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Policy Framework
The welfare system has been transformed over the past decade, notably through the introduction of stricter work requirements and time limits on cash assistance. At the same time, government at both the federal and the state level has invested in offering financial work supports of unprecedented scope to low-income parents. A top priority on the national agenda is to understand how these changes in the safety net — and sharp rises in employment, particularly among single parents — are affecting children.
Long before the federal welfare reforms of 1996 drew attention to this question, MDRC — in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other government, foundation, and research partners — was systematically gathering data about children in its studies of pioneering efforts to promote employment among low-income parents. These studies laid the groundwork for the Next Generation project — a collaboration that began in 1999, involving MDRC, several other leading research institutions, and the project’s foundation funding partners. Drawing on 10 studies by MDRC of welfare, antipoverty, and employment policies piloted as early as the 1980s and widely adopted since then, Next Generation is synthesizing and reanalyzing data to learn how programs targeted at parents' economic circumstances affect children’s school performance, behavior, and health, as well as measures of family well-being.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
The Next Generation project aims to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars by identifying lessons that cut across evaluations of individual welfare, antipoverty, and work programs. With a focus on how such programs can influence children’s and families’ well-being through their effects on employment, income, and child care, the project addresses questions such as:
- How do programs that share certain effects on parents’ economic outcomes — for instance, that boost employment or income — affect children? What combinations of economic effects harm or benefit children most?
- How do different types of child care assistance shape patterns of child care use among low-income parents? What are the consequences for children’s well-being?
- Do the programs affect children of different ages differently? If so, how?
- What can we learn from in-depth interviews with families subject to welfare reform about the daily challenges they face and how public policies can address their needs?
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The Next Generation project draws data and perspectives from 10 rigorous studies conducted by MDRC, including the Project on Devolution and Urban Change and random assignment evaluations of the following programs:
Because of the variety of policy approaches, data sources, and methodologies represented, Next Generation can delve deeper into the programs’ effects on children and families than could any single study. The project derives statistical reliability from the large size of its aggregate database. Together, the underlying evaluations encompass tens of thousands of parents and children across North America.
Owing to the richness of the underpinning research, the Next Generation team can make new discoveries without collecting new information. All the findings rest on secondary analysis of primary data, which include administrative records of employment and public assistance receipt, surveys of parents and teachers, and ethnographic interviews. The project’s synthesis approach is facilitated by the use of comparable measures of children’s and families’ well-being in many of the studies.
What's Next
Topics to be explored in upcoming publications include (1) how the effects of welfare and work programs on children vary across age groups; (2) whether benefits to children of generous earning supplement programs are observed in the long term; (3) how welfare and work programs affect children's outcomes through causal pathways such as employment, income, and the use of child care; and (4) how the effects of parents' employment on children's outcomes are influenced by characteristics of parents' employment on the one hand and neighborhood quality on the other.
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