The Relationship of Welfare Receipt to Child Outcomes

Welfare receipt often is correlated negatively with children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Yet, virtually all children in households that receive public assistance are poor, prompting the question of whether poor outcomes are an effect of welfare, a spurious relationship between welfare and child outcomes, or a result of welfare selection. Using the NLSY-CS, these possibilities are examined by controlling for poverty and for selection into welfare. Controlling for child and maternal characteristics accounts for the majority of bivariate associations between welfare and outcomes among Black children. Controlling for poverty does little to change the relationship between welfare and outcomes for Black or White children. Controlling for selection into welfare further reduces the relationship between welfare receipt and outcomes among White children and has little discernible effect among Black children.     

Welfare and Work: Complementary Strategies forLow‐Income Women?

We examine the effects of mothers' strategies of combining employment and welfare receipt during the first 3 years of their child's life on the child's cognitive development, behavior problems, and home learning environment at ages 5 to 6. We compare the child outcomes of those mothers who were continuously employed and received no welfare with (a) those who worked some or all of the 3 years and also received public assistance and (b) those who were totally dependent on public assistance. We studied children in single‐parent families (N= 1271 ) living below 200% of the poverty threshold using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—Child Supplement. No negative association was found on most child outcomes with a mother's employment whether or not it was combined with public assistance. However, mothers' not working at all and receiving financial support solely from AFDC was associated with negative child outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the possible effects of the new welfare laws on families and young children.     

Does caregiving increase poverty among women in later life? Evidence from the Health and Retirement survey

Given the rapid aging of the U.S. population and reductions in federal funding, elder care has become a major issue for many families. This paper focuses on a long-term consequence of elder care by asking how caring for elderly parents affects women's subsequent risks of living in poverty. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine whether and how caregiving for parents in 1991 increases women's risks of living in households with incomes less than the poverty threshold, receiving public assistance, and receiving Medicaid in 1999. Our findings illustrate that caregiving in earlier life raises women's poverty risks in later life by intensifying the negative effects of stopping work and declining health on women's economic well-being.     

TANF’s 15th Anniversary and the Great Recession: are Low‐Income Mothers Celebrating Upward Economic Mobility?

This article examines the impact of welfare reform for the upward economic mobility of low‐income families at the fifteenth anniversary of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The reformed policy was based on assumptions about participating families’ morality and encouraged states to move families off welfare through work and marriage without considering whether they were still poor. TANF was also implemented during an economic boom. Today, the US economy is suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, with many fearing a double dip recession. Poverty rates rose during the last 3 years and are currently above 15 percent. For the first time since 1996, the welfare rolls are increasing in many states. Welfare reform’s ‘work first’ approach did not create lasting upward economic mobility for low‐income families. As an alternative, I explore how higher education for welfare mothers will create opportunities for lasting upward mobility, even in times of recession.     

The Impact of the Economic Transition in Poland on Vulnerable Populations

The economic changes that began with the fall of communism in 1989 have helped Poland to establish one of the strongest economies in Eastern Europe today. Not all parts of society have benefited equally from the positive economic picture however. Those who are unemployed, living on a pension, single parents, or residents of rural communities are at risk of living in poverty in Polands new economic environment. This paper assesses the views of people in these four groups in terms of their perceived need for basic necessities (money for food, rent, and medicine) and for luxury activities (culture, relaxation, and education). The findings have implications for social welfare policies and services in Poland.The authors wish to thank Kazimierz M. Slomczynski for use of the POLPAN data.     

