Welfare reform

Welfare policies are generally designed for adults, with little attention paid to the effects on their children. Yet the impacts on children (both positive and negative) should figure into the cost/benefit calculations.

Welfare reform policies can benefit younger children when designed in ways that increase the employment and the income of single parents. For policy-makers interested in using welfare policy to improve children’s well-being, earnings supplements might be an important complement to programs aimed directly at improving the development of low-income children.

Since more parents are relying on child care as a result of welfare reforms, more attention should be paid to the quality of early-childhood education and care programs, especially family daycare, in order to foster children’s positive development and school readiness. This is of special concern given the long hours more and more young children are spending in child care, and the potentially low quality and instability of child care available for very young children.

Finally, policy-makers should be increasingly concerned about the potentially negative effects of welfare reform on adolescents, and should focus on the role of institutions and social context for adolescents. More research on the effects of welfare policies on children across their developmental stages would help inform policy-makers as they grapple with how to balance budgets and provide a cohesive and comprehensive social safety net for low-income families.

See also...

• How important is it?
• What do we know?
• According to experts