Download or read book Low income Single Mothers and the Transition from Welfare to Work written by Melody Renea Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making Ends Meet written by Kathryn Edin and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1997-04-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welfare mothers are popularly viewed as passively dependent on their checks and averse to work. Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems. Making Ends Meet offers dramatic evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, and South Carolina over a six year period. They learned the reality of these mothers' struggles to provide for their families: where their money comes from, what they spend it on, how they cope with their children's needs, and what hardships they suffer. Edin and Lein's careful budgetary analyses reveal that even a full range of welfare benefits—AFDC payments, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies—typically meet only three-fifths of a family's needs, and that funds for adequate food, clothing and other necessities are often lacking. Leaving welfare for work offers little hope for improvement, and in many cases threatens even greater hardship. Jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled women provide meager salaries, irregular or uncertain hours, frequent layoffs, and no promise of advancement. Mothers who work not only assume extra child care, medical, and transportation expenses but are also deprived of many of the housing and educational subsidies available to those on welfare. Regardless of whether they are on welfare or employed, virtually all these single mothers need to supplement their income with menial, off-the-books work and intermittent contributions from family, live-in boyfriends, their children's fathers, and local charities. In doing so, they pay a heavy price. Welfare mothers must work covertly to avoid losing benefits, while working mothers are forced to sacrifice even more time with their children. Making Ends Meet demonstrates compellingly why the choice between welfare and work is more complex and risky than is commonly recognized by politicians, the media, or the public. Almost all the welfare-reliant women interviewed by Edin and Lein made repeated efforts to leave welfare for work, only to be forced to return when they lost their jobs, a child became ill, or they could not cover their bills with their wages. Mothers who managed more stable employment usually benefited from a variety of mitigating circumstances such as having a relative willing to watch their children for free, regular child support payments, or very low housing, medical, or commuting costs. With first hand accounts and detailed financial data, Making Ends Meet tells the real story of the challenges, hardships, and survival strategies of America's poorest families. If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families is to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living. Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that so many would change and so few understand.
Download or read book Shut Out written by Valerie Polakow and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shut Out portrays in vivid detail the economic, educational, and existential struggles that single mothers confront as they fight back against a welfare-to-work regime that denies them access to higher education and obstructs their aspirations as autonomous women, determined to exit poverty and attain family self-sufficiency. The book is a unique blend of policy analysis and lived realities. The voices of student mothers fighting to stay in school, and organizing for a different future, are embedded in an analysis grounded in the educational experiences of women in poverty across the states. Harsh and punitive public policies that are designed to keep poor women trapped in low wage work are juxtaposed against the actions of those who, together with their allies, have resisted—inspired by a vision of a different world made possible by higher education. Contributing authors discuss the provisions of the 1996 "welfare reform" (PRWORA) Act and the myriad of statewide responses to educational options within the framework of national legislation. In documenting the multiple obstacles and policy restrictions that low income women face, the book also highlights successful state programs, institutional practices, and community-based programs that afford low income women educational opportunities. The afterword summarizes recent legislative developments and makes policy and advocacy recommendations for the future.
Download or read book Mothers Work and Children s Lives written by Rucker C. Johnson and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2010 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the effects of work requirements imposed by welfare reform on low-income women and their families. The authors pay particular attention to the nature of work, whether it is stable or unstable, the number of hours worked in a week, and regularity and flexibility of work schedules. They also show how these factors make it more difficult for low-income women to balance work and family requirements.