Child welfare workers’ constructions and causal explanations of poverty

Studying the perceptions of the causes of poverty is warranted because individual perceptions shape behavior toward poor people and actions related to poverty. Prior studies relying heavily on survey methodology fail to capture deeper and fuller meanings participants apply to poverty. This study explores how child welfare workers understand poverty by examining their definitions of, and what they see as causal explanations of, poverty. Individual interviews were conducted with 30 child welfare workers throughout a Midwestern state. Analysis indicated that workers all defined poverty as ‘not getting basic needs met,’ corresponding to the underlying assumptions of absolute poverty measures. Workers simultaneously augmented these definitions using other poverty constructions, namely the federal guidelines and more complex views – conceptually in line with relative poverty measures – that account for factors outside income or consumption. Workers’ causal explanations of poverty were multifaceted. Causal explanations included structural/systemic, individual, family/generational, and luck, with the first three being most prominent. These findings have implications for practice and training in the child welfare system as it relates to poverty.     

WORKING TO EXIT POVERTY WHILE CARING FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT IN VIETNAM

Since the implementation of economic reforms in 1986, levels of urbanization, industrialization, and women's labour force participation have increased in Vietnam. This article focuses on the experiences of parents in Vietnam and how labour and social conditions affect their ability to work and exit poverty while caring for their children's health and development. We interviewed a sample of 147 parents in Ho Chi Minh City using in-depth, semi-structured questionnaires. Sixty-three percent of parents had faced loss of income or promotions or had difficulty retaining jobs because they had to care for children. Fifty-eight percent of parents lost income while caring for their sick children because they had to take unpaid leave from work to care for their children or because they had to decrease productivity if they were able to continue working. Fifty percent of parents with school-age children experienced barriers to helping with homework, to attending meetings, or to participating in other aspects of their children's education. The aftermath of the Vietnamese – American War affected parents through loss of extended family members, limiting access to a major traditional source of support. The war had affected other parents by preventing them from completing their education, which left them with job choices that offer little or no work benefits. Although Vietnam has made significant progress in providing early childhood care and education and legislating labour laws, working families’ experiences demonstrate the need to ensure that paid leave and work flexibility policies are available and implemented in all work sectors and to expand affordable, quality child care in order to help low-income working parents in Vietnam meet work demands and exit poverty while meeting their children's needs.     

Child Poverty and the Changing Rural Family1

Abstract Our main objective is to give demographic perspective to changes since 1960 in the comparative economic circumstances of non-metropolitan and metropolitan children. Specifically, we examine absolute and relative poverty rates using child records from the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Public Use Microdata Samples and from the 1990 March annual demographic file of the Current Population Survey. Results reveal that more than one-in-five nonmetropolitan children today are poor, an increasing proportion are deeply impoverished, and a growing share are living in families with incomes lagging standards typical of the average American family. Changes in family structure accounted for roughly 60 percent of the increase in nonmetropolitan child poverty during the 1980s. Positive economic effects associated with increasing female employment, rising education levels, and declining family size in nonmetropolitan areas were more than offset by the deleterious effects of changing family structure. And the persistently higher rates of nonmetropolitan than metropolitan child poverty cannot be explained away by compositional differences in parental employment patterns, educational levels, or family size. Our results suggest that recent changes in family formation and structure cannot be disassociated from the changing economic welfare of children, especially for those living in nonmetropolitan America.     

“Time to Do the Chores?” Factoring Home-Production Needs into Measures of Poverty

Currently, income is the only resource that the government uses to measure poverty. However, in order for a family to maintain an adequate standard of living, its members must have the money and the time to do certain kinds of work in the home, such as child care, food shopping, meal preparation, laundry, housecleaning, and other similar household tasks. In this article, poverty rates are recalculated using a method developed by Vickery (1977) in which time is incorporated as a resource. Findings show that poverty rates increase dramatically when time is incorporated as a resource because working parents, especially single parents, often do not have enough time to perform essential tasks. Data are from the 1985 American Time Use Survey.     

Family Structure and Child Well‐being: Integrating Family Complexity

Although children's family lives are diverse, the measurement of children's living arrangements has lagged, focusing on the relationships of children to parents while largely ignoring sibling composition. Using data from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 23,985) the authors documented patterns of family complexity among a nationally representative sample of children ages 0–17 living in a range of family structures. They also examined the independent and joint associations of family structure and family complexity on child economic well‐being. Family complexity was independently related to economic disadvantage, namely, a lower income‐to‐needs ratio and a higher likelihood of public assistance receipt. The role of family complexity was partially contingent on family structure, with the positive association between family complexity and receipt of public assistance more pronounced for children in families with 2 married biological parents. This study demonstrates the utility of integrating family structure and family complexity in studies of children's well‐being.     

