Welfare Reform: Long-Term Implications for the Development of Children, Adolescents and Young Adults
 


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Air date: Thursday, November 13, 2008, 3:00:00 PM
Category: BSSR Lecture Series
Description: More than a decade after the passage of the landmark welfare reform law of 1996 --the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)--, the long-term outcomes for children and youth are still unclear. PRWORA had the good fortune to be launched during a period of strong economic growth. Yet, few studies have examined how children’s well-being may have changed under welfare reform during the post-2000 period of a sluggish economy. Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study was designed to examine the association of mothers’ welfare and employment transitions with changes in child development at three time points over a six-year period, 1999 to 2005, in a random sample 2,042 children and youth in low-income families living in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. For young children, changes in mothers’ welfare receipt and employment were not linked to long-term deterioration or improvement in children’s reading and math skills or problem behavior. For youth, the overall picture is also one of null findings in these domains. Moreover, we found no significant association between mothers’ welfare and employment transitions and the important youth life outcomes of teenage pregnancy, parenthood, or high school drop-out. A notable exception was that adolescents and young adults whose mothers found jobs or increased their work hours were less likely to have clinically-high levels of behavior problems than were those whose mothers remained unemployed or worked part-time. Overall, the long-term well-being of children and youth neither worsened nor improved substantially in this new era of welfare reform, suggesting that the predictions of both the proponents and the opponents of PRWORA were off the mark.

This lecture is an installment of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Lecture Series sponsored by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and organized by the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee.

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR CC), with support from the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), convenes a series of guest lectures and symposia on selected topics in the behavioral and social sciences. These presentations by prominent behavioral and social scientists provide the NIH community with overviews of current research on topics of scientific and social interest. The lectures and symposia are approximately 50 minutes in length, with additional time for questions and discussion. All seminars are open to NIH staff and to the general public.
Author: P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Ph.D., Northwestern University
Runtime: 90 minutes
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CIT File ID: 14767
CIT Live ID: 7285
Permanent link: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?14767