Past research establishes an association between
welfare receipt and involvement with child protection services.
Leaving welfare to enter the workforce, the primary goal of the
1996 welfare reform, holds the potential both to improve children’s
welfare by increasing poor families’ income and to increase
child maltreatment by throwing families into economic uncertainty.
Many welfare recipient families have experienced a number of adverse
life events that make them more vulnerable to charges of child
maltreatment. In addition, the new behavioral requirements that
welfare reform imposes as a condition of receiving benefits affect
the parenting experiences of recipients who are concurrently involved
with the child welfare system. These families are at the intersection
of two state institutions that seek to modify the behavior of
poor parents.
This paper uses the findings of a qualitative study
to explore the conver-gence of these two behavior modification
programs in the lives of poor families. Our study focused on families
who both received welfare and experienced involvement with the
child welfare system — so-called “dual-system families.”
We conducted in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a subset of
16 dual-system parents drawn from the larger pool of families
participating in the Illinois Families Study (IFS). The IFS tracks
a random sample of 1,362 Illinois families who received welfare
benefits in 1998 for a six-year period. Our goal was to examine
the impact of welfare reform on the experiences of families in
the IFS who are also involved with the Illinois Department of
Children and Family Services (DCFS). Our interviews con-firmed
that the convergence of these two behavior modification programs
places competing demands on poor parents, making it difficult
to meet the expectations of either program. As a result, dual-system
families are uniquely burdened by excessive and, at times, contradictory
social welfare policies.
Morgan B. Ward Doran, School
of Law and Program in Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern
University
Dorothy E. Roberts, School of Law, Northwestern University
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