Challenges Faced by Women with Disabilities Under TANF

SUMMARY

A number of studies report the multiple problems facing women during the welfare reform transition. Within this group is a large number of single mothers struggling with both poverty and chronic health problems or disabilities. Those with these additional challenges might be expected to experience less success in moving out of poverty than those without these health challenges. In this study, we examine the progress of 178 women around the state of Wisconsin who were interviewed repeatedly about their experiences with welfare reform and poverty between 1997 and 2000, when the Wisconsin Works (W-2) program was being implemented. The incidence of health problems is related to level of education, and the type of disability has major impacts on expected outcome. Those with less education are more likely to suffer from health problems, especially mental health issues, depression and post-traumatic stress, which seem to be the most debilitating. These women also had difficulty accessing non-work support, such as Supplement Security Income (SSI), a federal assistance program for disabled persons with little or no income, or assistance from the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR), a federal and state program of assistance to promote the employment abilities of adults with disabilities.     

High Stakes: Time Poverty,Testing, and the Children of the Working Poor

Sociological interest in the implementation of policy generally focuses on the ways a single stream of policy creates a set of measurable consequences either for parents or children. This article takes an ethnographic approach to the study of conflicting policy mandates that collide in the lives of families moving from welfare to work at the same time that schools are implementing high stakes tests and the end of social promotion. We show that these two policies make contradictory demands on parents, to the potential detriment of children. Ethnographic research reveals the ways in which multiple and incompatible forms of policy impact poor families, putting them in the unhappy position of choosing between economic stability or mobility and children's educational performance.     

Urban poverty,economic restructuring and poverty reduction policy in urban China: Evidence from Shanghai, 1978–2008

This article uses the city of Shanghai as a case study to analyze the changing institutional mechanisms for the new urban poverty stratum in China. Specifically, the article examines urban poverty in relation to economic restructuring and the transformation of the welfare provision system in three stages of market reforms. The article first examines the overall economic growth strategies at the national level, and then examines local government policy outcomes at the city level. The impacts of institutional changes on urban poverty and social inequality are subsequently. Finally, the article assesses the current poverty reduction policies and proposes a “social inclusion” framework to alleviate urban poverty in China.     

Welfare reforms in Canada

This study examines the development of impoverished pre-school children before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives in Canada. Using data from the 1994/95 and 1998/99 cycles of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, we explore the relationships that impoverished families’ income source and family income status have with pre-school children's school readiness. Findings indicate that both before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives, children in working poor families had higher school readiness scores than their peers whose families receive social assisntance, independent of family environment characteristics that differentiated working poor and social assistance poor families. In addition, both before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives, school readiness scores of poor children were lower than scores for non-poor children, with children living in families that had incomes at least 200 percent of the low-income cut-offs being the only group with scores above the expected standard of 100. In sum, our study fails to provide evidence that by the end of the 1990s welfare reforms supported the concurrent policy goal of improving the well-being of Canadian children in poverty.     