Download or read book Doing Without written by Jane Henrici and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2006-10-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The welfare reform legislation enacted in 1996 was applauded by many for the successes it had in dramatically reducing the number of people receiving public assistance, most of whom were women with children. Today, however, more than a decade later, these successes seem far less spectacular. Although the total number of welfare recipients has dropped by more than fifty percent nationwide, evidence shows that poverty has actually deepened. Many hardworking women are no better off for having returned to the workplace. In Doing Without, Jane Henrici brings together nine contributions to tell the story of welfare reform from inside the lives of the women who live with it. Cases from Chicago and Boston are combined with a focus on San Antonio from one of the largest multi-city investigations on welfare reform ever undertaken. The contributors argue that the employment opportunities available to poorer women, particularly single mothers and ethnic minorities, are insufficient to lift their families out of poverty. Typically marked by variable hours, inadequate wages, and short-term assignments, both employment and training programs fail to provide stability or the kinds of benefitsÑsuch as health insurance, sick days, and childcare optionsÑthat are necessary to sustain both work and family life. The chapters also examine the challenges that the women who seek assistance, and those who work in public and private agencies to provide it, together must face as they navigate ever-changing requirements and regulations, decipher alterations in Medicaid, and apply for training and education. Contributors urge that the nation should repair the social safety net for women in transition and offer genuine access to jobs with wages that actually meet the cost of living.
Download or read book From Welfare to Child Care written by Natasha J. Cabrera and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although federal and state support for childcare has increased dramatically in response to welfare work requirements, low-income families are still facing difficulties balancing work and family obligations. There is wide variation across states in the strictness of welfare work requirements and in the generosity of childcare support. In addition, the level of co-payments required and the flexibility to use subsidies for informal modes of childcare differ across states, leading families to make different childcare and employment choices. The purpose of From Welfare to Childcare is first to describe what changes occurred in childcare following the 1996 welfare reform legislation, and then to analyze how federal welfare and subsidy policies influence the availability, accessibility, and quality of childcare arrangements for single mothers with young children. National in scope, it focuses on how the reforms influence the way that children are cared for when their mothers leave welfare and enter the workforce. This book is suitable for national, state, and local policymakers, non-profit organizations that study and attempt to influence public policy, and scholars interested in family and social policy issues. It can be used as a text in graduate level courses on welfare, poverty, and children and public policy.
Download or read book From Welfare to Childcare written by Natasha Cabrera and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although federal and state support for childcare has increased dramatically in response to welfare work requirements, low-income families are still facing difficulties balancing work and family obligations. There is wide variation across states in the strictness of welfare work requirements and in the generosity of childcare support. In addition, the level of co-payments required and the flexibility to use subsidies for informal modes of childcare differ across states, leading families to make different childcare and employment choices. The purpose of From Welfare to Childcare is first to describe what changes occurred in childcare following the 1996 welfare reform legislation, and then to analyze how federal welfare and subsidy policies influence the availability, accessibility, and quality of childcare arrangements for single mothers with young children. National in scope, it focuses on how the reforms influence the way that children are cared for when their mothers leave welfare and enter the workforce. This book is suitable for national, state, and local policymakers, non-profit organizations that study and attempt to influence public policy, and scholars interested in family and social policy issues. It can be used as a text in graduate level courses on welfare, poverty, and children and public policy.
Download or read book Before and After Welfare Reform written by Avis Jones-DeWeever and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jobs Taken by Mothers Moving from Welfare to Work and the Effects of Minimum Wages on this Transition written by Peter David Brandon and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Transition from Welfare to Work written by Sharon Telleen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How well do you understand the sweeping welfare reforms of the mid-1990s? The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes provides a comprehensive examination of the welfare-to-work initiatives that were undertaken just prior to and following the major reform of United States welfare legislation in 1996. It will familiarize you with the intent of those reforms and show you how those interventions have been implemented. It also explores the barriers to employment that must be overcome by welfare-to-work clients, and the impact of these changes on clients, employers, and society. From the editors: “Although the numbers enrolled in welfare programs dropped dramatically in the last few years of the economic expansion of the 1990s, until recently we have known very little about the conditions of families affected by welfare-to-work policies. How did welfare-to-work interventions change the lives of participants and their families? What factors helped or hindered the transition to paid work? Are welfare-to-work policies likely to have actually improved the earnings or income of former AFDC recipients? This book studies all these questions.” The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes presents qualitative, quantitative, and econometric analyses as well as panel studies, longitudinal, and quasi-experimental designs. Beginning with a brief description of the goals and structure of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this book examines all of the phases of the welfare-to-work process. Use it to increase your understanding of: the implementation of interventions designed to place TANF recipients in jobs the factors that impact the readiness of low-income women to enter the job market the outcomes of current and earlier welfare-to-work interventions the steps we need to take to know how these citizens are faring in the welfare-to-work environment and more!
