The long debate over welfare reform that culminated in President Clinton’s decision to sign a Republican bill ending “welfare as we know it” centered on whether poor children would be adversely affected by the new legislation. There is good reason for concern.
A program that began 60-some years ago to keep widowed mothers from having to go to work to support their children is being eliminated in favor of one designed to send single mothers into the workplace, thus keeping them from staying home with their kids. Can this possibly be an improvement?
Well, yes, it can. And Illinois has an unprecedented opportunity to create a family-oriented program that gets mothers into the work force at the same time that it ensures a better future for their children–and for the society in which they live. That’s what the legislature has the chance to do, if it only has the will.
Under the new law, each state must come up with its own plan for assisting the poor, within broad federal guidelines and with a fixed federal grant. The guidelines call for able-bodied adults to find work within two years, after which benefits will be cut off.
But what of their children–the infants and toddlers whom the original welfare program was intended to benefit? In fact, the federal welfare system has not served those children well at all.
Research over the years has established overwhelmingly that the children of poor, single mothers are far more likely than their middle-class counterparts to be abused or neglected, to do poorly in school, to become delinquent and to wind up in jail.
The cost to taxpayers is enormous; the cost in human potential unthinkable. But it doesn’t have to be so. Programs that identify such families early and provide then with parenting guidance and quality preschool have shown remarkably good results.
A Syracuse University study, for example, found that low-income children enrolled in high-quality preschool later cost the juvenile justice system less than one-tenth as much as children not in the program. Another major study on long-term effects found that quality preschool increased the IQs of low-income children and raised their literacy rates, their high school graduation rates and their earnings as adults.
And even before the preschool years, home visits to teach young, single poor mothers how to care for and interact with their children can greatly decrease child abuse and neglect and mean significant savings later in social service costs and foster care.
In 1988 Hawaii created a home-visiting program for new parents with high risk factors for abuse and neglect. In 1992 less than 1 percent of them had abused or neglected their children, compared with more than 20 percent of high-risk families nationwide.
This is important not just because children are better off but because taxpayers are too. Abused and neglected children wind up as costly wards of the state and are 40 percent more likely to become juvenile delinquents or adult criminals.
What does that mean for Illinois and welfare reform? Simply this: The most cost-effective and humane approach to getting poor mothers into the work force must be child-centered.
It should include early home visits to teach the mothers how to be effective parents, followed by child care that stresses cognitive development and prepares the child for a successful future in school.
By fortunate coincidence, the state’s new Department of Human Resources, which will consolidate virtually all child-related services, is ideally situated to coordinate community-based programs.
Forcing mothers to provide for themselves and their children can go far toward breaking the cycle of poverty and its myriad ills if the kids are learning while the mothers are working.
It won’t be cheap . . . at first. But the legislature, as it fashions Illinois’ role in helping needy families, must have the vision to see that making the children of poverty a priority now will benefit us all in the long run.
