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Welfare Reform: Children
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Welfare reform, then, has affected the lives of millions of people. If the 1999 poverty rate had still been at 1990 levels, there would have been another 4.2 million poor mothers and children. If the illegitimacy rate had continued at its pre-reform pace, another 1.4 million children would have been born out of wedlock. Some of the gains of welfare reform were lost in the 2001 recession, but reform has created a fundamentally different and better dynamic in the nation’s anti-poverty policy.
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Welfare reform and children - [T]he home page of a four-year study of families and children in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio; the study is based at Johns Hopkins University. The interdisciplinary study, beginning in January, 1999, combines a household survey of 2,800 parents and children, half of them recipients of TANF welfare benefits, an embedded developmental study of 800 of these families, and an ethnography of a separate but similar group of 170 families.
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At the same time, poverty rates remain well below those before welfare reform was enacted. According to the Census Bureau, child poverty rates declined from more than 20 percent in 1996 to 17.8 percent today Roughly 1.6 million children were lifted out of poverty. Perhaps even more impressively, since 1996, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at the fastest rate since figures have been recorded. Dependent single mothers, the group most heavily impacted by welfare reform, account heavily for this decline. Since the enactment of welfare reform, the poverty rate for female-headed families with children has fallen from 46 to 28.4 percent -- a decline greater than that of any other demographic group.
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John Hopkins University has a four-year project in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio to research the effects of welfare reform on child well-being. The study is looking at programs that cities are using related to employment, schooling/training, residential mobility and fertility of adults, and how these programs affect children. Interviews will begin with the main sample in January 1999. For more information, see http://www.jhu.edu/~welfare/proj.html.
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A significant number of families with children and/or adults with disabilities will be directly affected by the implementation of welfare reform. Early analyses of the Disability Supplement to the 1994 National Health Interview Survey show that nearly 40% of families on AFDC in 1994 had either an adult or child or both with a long-term, functional limitation. This information is self-reported.
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In the almost seven years since the welfare reform law was enacted, economic conditions have improved dramatically for America's poorest families. Welfare rolls have plummeted, employment of single mothers has increased dramatically, and child hunger has declined substantially. Most striking... has been the effect of welfare reform on child poverty, particularly among black children.
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