Dimensions: 1.00'' x 6.25'' x 9.50'' 280 pages Transaction Publishers Publication Date: July 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 0765801884

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Family and Child Well-Being after Welfare Reform
Douglas J. Besharov, editor

The 1996 welfare reform law not only led to a clear drop in the welfare rolls, but also to complex data on many other factors, including cohabitation, homelessness, and child health. In this book, welfare experts sift through this data and make recommendations on how the effects of welfare reform should be studied and understood.

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. His recent books include Rethinking WIC (2000), America's Disconnected Youth: Toward a Preventative Strategy (1999), and Enhancing Early Childhood Programs: Burdens and Opportunities (1996). This summary is adapted from the book's introduction.

The 1996 welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). Between March 1994 and June 2001, the welfare rolls fell an amazing 59 percent from their historic high of 5.1 million families. Around July 2001, caseloads stopped declining in most states and started rising again, presumably because of the weakening economy. But, although about ten states experienced caseload increases of 10 to 20 percent in the next year, at least as of June 2002, the nationwide rise had been surprisingly modest.

How much of this decline was the result of welfare reform and how much was the result of other factors, such as the strong economy? What were the effects of the decline on low-income families? About a quarter billion dollars is being spent on studies and surveys designed to answer these and other questions. Unfortunately, concludes this volume, we are unlikely to get more than a modest amount of information on these key questions.

Welfare Reform and the Caseload Decline

In chapter 2, Besharov and Peter Germanis, assistant director of the University of Maryland's Welfare Reform Academy, trace what is known about the large decrease in welfare recipiency and what families are doing after they leave welfare. Besharov and Germanis describe how a number of respected researchers have used econometric models to estimate how much of the decline was caused by welfare reform compared with other factors. That research suggests that 35 to 45 percent of the decline resulted from the strong economy, 20 to 30 percent stemmed from massive expansion in aid to the working poor, up to 5 percent came from an increase in the minimum wage, 25 to 35 percent resulted from welfare reform, and 5 to 10 percent came from the erosion in the real value of benefits. The authors express each factor as a range, to reflect the uncertainty surrounding the estimates, but they nevertheless conclude that these percentages accurately reflect the relative importance of each factor to the decline in caseloads.

According to Besharov and Germanis, welfare offices have been transformed from places where mothers are signed up for benefits to places where mothers are helped, cajoled, and pressured to get a job--or to rely on others for support. This dual approach is reflected in case outcomes: survey research of those who have left welfare ("leavers") suggests that only about 50 to 60 percent seem to be working regularly, often in low-paying jobs. The other 40 or 50 percent are just leaving--some to work eventually, but more immediately to move in with (or to be supported by) family, friends, or boyfriends. Most welfare leavers report that they are as well off or better off after leaving welfare than while they were on it, but a significant minority report being worse off.

Assessing Welfare Reform's Impact

In chapter 3, Peter H. Rossi, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, describes the four major research projects assessing welfare reform. These programs account for more than half of the quarter billion dollars spent evaluating "welfare reform": the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD), the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF), the Project on Devolution and Urban Change (UC), and the Child Impact Waiver experiments being funded by the federal government. Rossi concludes that these studies cannot provide a reliable assessment of welfare reform's impact on children and families because it is too late to construct a valid control or comparison group with which to measure the "counterfactual," or what would have happened in the absence of welfare reform.

Income and Expenditures

In chapter 4, Richard Bavier, a policy analyst at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, traces changes in child poverty rates and the incomes of unmarried female-headed families with children from the period before welfare reform through the next three or four years. Bavier finds that between 1995 and 1998, families in the bottom quintile experienced a decline in annual family income of about $617 (in 2001 dollars), or about 7.4 percent. Between 1998 and 2000, however, family income increased $1,160 to its highest level before declining by $1,073 between 2000 and 2001. In contrast to the up-and-down trends in income experienced by low-income, female-headed families, consumption data suggest a steady improvement in their well-being throughout the 1995 to 2000 period.