Download or read book The Transition of Single Mothers on Public Assistance to Economic Self sufficiency written by Louise Anne Parker and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study explored a model that integrates human capital, family resource, employment and psychosocial factors to explain variation in economic self-sufficiency (ESS) among single mothers. A sample of 851 single mothers on Aid to Families with Dependent Children was selected from the Washington State Family Income Study data base. Data from a three-year period (6/88-5/91) were utilized to describe and analyze single mothers in transition from welfare. When compared to a sample of non-poor single mothers, mothers on public assistance differed significantly in several ways: They were younger, had more children and were more likely to have parents who received public assistance. Educational levels were significantly lower, as was employment activity. Economic self-sufficiency was measured as the ratio of welfare benefits to household income. Degree of ESS improved over the three-year period: While 60 percent of single mothers relied on welfare for more than half their income in the first year, only 45 percent did by the third year. In analyzing differences in degrees of economic self-sufficiency among single mothers, the following groups of mothers had significantly higher degrees of welfare reliance: never-married and divorced mothers; mothers with a child under age two; mothers with three or more children; non-white mothers; and mothers living in public housing. A path analysis was conducted to determine the relative influence of human capital, family resource, employment and psychosocial factors on later economic self-sufficiency. Number of children and receipt of subsidies positively affected welfare reliance. Education, number of adults in the household and number of months employed negatively affected degree of welfare reliance. A key finding was that, after controlling for differences in human capital, family resources and employment activity, workplace support retained a highly significant, inverse relationship with degree of welfare reliance. Sense of personal control and social support had both direct and indirect effects on degree of welfare reliance, establishing that psychosocial factors mediate impacts of human capital, family and employment factors on economic self-sufficiency. The results support the viability of utilizing stress models to examine objective economic outcomes in future research.
Download or read book Good Parents or Good Workers written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good Parents or Good Workers? draws upon new ethnographic studies and longitudinal interviews that are reporting on the daily lives of women and children under new welfare policy pressures. Contributors look at family policy in the context of daily demands and critique new social programs that are designed to strengthen families. The book is divided into three course-friendly sections that deal with the impact of welfare reform on caregiving, the lived experiences of low-income families, and family policy debates. Good Parents or Good Workers? is an important text on the impacts of welfare reform that will be essential reading in a variety of courses in education, sociology, and politics.
Download or read book Making the Work Based Safety Net Work Better written by Carolyn J. Heinrich and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work first. That is the core idea behind the 1996 welfare reform legislation. It sounds appealing, but according to Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better, it collides with an exceptionally difficult reality. The degree to which work provides a way out of poverty depends greatly on the ability of low-skilled people to maintain stable employment and make progress toward an income that provides an adequate standard of living. This forward-looking volume examines eight areas of the safety net where families are falling through and describes how current policies and institutions could evolve to enhance the self-sufficiency of low-income families. David Neumark analyzes a range of labor market policies and finds overwhelming evidence that the minimum wage is ineffective in promoting self-sufficiency. Neumark suggests the Earned Income Tax Credit is a much more promising policy to boost employment among single mothers and family incomes. Greg Duncan, Lisa Gennetian, and Pamela Morris find no evidence that encouraging parents to work leads to better parenting, improved psychological health, or more positive role models for children. Instead, the connection between parental work and child achievement is linked to parents' improved access to quality child care. Rebecca Blank and Brian Kovak document an alarming increase in the number of single mothers who receive neither wages nor public assistance and who are significantly more likely to suffer from medical problems of their own or of a child. Time caps and work hour requirements embedded in benefits policies leave some mothers unable to work and ineligible for cash benefits. Marcia Meyers and Janet Gornick identify another gap: low-income families tend to lose financial support and health coverage long before they earn enough to access employer-based benefits and tax provisions. They propose building "institutional bridges" that minimize discontinuities associated with changes in employment, earnings, or family structure. Steven Raphael addresses a particularly troubling weakness of the work-based safety net—its inadequate provision for the large number of individuals who are or were incarcerated in the United States. He offers tractable suggestions for policy changes that could ease their transition back into non-institutionalized society and the labor market. Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better shows that the "work first" approach alone isn't working and suggests specific ways the social welfare system might be modified to produce greater gains for vulnerable families.
