Contrary to fears that welfare reform would hurt children, the largest study yet assessing the effects of the sweeping 1996 act pushing mothers on welfare into work has found that it has not been bad for youngsters and may do some good.
Regardless of whether their mothers went to work or remained at home, children continued to develop along the paths they had been on, said the study’s lead author, developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy.
The findings support a growing body of evidence that the intellectual or emotional development of children of working mothers is not shortchanged compared with that of children of non-working mothers.
“It’s a very controversial topic in the U.S., even though 70 percent of mothers with children are in the workforce,” Chase-Lansdale said. “It touches a nerve about how much time mothers are spending with their children.”
The study was undertaken to determine the effect of the sweeping change in the welfare system that has dramatically reduced the number of families receiving assistance, Chase-Lansdale reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science.
“This study suggests that, in general, welfare reform has not had the dire consequences for children’s well-being that many of us feared,” said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a Columbia University professor of child development and education, who was not involved in the study.
But not everyone was convinced. Toby Chaudhuri, a spokesman for the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund, noted that the study was conducted in the booming 1990s and that the ensuing economic downturn has put many poor mothers at increased risk.
“More and more of even the poorest families are not receiving welfare assistance, and states are cutting back on child care for low-income working families just when they need it the most,” Chaudhuri said. “Welfare-to-steady-work can help children, but welfare-to-joblessness does not.”
The new study, which included researchers from Johns Hopkins and Northern Illinois Universities, involved 564 preschoolers and 895 adolescents as well as their mothers. The children were tested for their reading and math skills from the time their mothers were on welfare to 16 months after their mothers began working.
Mothers were interviewed about their children’s behavior problems, such as aggression, depression and internalizing or externalizing feelings. Adolescents were interviewed about their psychological well-being.
The subjects were randomly picked to represent welfare families as well as mothers living in poverty who were not on welfare but who were either working or not. The families were in Chicago, Boston and San Antonio; the average annual income was $13,000 for a family of four.
As welfare reform was being debated in the 1990s, those in favor of the change held that growing up on welfare was harmful to children because it fostered dependency and the lack of initiative, thus lowering cognitive achievement and increasing behavior problems.
Opponents warned that requiring mothers to work would take them out of the home and away from their children, increasing parental stress and decreasing responsive parenting.
“Neither of these arguments was based on sound scientific evidence,” Chase-Lansdale said. “Our study fits with a broad body of work suggesting that mothers’ employment is neither harmful nor helpful to child development.”
The National Institute of Child Health and Development, part of the federal National Institutes of Health, provided major funding for the $20 million study because of the public debate raging over welfare reform in the mid-90s, said Jeffery Evans, director of the institute’s intergenerational research, demographic and behavioral sciences branch.
“What we were afraid of back then was that if you kick out the income supports of public policy, women would have to go to work and they wouldn’t have time left for their kids,” he said.
“We thought it would be bad,” he added. “It turns out that mothers are not doing that. They’re sacrificing a lot in their lives, but they’re not sacrificing time with their kids.”
Improved financial status
Though preschoolers were unaffected, adolescents appeared to benefit moderately by a reduction in psychological stress, particularly anxiety, Chase-Lansdale said.
This improvement may be because of the family’s improved financial status, which made teens less anxious and mothers more self-confident, she said.
“The findings suggest that welfare reform has been more successful and less harmful than its critics feared,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “No one is suggesting any major changes in the law, although a number of people think we should invest more in quality child care.”
The new study’s findings differ somewhat from those of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. in New York, which found that adolescents did less well in school when their mothers worked. They were more likely to drop out, repeat a grade or be placed in special-education classes.
Lisa Gennetian, who conducted that study, said it is likely that the findings of both studies may be true and that the different populations involved in the two studies cause the divergence in findings.
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“As far as adolescents are concerned, the jury is still out when mothers go to work,” she said. “But our results about preschoolers agree that they are unaffected.”
Manpower Demonstration’s study also showed a significant benefit for elementary schoolchildren when their mothers went to work.
“For those children, we are finding that when their mothers are employed and income increases we see benefits to their cognitive achievement and behavior,” Gennetian said.
Studies consistently show that the emotional status of mothers who switch from welfare to work either remains the same or is marked by less depression. Their parenting behavior is less harsh, said Columbia’s Brooks-Gunn.
“A lot of people thought that if you’re on welfare and you go into the job market in low-paying jobs, that moms would be more stressed,” she said. “All the research to date doesn’t suggest that.”
Ieesha Anderson, 22, a Calumet City mother of five children, said going from welfare to work was a confidence-builder.
“It means a lot to know that I can be independent and provide for my family,” she said.
In 1998 Anderson was forced to seek work because of welfare-reform restrictions. She enrolled in Women’s Resource Assistance Program, a social service agency in Harvey that provided her with everything from job training to wardrobe tips.
Two months later, she stepped behind the counter in the Harvey Bank, where she earns more than $1,100 a month, considerably more than her welfare check of $278. She is living in federally subsidized housing, where her rent is $72 a month.
She said her children deal well with her working. Every morning they go to school or day care. She’s at work by 7:45 a.m. and back home by 6 p.m. Then it’s right into her “second shift” of cooking, laundry and meeting the demands of her children.
“There are days when it’s real hard–you’re just so exhausted–but you do what you have to do,” she said. “I think my kids are proud of me.”
Time diaries kept
There were fears that mandatory work would deprive children of a significant amount of time with their mothers, but that did not appear to be the case, Chase-Lansdale said.
Time diaries kept by mothers showed that work kept them away from home an average of four hours a day while their adolescents were there, but the mothers made up for it by spending more time with their children later in the day.
Mothers cut back on the time they formerly spent on leisure, sleep, hobbies or other activities. As a result, the net loss of time spent with their adolescent children was only 45 minutes a day, Chase-Lansdale said.
Mothers of preschoolers reduced the amount of time spent with their children by an average of two hours a day.
“Time and money are seen as very important resources for children–time spent with children and money for their daily living,” Chase-Lansdale said. “If money goes up from maternal employment and time goes down, there’s no net effect.