Family and neighborhood welfare dependency and sons' labor supply

This article tests four models of how parental and childhood welfare use affects sons' labor supply: the correlated disadvantages model, Wilson's structural-environmental model, Mead's welfare culture model, and Murray's incentives model. Past research is extended by including measures of all seven factors that these models predict will shape sons' labor supply: parental welfare use, neighborhood welfare use, parental income, family noneconomic resources, neighborhood resources, labor market conditions, and state welfare benefits. There are four main findings. First, welfare use in the childhood neighborhood has no effects on sons' work hours. Second, only one group of sons is affected by parental welfare use: black sons' whose parents average $7,500 or more in welfare income per year. Third, black sons' adult work hours are strongly predicted by parental poverty and by labor market conditions; together these account for half the estimated relationships between heavy parental welfare use and black sons' labor supply. Fourth, parents' and neighbors' work hours strongly predict nonblack sons' labor supply. This research was supported by Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services, by the Rockefeller Foundation, and by the Office of the Vice-President for Research at the University of Michigan. We are grateful to John Bound, Sheldon Danziger, Greg Duncan, Martha Hill, and an anoymous reviewer for helpful comments and advice, to Marguerite Grabarek and James Kunz for programming, and most of all to Wendy Niemi for her patient, accurate, and efficient typing. Her research interests include poverty, social stratification, and labor economics. His research interests include rural poverty, poverty neighborhoods, and intergenerational poverty.     

Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review

Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences of poverty featured new techniques for identifying underlying processes and mechanisms. Researchers also explored “neighborhood effects” and focused on poverty deconcentration efforts. Finally, scholars produced a voluminous literature on the efforts to reform welfare and their subsequent effects.     

相对贫困的理论与政策聚焦 ——兼论建立我国相对贫困的治理体系

贫困一直是世界各国首要解决的社会问题。本文基于我国全面进入小康社会,需要建立解决相对贫困长效机制这一战略转换背景,从相对贫困与绝对贫困关系入手,围绕相对贫困内涵的争论,聚焦我国相对贫困的表现形式,并基于我国国情,提出建立相对贫困治理体系的建议。在机制上,充分发挥基本公共服务的作用,建立相对贫困人口发展的基础性机制;形成"政府主导、社会参与、市场促进"的贫困治理的整体性机制;建立干预代际贫困传递的阻断性机制。在具体措施上,围绕低收入家庭,要建立生活负担减免制度;健全以生产帮扶和就业帮扶为主的专项援助制度;按需救助,对低收入户开展"救助会诊";建立相对贫困家庭陪伴式服务制度。     

Net effects of poverty on welfare use and dependency among children by family immigration and citizenship statuses

The fact that immigrant families used welfare at a disproportionately high level called for national welfare and immigration reforms in the mid-1990s. This study examined the net effects of poverty on welfare use and dependency among U.S.-born children by family immigration and citizenship statuses in pre- and post-welfare reform years. The analyses found that children in poor immigrant families were less likely to use welfare than children in poor native-born families in 1995, 2000, and 2005. In 2010, however, children in poor immigrant families and poor native-born families had similar likelihoods of welfare use. Children in poor noncitizen families were in general less likely to be dependent on welfare than children in poor naturalized families. Although children in poor naturalized families had a lower likelihood of welfare dependency in a pre-welfare reform year, they had similar or higher likelihoods of dependency in post-reform years, compared to children in native-born families.     

Poverty and Material Hardship in Grandparent‐Headed Households

Using the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation, the current study examines poverty and material hardship among children living in 3‐generation (n = 486), skipped‐generation (n = 238), single‐parent (n = 2,076), and 2‐parent (n = 6,061) households. Multinomial and logistic regression models indicated that children living in grandparent‐headed households experience elevated risk of health insecurity (as measured by receipt of public insurance and uninsurance)—a disproportionate risk given rates of poverty within those households. Children living with single parents did not share this substantial risk. Risk of food and housing insecurity did not differ significantly from 2‐parent households once characteristics of the household and caregivers were taken into account.     

Disability welfare reform and the chav threat: a reflection on social class and ‘contested disabilities’

The recent UK media clash between Katie Hopkins and Katie Price in the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother 2015 regarding Price’s receipt of welfare benefits for her son, Harvey, has reopened old debates about welfare support for the so-called deserving and undeserving poor. Nowhere is this more evident than in the classed moralities of motherhood with the harshest criticisms aimed at the ‘chav’ poor and working-class families and their children whose lifestyles and moral respectability may be called into question for causing or even fabricating particular disabilities in the first place. Alongside these characterisations of parental deficits and immorality associated with working-class and poor parents, connections between ‘invisible’ disability, poverty and poor parenting continue.