent evaluations of initiatives launched in the early and mid-1990s focused on three specific policies that states are using to reform their welfare systems in response to the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation: earnings supplements, time limits on the receipt of welfare benefits, and work requirements. The Minnesota Family Investment Program, Canada’s Self-Sufficiency Project, and the New Hope Project tested three types of earnings supplements designed to make work pay for parents in low-wage jobs. All three produced positive effects on the school performance of elementary school-age children. MDRC’s evaluations of Florida’s Family Transition Program and Connecticut’s Jobs First program provide some of the most rigorous information available about how time-limited welfare programs affect families and children. The multisite National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies, which included the Child Outcomes Study conducted by researchers at Child Trends under subcontract to MDRC, found that requiring welfare mothers to participate in employment-related activities had only few effects, either positive or negative, on their elementary school-age children. In several ongoing projects where we are collecting new data on child outcomes — including Employment Retention and Advancement, Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ, Work Advancement and Support Center Demonstration, and Opening Doors — MDRC is learning more about how improvements in parents’ employment, earnings, and educational outcomes can affect children.
We are also drawing upon data from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change in four large urban areas to examine contextual factors that might influence the effect of maternal employment on children, adolescents, and young adults. These analyses will shed new light on these issues by drawing on multiple sources of information about children and adolescents, mothers’ employment, and neighborhood surroundings — from welfare reform implementation research in each city, longitudinal surveys with families, neighborhood indicators, and ethnographic interviews.
As part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project, MDRC has worked closely with Early Head Start sites in Kansas and Missouri to enhance the employment component of their existing two-generation services to parents with young children. In a multisite experimental evaluation, MDRC will examine the effects of this approach on parents’ employment, their parenting skills, and their children’s well-being.
Finally, MDRC and ideas42 are leading the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral research lens to programs that serve poor families in the United States — programs like cash assistance, child care, child support, and child welfare. The project will apply behavioral insights to issues related to operations, implementation, structure, and efficacy of social service programs and policies. The ultimate goal is to learn how tools from behavioral science can be used to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families.
Key Documents on Work, Welfare, & Child Well-Being
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