CHILDREN: Whether or not children benefit depends on the program strategy and the age of the child.

The AFDC welfare system was originally created in the 1930s to protect the children of indigent widows. While normative changes in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing dramatically altered the composition of the welfare rolls, one of welfare's goals has remained the same: to protect children in poor, usually single-parent families headed by women. Following dramatic increases in the welfare rolls in the 1970s, however, a new goal was added: to increase parents' employment and reduce family welfare dependency. The effects on children of welfare dependency, poverty, and requirements that their mothers work have been much debated, but there has been little reliable evidence to provide solid answers. A new generation of program studies that sheds light on how welfare reform programs affected children's behavior, development, and progress in school has begun to fill in the blanks.

Logically, one might expect changes in parental employment and income to affect children differently depending on their age. For example, time spent with one's child is thought to be especially important for infants' and toddlers' development. Parental employment might be of less concern for elementary school-aged children, as long as adequate after-school care is available. Teenagers are presumably self-sufficient when it comes to after-school care, although this also means they will receive less supervision at an age when youngsters are more likely to experiment with risky behaviors. For these reasons, child outcomes are examined separately by age of child.

Welfare reform programs that led to increases in mother's employment and income - specifically, those that included earnings supplements - consistently improved the school performance of elementary school-age children. By contrast, work mandates or time limits alone had few effects on young children; there was no consistent pattern of benefit or harm. More Regardless of program approach, policies that led to increases in mothers' employment plausibly led, in turn, to small negative effects on adolescents' progress in school. On average, however, these policies did not lead to increases in more serious problems like school suspensions, dropout rates, or teenage childbearing. More The data on infants and toddlers are too limited to permit definitive conclusions, though available evidence reveals little systematic harm or benefit to very young children's later achievement or schooling when their mothers go to work.  More