Cohabitation

In chapter 5, Wendy D. Manning, an associate professor in Bowling Green State University's Department of Sociology, explains that the most obvious benefit of cohabitation is that a child has two potential caregivers and income providers. Indeed, the poverty rate for children living in such relationships falls dramatically once the income of the cohabiter is included. According to Manning, however, children in cohabiting-partner households are more likely to have lower levels of academic performance and greater behavioral problems than those in intact families.

In chapter 6, Wade F. Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, summarizes the importance of fathers to child well-being. Horn argues, however, that cohabitation is a weak family structure compared with marriage. Children in households with married parents do better on almost every measure of child well-being, even after controlling for income. Outcomes for children whose fathers leave may actually be worse than for those who have had a continuously absent father. Many cohabiting men are not the biological fathers of the children involved, a factor that makes the children more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Thus, encouraging cohabitation may do more harm than good, says Horn.

Teenage Sex, Pregnancy, and Nonmarital Births

In chapter 7, Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the high proportion of children living in single-parent families and shows how this arrangement contributes to child poverty. A shift in the composition of single parents, so that a greater number are never-married mothers, exacerbated poverty and welfare dependency. Sawhill believes that it is too early to determine whether the welfare law's emphasis on reducing nonmarital and teen childbearing has had a positive effect, but she notes that employment rates have risen for young unmarried mothers. She points out that in 1986, a single mother was only a little better off going to work than being on welfare but, by 1997, she was able to double her income by doing so. She concludes, "Work is, I would suggest, a great contraceptive."

Child Maltreatment and Foster Care

In chapter 8, Richard J. Gelles, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, reports what is known about the incidence of child maltreatment and foster care placement rates since welfare reform. He reports that the number of children reported as suspected victims of child abuse and neglect rose from 2.6 million in 1990 to nearly 2.8 million in 2000. But the rate of confirmed child maltreatment peaked in 1993, rising from 13.4 per 1,000 children in 1990 to 15.3 per 1,000 children in 1993, and has since declined to 12.2 per 1,000 children in 2000. Gelles notes that the rate of victimization in 1999 was the lowest it has been since the NCANDS data collection began in 1990.

Gelles concludes that "no evidence indicates that welfare reform legislation has produced an increase or decrease in child maltreatment reports, child abuse and neglect fatalities, or the number of children placed in foster care." He is careful to qualify his conclusion, because of the limited and weak data available and because welfare reform may not really have an impact until after families begin reaching the federally imposed five-year time limit in 2001.

Housing Conditions and Homelessness

Another concern expressed by critics of welfare reform was that homelessness would increase. In chapter 9, John C. Weicher, assistant secretary for housing and Federal Housing Administration commissioner at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, discusses trends in homelessness and housing conditions. He explains that few reliable data on homelessness are available, so that estimates of the total number of homeless people are problematic. Nevertheless, virtually no evidence indicates that homelessness has increased (or decreased) since the passage of welfare reform.

Child Health

In chapter 10, Lorraine V. Klerman, a professor at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, describes the difficulty of measuring welfare reform's impact on children's physical and mental health by using existing data sources and suggests additional approaches to consider. Klerman believes that using current federal data sources to measure the impact of welfare reform on children's health will be difficult. Most children are relatively healthy, even though the health of low-income children is worse by almost every indicator than is the health of wealthier children. Thus, changes in health status, if they occur, will be difficult to detect, especially in the short term.

In chapter 11, Harold S. Beebout, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and chief information officer at the Child and Family Services Agency, District of Columbia, reviews what is known about nutrition, food security, and obesity. Beebout explores the question of whether welfare reform has affected food insecurity and hunger. He recognizes that the relationship between these measures and health status is uncertain. Nevertheless, he points out, "Between 1995 and 2001, no appreciable change occurred in these measures for low-income households or for households as a whole." Beebout also notes that low-income adolescents have double the obesity rate of the rest of the adolescent population, making them vulnerable to diabetes, high blood pressure, and other health problems.