Download or read book Consequences of Growing Up Poor written by Greg J. Duncan and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One in five American children now live in families with incomes below the povertyline, and their prospects are not bright. Low income is statistically linked with a variety of poor outcomes for children, from low birth weight and poor nutrition in infancy to increased chances of academic failure, emotional distress, and unwed childbirth in adolescence. To address these problems it is not enough to know that money makes a difference; we need to understand how. Consequences of Growing Up Poor is an extensive and illuminating examination of the paths through which economic deprivation damages children at all stages of their development. In Consequences of Growing Up Poor, developmental psychologists, economists, and sociologists revisit a large body of studies to answer specific questions about how low income puts children at risk intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Many of their investigations demonstrate that although income clearly creates disadvantages, it does so selectively and in a wide variety of ways. Low-income preschoolers exhibit poorer cognitive and verbal skills because they are generally exposed to fewer toys, books, and other stimulating experiences in the home. Poor parents also tend to rely on home-based child care, where the quality and amount of attention children receive is inferior to that of professional facilities. In later years, conflict between economically stressed parents increases anxiety and weakens self-esteem in their teenaged children. Although they share economic hardships, the home lives of poor children are not homogenous. Consequences of Growing Up Poor investigates whether such family conditions as the marital status, education, and involvement of parents mitigate the ill effects of poverty. Consequences of Growing Up Poor also looks at the importance of timing: Does being poor have a different impact on preschoolers, children, and adolescents? When are children most vulnerable to poverty? Some contributors find that poverty in the prenatal or early childhood years appears to be particularly detrimental to cognitive development and physical health. Others offer evidence that lower income has a stronger negative effect during adolescence than in childhood or adulthood. Based on their findings, the editors and contributors to Consequences of Growing Up Poor recommend more sharply focused child welfare policies targeted to specific eras and conditions of poor children's lives. They also weigh the relative need for income supplements, child care subsidies, and home interventions. Consequences of Growing Up Poor describes the extent and causes of hardships for poor children, defines the interaction between income and family, and offers solutions to improve young lives. JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN is Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also director of the Center for Young Children and Families, and co-directs the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College.
Download or read book The War on Welfare written by Marisa Chappell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.
Download or read book Flat Broke with Children written by Sharon Hays and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.
Download or read book Through My Own Eyes written by Susan D. Holloway and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirl is a single mother who urges her son's baby-sitter to swat him when he misbehaves. Helena went back to work to get off welfare, then quit to be with her small daughter. Kathy was making good money but got into cocaine and had to give up her two-year-old son during her rehabilitation. Pundits, politicians, and social critics have plenty to say about such women and their behavior. But in this book, for the first time, we hear what these women have to say for themselves. An eye-opening--and heart-rending--account from the front lines of poverty, Through My Own Eyes offers a firsthand look at how single mothers with the slimmest of resources manage from day to day. We witness their struggles to balance work and motherhood and watch as they negotiate a bewildering maze of child-care and social agencies. For three years the authors followed the lives of fourteen women from poor Boston neighborhoods, all of whom had young children and had been receiving welfare intermittently. We learn how these women keep their families on firm footing and try--frequently in vain--to gain ground. We hear how they find child-care and what they expect from it, as well as what the childcare providers have to say about serving low-income families. Holloway and Fuller view these lives in the context of family policy issues touching on the disintegration of inner cities, welfare reform, early childhood and pro-choice poverty programs.
