How Welfare and Work Policies for Parents Affect Adolescents:
Evidence from Random Assignment Studies and Ethnographic Interviews

A Forum — November 15, 2002

Background

The federal law that overhauled the nation’s welfare system in 1996 sought to break the cycle of poverty by increasing self-sufficiency and family well-being through its effects on both parents and their children. Because the law incorporated new requirements promoting employment for parents with children, some feared it might have detrimental impacts on young children. Others, however, believed that older children might benefit from the presence of working parents as role models and changing community norms.

In contrast to initial expectations regarding older children, data and analyses from Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC, a non-profit, nonpartisan social policy research institute), suggest that the effects of welfare policy on adolescents are mostly small and generally neutral or negative. At this forum, two collaborators on MDRC’s Next Generation project, an MDRC researcher and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University, discussed these findings drawing on results from two different types of studies.

Forum Summary

Lisa Gennetian, Senior Research Associate at MDRC, presented the results of a research synthesis that used meta-analytic techniques to examine how welfare-to-work policies influenced the adolescent children of low-income families. The research integrated survey data collected from eight studies involving 16 different welfare and employment programs. In each study, parents were randomly assigned to an experimental program that involved some combination of three key programs associated with the law (mandatory employment, earnings supplements, and time limits on welfare receipt), while others were assigned to a control group whose members received standard welfare benefits and were not subject to the experimental program requirements.

The results of the synthesis showed that the welfare policies tested in these pilot programs had a negative effect on adolescents’ progress in school. When asked about their adolescent children, parents in the experimental welfare programs reported worse school performance, a higher rate of grade repetition, and more use of special educational services than did control group parents. While analyses showed that there were no negative effects on student suspensions, dropout rates, or teen childbearing overall, there were notable negative effects, including increased suspensions and dropping out, for adolescents who had younger siblings. The analyses suggest that there was reduced child supervision and monitoring when maternal employment increased, and adolescents increasingly took on adult roles such as caring for siblings as mothers increased their work hours. There was little evidence that the programs had negative effects for older teens who were transitioning to adulthood.

Interestingly, changes in adolescent behavior did not vary directly with respect to program type. Time limits, mandates, and earnings supplement programs each showed some negative effects on schooling outcomes, and even very generous earning supplement programs showed negative effects for adolescents.

Gennetian discussed several policy implications of this research: a) mothers’ reduced ability to supervise or monitor their children as they move into the workforce reinforces the need for effective strategies to engage low-income youth; b) the difficulty of juggling work and family responsibilities in low-wage jobs often available to women transitioning from welfare to work and the consequences of increased maternal work for adolescent children point to the need for policies that enhance job flexibility for parents; and 3) the increased role of adolescents as caretakers for younger siblings when parents move into the workforce indicates that these families could benefit from expansions in childcare services.

Andrew London, Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University, described the findings from an ethnographic study of 17 predominately African-American families with at least one adolescent child from three Cleveland neighborhoods. His research, conducted in collaboration with Ellen Scott, from the University of Oregon, drew on data from lengthy, in-depth interviews conducted over a period of three to four years examining women who were on welfare and living in selected neighborhoods of concentrated poverty when they were recruited to participate in the study. Baseline interviews were conducted in 1997/98 and annual follow-up interviews were held in 1999, 2000, and 2001.

Three themes emerged from these interviews:

1. Even within demographically similar neighborhoods, there was a great deal of variety in the well-being of adolescents.
2. The negative outcomes that are observed often seem to be unrelated to changes in welfare policies and programs. The causes of these problems are multiple and complex, and often seem to be related to earlier problems in childhood, peer influences, difficult family circumstances, dangerous neighborhoods, poor schools, and problems obtaining effective assistance from various institutions.
3. The reduced maternal supervision and increased adolescent adult role-taking associated with the welfare to work requirements sometimes contribute to adolescent problems, although some adolescents may benefit from taking on greater adult responsibilities.

London presented longitudinal case studies of four different families to illustrate the disparate impact of welfare policies on these families as mothers moved into the workforce and off of welfare. In one family, there were multiple and complex problems such as teenage pregnancy, marital conflict, and addiction, negatively affecting all three teenage children. As the mother moved into the workforce, the problems were exacerbated. In another family, the mother saw benefits for her child as she moved into the workforce during the initial interviews; however, she later came to believe that her increased work responsibilities left her less able to supervise her teen and contributed to her child’s problems in school. In a third family in which the mother moved into the workforce and obtained a good job with benefits, her teenagers both ended up going to work rather than completing school. Although she described her two sons as contributing to the household, responsible, and good-natured, their apparent early transitions to adulthood and failure to complete high school suggest that this is not an unambiguously positive outcome for these adolescents. In a final example, the teenager was doing well at the initial interview and continued to do extremely well during the follow-up interviews. The mother in this family was the best-educated woman in the whole sample, who seemed to be able to offer her son a great deal of stable support and encouragement to participate in a wide range of extra-curricular activities. She went on welfare to care for her daughter who had a severe seizure disorder. She ultimately became the paid caregiver for her own daughter, which increased her income and self-esteem, and allowed her money to reward her son for his excellent performance in school.

While these cases illustrate that the program requirements associated with the welfare law increased maternal employment, the policies seemed to enhance or exacerbate existing family situations. Those families that were already positively situated were able to improve their lot; those with existing problems found those problems magnified.

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