Maternal work and welfare use and child well-being: Evidence from 6 years of data from the Women's Employment Study

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Abstract

Using five waves of data from a study of former and current welfare recipients in Michigan, this study examines how the extent of work participation and welfare receipt over the period 1997–2003 is associated with child behavior. We use a fixed-effects regression design to control for all time-invariant characteristics of mothers and children. We find few associations between work and welfare participation and child behavior. In contrast, measures of household economic circumstances, such as financial strain and hassles, and mothers' psychological problems and stress were consistently associated with reports of child behavior. Overall, these results suggest that among welfare leavers followed over the longer term, work participation and welfare receipt, per se, are relatively less important correlates of children's behavior compared to the more proximate family economic and psychological stressors that persist despite leavers' substantially increased work and decreased welfare use over time.

Introduction

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance for low-income families with children and made the receipt of cash benefits conditional upon working or participating in work-related activities. Although most public policy research has been concerned with the progression of women's employment and earnings after welfare reform, a number of studies have also been documenting the linkages between women's work experiences and child well-being. Research to date, much of it based on relatively short-term longitudinal and experimental data, suggests small positive or neutral impacts on young children's well-being in the face of maternal transitions from welfare to work, although some small negative effects for teenage children have also been reported.

The present paper uses new longitudinal data from the Women's Employment Study (WES) to examine the important question of longer-run outcomes for children after welfare reform. This analysis builds on our previous work (Dunifon et al., 2003, Kalil et al., 2001) by focusing on the linkages between the extent of maternal welfare participation and employment since 1997 and children's behavior, furthering the previous work by adding two new waves of WES data, thus extending the study period to 2003. Each wave of data provides mother-reported measures of child well-being, as well as measures of mothers' employment, welfare participation, income, financial stress, physical health, and psychological problems.

Section snippets

Background

The remarkable increase in labor force participation among low-income mothers in the 1990s, coupled with equally notable declines in welfare caseloads, has spawned numerous studies of welfare leavers' employment experiences. Economists have largely been concerned with the stability of these women's jobs over time and their ability to earn a living wage (Johnson & Corcoran, 2003). There is ample reason to be concerned about these facets of low-income mothers' work. For example, since the 1980s,

Summary

The overall effects of welfare reform on families will depend on the confluence of state and local policies, family risk and protective factors, and the patterns and quality of maternal work experiences (Zaslow, Tout, Botsko, & Moore, 1998). Welfare reform has brought about many changes in family life, and the longer-run effects will undoubtedly be a function of the interaction among, and accumulation of, these changes and the particular outcome of interest. A comprehensive analysis of the

Data

We use data from five waves, covering a 6-year period, of the Women's Employment Study, a longitudinal study of a sample of women drawn from the cash assistance rolls in an urban Michigan county in February 1997. The WES is being conducted at the University of Michigan's Poverty Research and Training Center. Michigan's Family Independence Agency (FIA) provided names and addresses of all single-parent cases in the county, and a stratified random sample of women between the ages of 18 and 54 was

Method

The primary methodological challenge in estimating the impact of maternal work and welfare participation patterns on child well-being stems from the fact that the decision to work (or the choice of the type of work and number of work hours more generally) may be endogenous to child behavior. Moreover, mothers who hold jobs or receive welfare differ from those who do not in both observable and unobservable ways that may also affect child behavior. As a result, cross-sectional estimates of the

Descriptive results

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the variables used in the analysis, for each of the five waves of WES data. As indicated, on average women worked in at least half of the months between survey waves at each time point; this figure increased by wave 5 to two-thirds of the months. Conversely, the proportion of months receiving welfare decreased dramatically, from a high of 86% for the interval between sampling and wave 1 to a low of 27% for the intervals between wave 3 and wave 4 and

Conclusions

In this investigation, we examined the longer-run links between the extent of maternal work participation, welfare use, and children's behavior among a sample of women randomly drawn from the welfare rolls in Michigan after the implementation of federal welfare reform and followed for a 6-year period. Our questions were straightforward: do women who accumulate varying levels of work participation and decrease their welfare use over time have children who display significantly more or fewer

Acknowledgements

We thank Patrick Wightman for excellent research assistance and also the research staff at the University of Michigan's Poverty Research and Training Center. Support for this research was provided in part by grants from the Charles Stewart Mott and Joyce Foundations and the National Institute of Mental Health (R24-MH51363) to the Social Work Research Development Center on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health, the Office of the Vice-President for Research at the University of Michigan to the Program

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