MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at (847) 491-4890 or at w-leopold@northwestern.edu

Children in Welfare Face Trouble Ahead

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Children in families on welfare or in families transitioning off welfare since the implementation of welfare reform are at high risk for poor cognitive development and problem behavior, according to a policy brief by Northwestern University and Boston College researchers.

Preschoolers in sanctioned families -- families who have had their benefits reduced or eliminated for failure to follow stricter welfare program rules -- are among the most vulnerable for emotional and behavioral difficulties.

That finding and others suggest an urgent need for services and intervention and reflect the latest research conducted in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio from "Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study."

"Preschoolers whose families were sanctioned and left welfare were three times as likely to show rates of serious emotional and behavioral problems as children in national samples," said Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, primary author of the new brief titled "Welfare Reform: What About the Children?"

"We are not saying that sanctions caused these problems, but rather that sanction policies have identified vulnerable families with vulnerable children," Chase-Lansdale, professor in Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, added.

The new policy brief suggests that leaving welfare, particularly after experiencing sanctions, may be extremely stressful for families with young children. "Because new federal welfare rules limit the time families can remain on welfare to five years, we surmise that children in families who will soon hit their time limits may show similar difficulties as those families leaving welfare after being sanctioned," Chase-Lansdale said.

The study also looked at young adolescents and found that two out of every five young adolescents in families on welfare had emotional and behavior problems serious enough to require intervention and treatment. These conclusions were based upon a widely used, highly reliable measure called the Child Behavior Checklist.

"Without immediate mental health and educational interventions and services, these vulnerable children and youth will face a future with the odds stacked heavily against them," said Chase-Lansdale.

While considerable research focuses on adults in welfare and sanctioned families, The Three-City Study focuses particularly on children and young adolescents, using in-depth measures and multiples sources of information to track children's healthy development and school achievement. "What About the Children?" is the first to use in-depth measures to see how children in sanctioned families are faring.

To disentangle the effects of poverty from the effects of welfare, the researchers divided their sample of 1,885 low-income preschoolers and young adolescents living in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio into four groups.

Those groups consisted of:

1) children in families on welfare after the implementation of welfare reform in 1997

2) children in families who transitioned off welfare since the stricter welfare restrictions imposed by welfare reform were put into place

3) children in families who transitioned off welfare prior to welfare reform

4) children in families with low incomes who never accessed the welfare system.

In comparing the young adolescents in these groups, the researchers discovered that those in families on welfare fared worst off of all.

"Forty-two percent of young adolescents in families on welfare have very serious and troubling emotional and behavior problems that require intervention from mental health providers," Chase-Lansdale said. Adolescents in welfare families also show lower levels of cognitive achievement than other low-income teens in the sample.

With only one wave of data, the researchers cannot definitively conclude whether or not welfare reform has caused the problems that they have identified. However, the study has allowed them to identify seriously vulnerable groups of children who are in trouble now and require immediate attention.

The new policy brief outlines policy options that are immediately available for those vulnerable children in sanctioned families. They include assistance to families on welfare to bring them into compliance with the welfare rules before they are sanctioned; closer monitoring of sanctioned families; and the provision of additional supports, such as mental health services, academic enrichment and after-school programs.

"Welfare Reform: What About the Children?" was written by Northwestern University's Chase-Lansdale, Boston College researcher Rebekah Levine Coley, and Brenda J. Lohman and Laura D. Pittman of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.

The complete policy brief is posted on the World Wide Web at <www.jhu.edu/~welfare> with other research from the Three-City Study.