Crime, Delinquency, and Drug Use

In chapter 12, Lawrence W. Sherman, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Sociology, describes how criminal behavior tends to be concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods. He contends that "it is misleading to compare homicide rates across cities or to look at national homicide rates without disaggregating them by the factors that are most strongly correlated with their existence."

Sherman argues that if we want to understand the effects of welfare reform on a range of behaviors, including crime, data collection should focus on high-poverty areas--where such behaviors are concentrated. For example, the city of Baltimore has a homicide rate of about forty per 100,000, or about forty times the rate for the rest of Maryland. Furthermore, most of those homicides occur in East Baltimore, where the homicide rate is probably about 200 to 300 per 100,000.

In chapter 13, Peter Reuter, a professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs's Department of Criminology, examines substance abuse and addiction among welfare and low-income mothers. According to Reuter, before PRWORA, there was a widespread perception that substance abuse was a major factor contributing to welfare dependency. He notes that one influential report asserted that 27 percent of AFDC mothers were substance abusers (including alcohol), three times the rate for mothers not receiving AFDC. But other studies, including several that used the same data source, reported much lower levels of substance abuse, generally under 10 percent.

Practice under PRWORA suggests that the prevalence of drug use is even lower than suggested by earlier estimates, with both national and state data pointing to estimates that less than 5 percent of welfare recipients are drug dependent. Reuter concludes that "the weight of the very imperfect evidence is that abuse of illicit drugs affects only a modest share of welfare clients, even after the sharp declines post-PRWORA."

Mothers' Work and Child Care

In chapter 14, Julia B. Isaacs, director of the Division of Data and Technical Analysis of the HHS Office of Planning, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the child care data in the main national surveys.

Welfare reform could have its most immediate impact on child well-being through child care. Isaacs summarizes the findings from a series of HHS-funded leaver studies that examined child care utilization patterns and subsidy usage for families that left welfare. She reports that 41 to 65 percent of employed leavers who used nonparental child care relied on relatives and siblings as the primary providers, while just 8 to 36 percent relied on center-based care. Only about half of leavers reported paying for care, and only about 15 to 25 percent reported receiving a government subsidy. Isaacs concludes that the quality of child care data has improved in recent years but that "many unanswered questions" remain. Among the biggest challenges are obtaining good data on informal arrangements, the quality of child care settings, and representative state and local data.

Activities of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

In chapter 15, Don Winstead, HHS deputy assistant secretary of human services policy, and Ann McCormick, a social science analyst at HHS, confirm the seriousness of the problems that the other authors raise about various national, state, and local data sets, including attrition and the inability to capture "the new variation in programs across the country."

Winstead and McCormick describe HHS's efforts to deal with the problems. For example, HHS is working with the Census Bureau to match Social Security records "with samples of adult welfare recipients and non-recipients from Census surveys to help assess employ-ment and earnings patterns and outcomes on the basis of baseline characteristics." HHS is also examining several options to enhance longitudinal tracking capabilities with reliable state samples.

Conclusion

In chapter 16, Besharov and Rossi summarize the major findings of this volume. They conclude that little will be learned from existing research about the causes of the caseload decline and welfare reform's impact on family and child well-being. Nevertheless, they argue, even though it is too late to measure the impact of welfare reform overall, an overriding need exists to monitor the well-being of low-income families and children.

Besharov and Rossi conclude by warning that we should expect divergent research findings on a host of issues. Hence, any assessment of the well-being of children and families must be based on the analysis of multiple studies, with careful attention to each study's data and methodology. The limitations of some studies will be obvious, such as when comparisons are based on arbitrarily selected time frames. The defects of other studies will not be so clear, and resolving differences across studies may require a long and contentious debate. Besharov and Rossi encourage discussion of competing analyses, so that researchers can learn from each other and policy analysts can learn how to better design programs. But this will not be an easy or short-term effort. "Persistence, open-mindedness, and a sharp eye will surely be needed. But disadvantaged children and families deserve no less."

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