Marcia*, a 28-year-old widowed mother of two living in Philadelphia, left welfare for work in 1998, two years after President Clinton signed a landmark welfare reform law promising to "end welfare as we know it" and setting time limits on welfare benefits.

Marcia took a full-time job as a nursing home assistant at $8.29 an hour, and a part-time housekeeping job paying $6.25 per hour. On paper, Marcia's monthly income jumped by $426, to $1,235, compared to her previous income from her welfare check and informal earnings from hair-braiding.

By that measure, she could be considered evidence of the reform law's success: The number of people on welfare has dropped by more than half from the pre-reform peak of 14.2 million in 1994, more single mothers than ever before are working, and incomes have increased for many.

But for Marcia, success was relative. Virtually all of her increased income was swallowed up by new work-related childcare and transportation costs. Marcia also found her 60-hour work week exhausting. The balancing act was creating "chaos" for her family, she said. Marcia thought her 13-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter had become "a little wilder because I'm not home constantly watching them."

Marcia couldn't find a 9-to-5 job. Her work shifts kept her away from home till 9 or 10 p.m. Worn out, she soon quit her part-time job.

Studies of How Welfare Reform Affects Children Could Influence Debate
Marcia's story is one of several profiles gleaned from an ongoing 3-to-4 year study of low-income mothers, many of them leaving welfare for work, in impoverished neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Miami. The study, conducted by university researchers for the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a New York City nonprofit research organization, is one of several looking at the effects of welfare reform on children. Findings from these studies are expected to inform the national debate as Congress gets ready to reauthorize the welfare reform program.

While mothers who enjoy substantial income gains after leaving welfare report feeling better about themselves and hopeful about their children's futures, many others are barely making it in low-wage jobs that offer no sick leave or other benefits, according to Ellen Scott, a sociologist at the University of Oregon and one of the study's researchers.

"In most cases their income gain is not enough to make the difference in the family system," Scott says of the Cleveland families she is studying. "You see people living in the same terrible neighborhoods, going to food banks every month, going to Good Will for their children's clothing, paying a piece of a [utility] bill to stave off a shut-off for a month or two."

Like Marcia, Scott says, many mothers are concerned about how their absence from home will affect their children. These parents worry about crime in their neighborhoods, and fear that their teenaged children may get involved in drugs, or come to physical harm or become pregnant.

Strapped for money and distrustful of strangers, women in this sample often put their children in the care of relatives and boyfriends. "As women move from welfare to work, they seem increasingly dependent on men in their lives, including men abusive to them. There's a danger there," Scott says.

Do Kids Benefit When Income Rises?
One of the studies most widely cited since the crafting of welfare reform was also by the MDRC. It looked at 11 welfare-to-work experiments undertaken between 1991 and 1994. Researchers found that children whose parents were in back-to-work programs that supplemented their wages performed better in school than children whose families remained in the traditional welfare system.

These findings, released in January 2001, have bolstered policy arguments that welfare mothers and children will do better if the mothers returned to work.

"What's exciting is if you respond to that need [bringing a single mother out of poverty], it appears to make a difference. It appears to help children's development," says Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a psychologist at New York University.

But the school achievement boosts showed up consistently only in those programs that also supplemented wages, and they did not show up at all for children whose mothers were the least educated, had little job experience or suffered from health problems, according to Yoshikawa.

Some programs actually reduced families' income—with mostly negative effects on children's behavior and emotional well-being, according to Arloc Sherman, a researcher with the Children's Defense Fund who has analyzed the MDRC data independently.

Teens: Troubling Findings
Even those income-boosting programs that seemed to improve outcomes for young children did not produce good results for adolescents.

Compared to teens in welfare families, adolescents whose parents worked were more likely to be involved in smoking, drinking and delinquent activity in a Canadian program; were the subject of more calls from school about their behavior in Minnesota; and were involved in more trouble with the police and school suspensions in Florida.

"That it's uniformly unfavorable for adolescents in these programs is pretty astounding,'' says Sharon McGroder, a senior research associate at Child Trends, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization.

Many teens in ex-welfare families work more than 20 hours a week, according to Child Trends, which could hurt their school performance and put them in more frequent contact with adults who smoke and drink. Teens are also less likely to be in after-school programs.

