Jill Hanson lifts her 7-month-old daughter, Destiny, into a bucket swing in the playground and gives her a gentle push. Destiny’s dimpled hands wave gleefully above her as Hanson murmurs to her.
Hanson’s live-in boyfriend and Destiny’s father, Sheldon Graham, shoots a few invisible baskets, then comes over and pushes the baby himself.
“Ah-ooh!” he says. Then he hoists himself up on the swing next to his baby, a lanky young man goofing on the bucket swing as his baby chortles and Hanson smiles contentedly.
It is a scene of domestic sweetness, if you overlook the lack of marriage — father back from work, mother joining him for a walk after a day home with the baby.
But these happy times are funded partly by tax dollars. Hanson, 20, receives $278 a month in public aid. When people talk about welfare reform, it is her and Destiny’s welfare they are talking about.
Hanson is particularly germane to the heated debate because, while there is no typical welfare recipient, she comes statistically close.
Nationally, the most common person on welfare is not the convenient stereotype of a minority teenager with multiple children, but a white woman between the ages of 20 and 24 with one young child living in a metropolitan area.
Hanson is atypical in some ways. The clearest is Graham’s presence in her life, both physical and financial. He has been working full-time at the Evanston Recycling Center for $5.25 an hour, a salary that paid the rent on their one-bedroom Rogers Park apartment. However, there have been recent disagreements that put his job in jeopardy.
He is a loving father. “Let me clean your mouth,” he coos, dabbing at Destiny before Hanson lifts her into her highchair for lunch.
Hanson sits on the coffee table, the baby in front of her and the TV behind the baby. Ricki Lake’s show is on freeloading friends.
Hanson dislikes what she regards as welfare freeloaders as much as the rest of the country, and she thinks welfare should have been reformed a long time ago.
“There are an awful lot of people dependent on it,” she said. “They’re just having their babies and getting that money.”
Of course, she had a baby and is getting money too. But she would have had her baby even if she couldn’t have gotten a government cent, she says.
“Me and Sheldon would have been working extremely, extremely hard,” she said.
She thinks the public has a skewed view of welfare.
“People don’t get to see the people who don’t abuse it, like us,” she said. “Sheldon is working. And Destiny’s a new baby.”
The reason she had a baby before she could afford to support one is wrapped in emotion and circumstance. She was in love; she wanted a baby, though she says she did not deliberately try to get pregnant.
“I didn’t think I could get pregnant,” said Hanson, a placid, brown-eyed young woman with an ex-boyfriend’s name tatooed on her forearm, a relic of a wild life she hates to remember now. “I had been sexually active since I was 15, and I never got pregnant.”
Her job at a shopping center snack shop did not seem more pressing, or attractive, than making a family.
And then there was Sheldon. Hanson’s life can be divided into Before Sheldon and After Sheldon. Before Sheldon was the rough part.
“I was kind of a bad kid,” Hanson admitted with an embarrassed smile, bouncing Destiny softly in her lap in the apartment.
Her mother was 14 years old when Hanson was born. Her older sister, Hanson’s aunt, adopted Hanson so that her mother could return to 8th grade.
They all lived together in the Glenview house owned by Hanson’s grandmother, who worked as a press operator in a factory. When Hanson’s mother turned 17, she left home, marrying a year later and starting another family.
Hanson’s aunt, her adoptive mother, received AFDC for nine years. It was Hanson’s first experience with public aid.
In 7th grade, Hanson stopped going to school, spending her days sleeping and watching TV.
“I didn’t like the people,” Hanson said. “They were stuck up.”
“This is kind of a rich area, and we’re low-income,” said her adoptive mother, Sheila, who asked that her real name not be used. “She felt the kids didn’t like her, didn’t accept her.”
Sheila admits that she found it hard to discipline Hanson; she even let her come to work with her when she skipped school.
“She’s got this real mean temper; you were scared of her,” Sheila said.
Her biological mother tried taking her in to live with her, her husband and their two daughters and attend their local school in Palatine.
“She didn’t like it,” said her biological mother, Debbie, who also asked that her real name not be used. “There were too many rules for her.”
Hanson bounced back and forth between her Glenview and Palatine families, fighting with everyone. Sheila twice sent Hanson to hospitals for inpatient psychiatric care; Hanson considered it a way to kick her out of the house. She sent her to a group home; Hanson ran away.
But she was not entirely adrift; she went back to live in Palatine, attended high school at night and got her diploma. Today, it is displayed prominently in her apartment, next to the baby pictures.
However, when she was 18, the family hostilities reached their nadir. While arguing, Hanson threatened to kill Sheila.
“She wanted me to borrow money for her; she wanted to go see this guy,” Sheila said. “I stood up to her. She took a knife at me and said, `Get out of the house or I’ll kill you,’ threw a pop can and hit me in the back with a pencil.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Hanson said. “When I get mad, I say whatever. She came by me like she was going to hit me, and I was standing in the kitchen, near the knives.”
Sheila called the police. Hanson was arrested and charged with battery. She spent the weekend in jail before being released. A judge issued an order of protection barring her from the Glenview house for a year.
Debbie took her back in, but she bounced from there to a friend’s house and back to her grandmother’s before enrolling in an independent-living program.
She moved into an apartment with two other young women and got a job at a Woolworth’s snack shop. She met Graham and three months later, at the age of 19, she was pregnant.
