The welfare reforms of 1996 have had mixed effects on children based on their ages, which means policymakers need to consider the different developmental needs of children when crafting legislation, according to research by P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale and Greg Duncan (IPR-Education and Social Policy).

While caseload counts and political rhetoric have dominated news about welfare reform, information on children’s well-being and development has been somewhat lost in the shuffle.

“Despite the professed child-based goals of the reform legislation, remarkably little attention has been paid to tracking and understanding its impacts on family functioning and child well-being,” the researchers suggest.

Duncan and Chase-Lansdale presented their findings in February at a conference on the “The New World of Welfare” sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. The conference assembled the nation’s top experts on welfare to assess the effects of the 1996 reforms and to frame the policy debate that is emerging around reauthorization of the federal legislation for fiscal year 2003.

Based on their analyses of five welfare-reform random-assignment experiments conducted during the 1990s, the researchers found that programs requiring a 30-hour work week and providing financial supports for working families had positive effects on preschool and elementary-aged children.

On the negative side, Chase-Lansdale and Duncan found poverty, maternal depression, domestic violence, and children’s developmental problems “alarmingly common” even for families benefiting from generous work supports. In addition, while working mothers introduce routines into their children’s lives, make more money, and serve as role models, they have less time to spend with their children and cannot monitor their behavior so well.

In contrast to the positive effects on preschool and elementary-aged children, adolescents were more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as drinking and smoking, and have poor school achievement and behavior. Research on the effects on infants and toddlers was inconclusive. Welfare programs that mandated work but did not offer wage supports did not seem to help or harm children.

Though less definitive, some evidence indicates that factors operating outside the family—such as childcare and after-school programs—appeared to have more influence on favorable child outcomes than positive changes within the home environment.

In their report, Duncan and Chase-Lansdale urge policymakers to cast a wide net when researching welfare legislation.

Policymakers should “abandon the search for THE answer to how welfare reforms are affecting children’s well-being. Reforms will simultaneously help some children and hurt others. It is the distribution of impacts—both good and bad—that will tell the complete story of welfare reform’s impacts on children.”

Based on their analysis, Duncan and Chase-Lansdale made the following policy recommendations:
- Implement better work supports for mothers, which may include income supplements and childcare subsidies
- Create more after-school and community programs to provide children with enriching activities while their parents may still be at work
- Encourage fathers to become or stay involved in their children’s lives by removing penalties for fathers who live with mothers and children
- Provide safety nets such as Medicaid and food stamps for families with barriers to stable, full-time employment (for example, maternal depression, domestic violence, disabilities).

Duncan and Chase-Lansdale’s working paper, “Welfare reform and child well-being,” may be downloaded from the Web at www.jcpr.org.