Model Programs Bear Little Resemblance to Today's Welfare Reform
Advocates for low-income families maintain that welfare reform today bears little resemblance to the well-funded programs profiled in the original MDRC report. Few states supplement welfare recipients' incomes when they enter the work force, they note, and many of those "sanctioned"—forced off welfare for failing to meet work requirements—are often the least capable of holding down a job.

"States have relied much more heavily on the stick than the carrot—time limits and sanctions, rather than on income supplements," says Deepak Bhargava, director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, a coalition of 1,000 community organizations. "The way the MDRC study has gotten framed is as an endorsement of welfare reform as it is—when in fact it's an endorsement for something that doesn't exist in many places."

Those families pushed off welfare by the "stick" of sanctions tend to be the least able to fend for themselves in the job market, and their children tend to fare the worst, more recent studies suggest.

Families who have had their welfare benefits eliminated or reduced for failing to comply with back-to-work requirements are less likely to become employed than other families who have left welfare, according to an ongoing Johns Hopkins University study of Boston, Chicago and San Antonio. They tend to have lower levels of education, more substance abuse problems and poorer health.

Pre-schoolers in these families score worse on cognitive achievement tests than other low-income children, including those whose families are still on welfare, according to Northwestern University developmental psychologist P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale. She recently surveyed 1,900 low-income families as part of the Johns Hopkins "Three-City" study.

"Children in sanctioned families are especially at risk," Chase-Lansdale says. "I think we could say these children? need special attention."

Child Care: Quality is Often Poor
In relying on a babysitter at home, Marcia resembles many ex-welfare recipients. Mothers entering low-paying jobs often turn to neighbors or relatives because, unlike most day care centers, they can take a child overnight or on a flexible basis that meshes with irregular work shifts. Some experts say that's unfortunate because, on average, day care centers provide higher quality care.

That was the conclusion of researchers looking at day care arrangements for 250 2- to 4-year-olds in the Three-City study. The researchers rated 80 percent of the unregulated home care settings—including relatives' homes—as "inadequate" or "minimal." The homes lacked books and appropriate play materials, often had dangerous, unsanitary conditions and provided poor nutrition. In contrast, 80 percent of the centers used by these low-income families were rated "good" quality.

"We came up with this quandary: According to the developmental needs of children, centers are best; but for the needs of mothers—to work with their work schedule and find care they could afford—unregulated home care clearly met the needs of parents," says Rebekah Levine Coley, a developmental psychologist at Boston College and a researcher on this study.

Child Care Subsidies
That may also explain in part why so few ex-welfare moms apply for government child-care subsidies. A survey of state studies by the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, DC, found that in many areas, 30 percent or fewer of former welfare recipients who were working were getting a child care subsidy. In some states, like New York, mothers say their caseworkers never informed them they were eligible. Other states—notably Texas and California—have long waiting lists for subsidized day care slots.

The poor quality of former welfare families' day care grabbed headlines last year when a University of California-Berkeley think tank released a study finding that many children spent hours watching TV and had little interaction with their babysitters. However, recent surveys from the same think tank find that more mothers are shifting to California's licensed day care facilities within a year of leaving welfare as their work lives become more regular.

"The good news is the centers are giving high-quality care," says Diane Hirshberg, who directed the survey of three California counties for the Berkeley think tank Policy Analysis for California Education.

Recession Worries
Some researchers say they are worried about what will happen to certain groups of parents as they approach the date when their welfare benefits will be cut off. (Federal law set a maximum 5-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits, but states have the option of ending benefits sooner.) These include the least educated, mothers caring full-time for disabled or seriously ill children and mothers who suffer from physical or mental health problems.

Asks Scott, "What will happen to care-taking?" for seriously ill children in families where welfare once allowed mothers to stay home.

Finally, researchers and advocates for the poor caution that most studies were conducted during a booming economy. "It's a fairly sobering picture now, and as the recession takes hold we're likely to see much greater hardship," says Bhargava. "It's not clear the safety net we have in place will catch poor families and poor kids."

Resources:

• Manpower Demonstration Resources Corporation (MDRC)
• The Johns Hopkins ``Three-City'' study of welfare reform's effect on families
• National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support
• Child Trends
• Policy Analysis for California Education at the University of California-Berkeley http://pace.berkeley.edu/
• More studies on welfare reform and children can be found at the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University
• Research Forum on Children, Families and the New Federalism

Sarah Glazer is a free-lance writer in Larchmont, N.Y. Her articles have been published by Congressional Quarterly, The Washington Post Health Section and The Public Interest.