Her family asked whether she would consider adoption or abortion.
“I said, `No way,’ ” she said.
Debbie, devastated to think that history might be repeating, was only surprised that she hadn’t gotten pregnant sooner.
“She wanted a baby,” Debbie said. “She wanted something to love her, something that would never leave her.”
Graham, 24, wanted a baby, too. “I sort of blame myself,” he said, grinning. “I said I wanted a baby in ’96; but I didn’t mean right at the get-go of ’96.” Destiny was born on Dec. 30, 1995.
He didn’t want marriage. “Sheldon doesn’t want to get married unless we’ve been together a couple of years,” explained Hanson, who does.
But he did want to live with Hanson and help support and raise their child, which he has so far done.
Even with him working, money has been tight. They moved recently to a less expensive apartment; rent is $480 a month. They pay about $80 a month for food — Hanson gets milk and baby food through the Women, Infants, and Children program and has applied to be reinstated for food stamps — and $160 for utilities.
The biggest difficulty lately has been buying food; Hanson’s food stamps were discontinued recently because of a problem with paperwork.
Money worries aside, the After Sheldon part of Hanson’s life has been a joy that by all accounts bears no resemblance to the chaos that came earlier.
“She changed since that baby and Sheldon,” said Debbie. “Before, she was — that word that rhymes with witch. You couldn’t really talk to her. She had an attitude about everything.”
“She matured a lot, the way she talks and carries her baby,” said Sheila. “I think she’s really interested in making something of herself.”
During her pregnancy, Hanson enrolled in a program at Links-North Shore Youth Health Services in Northfield that pairs teenage mothers with volunteer mentors.
“She’s so nice, so polite, always so thankful and gracious,” said her Links mentor, Julie Gasaway, a mother of three.
“Maybe the baby was an answer to a lot of problems; maybe she just needed somebody to be responsible for.”
Now the taxpayer is partly responsible for Hanson. She quit her job at Woolworth’s when she was three months’ pregnant, worn down by morning sickness.
“They would work me eight hours a day, and then I would have to walk back to Des Plaines, where I lived,” a distance of one mile, she said.
Welfare seemed the only option. She has recently applied for a job with a grocery chain and is confident she will get it. Public aid would pay for child care.
In the long term, she would like to go back to school and train to be a parole officer or social worker — “something working with kids who have problems,” she said. “I’ve been there; I can relate.”
Neither a low-paying job nor school will get her entirely off welfare immediately. If she gets a job, her AFDC grant will be reduced by $1 for every $3 she earns, through a program instituted by the Illinois Department of Public Aid to encourage work. She will only get off welfare once her income is three times the grant amount.
She could continue to receive benefits if she goes to school, but she would be required to spend eight hours a week searching for a job or working.
The biggest question, for Hanson personally and policymakers generally, is whether Hanson is typical of welfare recipients in terms of how long she will stay on public aid.
The difficulty in answering that begins with the difficulty in defining what is typical. There are two contradictory answers.
Most of the concern over welfare has been over people who stay on the rolls for many years. Seventy-one percent of families receiving AFDC will eventually spend five or more years on welfare, reported Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood in their cogent analysis, “Welfare Realities” (Harvard University Press).
But to say that such long-termers are typical welfare recipients would be simplistic. Three-quarters of people beginning a spell of welfare will get off in five years or less, they wrote; 31 percent within one year.
The difference is whether you look at people who are beginning a period of welfare, or those on it at any given moment.
The frequently cited analogy is to a hospital with, say, two beds. One is occupied for an entire year by one person with a chronic illness. The other is occupied by a different person every day.
At the end of the year, 365 out of the 366 people who have ever been in that hospital will have been short-termers, who would be counted as among an overwhelming majority beginning a spell in the hospital. But 50 percent of that hospital’s beds — and resources — will have gone to the chronically ill.
“The vast majority of people who start on welfare will stay less than four years,” Bane and Ellwood wrote. “Yet people who stay eight years or more account for more than half of the people on welfare at any point in time.”
Which group Hanson ends up in will depend on her grit, her luck and her financial and marital future with Graham — and, perhaps, on welfare reform.
Congress has sent to President Clinton a welfare-reform bill that ends the federal guarantee of financial help for the poor and gives states the authority to run their own programs with federal money.
The bill establishes a five-year lifetime maximum on public aid, though states will be allowed to exempt 20 percent of families for whatever reasons they see fit. If Hanson is still on public aid in five years, she could face that limit.
She intends to be long gone by then. “I would rather make my money myself,” she said.
Her family, with whom her relationship has never been better, predicts her success.
“I don’t think she’s going to be on welfare as long as I was,” Sheila said. “She’s more determined to get out there and change her situation and make a better home for the baby.”
“One time I said, `Jill, you know they’re changing the (welfare) laws,’ ” said Debbie. “She said, `I know; I’ll be off by then.’ “
She spends these days with the baby and the TV. She usually takes Destiny out in the afternoon. Graham often cooks dinner; his dream is to become a professional cook.
They play with the baby, watch TV and play cards. Most nights, friends come over.
“I don’t like to go out,” she said. “I like to stay in my house.”
Welfare won’t be her life for long, Hanson vowed, but for now, it has made her life good.
“Basically,” she said, “it’s really all going my way.”
