Motherload: if we care so much about building strong families, why are we forcing single welfare moms to work full time?

If we care so much about building strong families, why are we forcing single welfare moms to work full time?

If you've heard either presidential candidate podium-pounding about the need to get welfare mothers working, you have a pretty good idea of the direction that the welfare reform debate is going these days. But for a better sense of what's being said--and not being said--in the make-them-work rhetoric this political season, get yourself a copy of Moving Ahead, a June 1992 study by three Republican members of the House Human Resources Subcommittee on Ways and Means 

The authors open by calling for a return to the two-parent family, a change that would restore families to the "civilizing task" of raising children. They go on to warn that the children of the 3.4 million female-headed families living below the poverty level face greatly increased odds of "having poor school attendance and achievement, dropping out of school, committing crimes," and so on. But if you think that these lawmakers went on to argue that moms of such at-risk children should have the chance to provide both money and time to their children, well, you're half right. In its 59 plaintive pages, Moving Ahead utters not a peep about how these mothers will engage in the "civilizing task" of bringing up their children or how they will keep their kids from the very perils described at the outset. The math of the study's policy prescriptions, for moms with tots of all ages, is predicated on those moms working a 40-hour week.

Family values: By now you'd rather strangle your grandparents than hear the phrase again. But in welfare reform, talk about family values isn't just rare, it's stood on its head. This summer, Bush told the country in his acceptance speech that he's "for dads sticking around," but when dad is already gone, Bush stands foursquare behind experiments in welfare reform that compel the remaining parent to go to work full time. While Hillary Clinton tried to bake her way into the hearts of homemakers

V around the country, her husband stumped with some of the toughest get-a-job talk yet offered by a Democratic presidential hopeful. But for all the wind about personal responsibility from both candidates, neither is saying anything about welfare mothers actually parenting.

"There are two separate discussions going on about the same issue," says Diana Pearce, director of the Women and Poverty Project, an advocacy group for low-income women's issues. "You see lots of press about middle- and upper-class women going back home, struggling to juggle their careers and the demands of motherhood. But when we discuss the lower class we put on a different hat. We never ask how they are going to be good mothers, and we never ask what is the best way for them to bring up their children."

The silence of liberals, traditionally sensitive to issues of fairness to the poor, is especially odd. Perhaps some think that pushing to let welfare moms spend more time at home with the kids implies standing against women entering the workplace. For whatever reason, the issue has gone largely unmentioned. "The policy question of how to treat parents with very young children is looming," says Mark Greenberg of the Center of Law and Social Policy, a non-profit public interest law firm. "But generally, the discussions just focus on the cost of child care instead of asking what is best for the child."

Recession-pinched Americans may be in no mood to fret about how welfare mothers raise their kids. But if, as is generally believed, part of creating strong, emotionally balanced children--the kind that hold down steady jobs and stay off welfare when they grow up--means being around to rear them, there are unexplored dangers in welfare reform's full-time work rhetoric. After all, the worries that bedevil middle-class single mothers also bedevil welfare mothers--only more so. And currently there are few options, like part-time work or work at home, that give welfare mothers the leisure to instill in their children the values that Republicans and Democrats now stumble over each other to champion.

Worksnare

The genesis of the recent push for full-time work is traceable to the 1988 Family Support Act, the scion of a Democratically controlled Congress and Ronald Reagan, which took the first step to change Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) form an income-support scheme to a workfare program. Health and Human Services mandated that single parents on welfare with children over four years old "participate" in job training, school, or most optimistically, a job for at least 20 hours a week, and required states to provide day care. Teen moms not enrolled full time in classes could be required to go back to school immediately after their children are born.

Since the act was passed, a number of states have applied for waivers allowing them to gnaw away at exemptions to include more moms with younger children for more hours. Oregon won a waiver from

HHS to mandate full-time participation for any

V mother with a child over one year old. In Michigan, a consistent trailblazer in welfare reform, mothers with kids aged one year and older can be compelled to work full time or face a cut in benefits.

Asking welfare recipients to work for their checks is undoubtedly a good, even overdue, idea, but the push for work shouldn't be fired by the sense that welfare moms want to languish in front of the soaps all day instead of earning a living. There clearly are many women addicted to their welfare checks, the kind who won't work unless threatened with sanctions. But contrary to the enduring stereotype--resurrected by Bush right in time for the campaign--only 20 percent of those ever on welfare are long-term users.

From the most eager workfare proponents, you're more likely to hear that they are asking of welfare moms no more than what is freely given by moms of all incomes. As Utah Department of Human Services eligibility coordinator Gene Hofeling puts it, "Our purpose is to mirror what is going on in society so that people in need of assistance are not treated any differently than anyone else is treated." And here's Mickey Kaus, in The End of Equality, proposing to replace cash doles with a WPA-style jobs program in which only moms working full time would get incomes above the poverty line: "No excuses for not working. Women and men. Married and single. If you have a child, be prepared to carry an extra burden. These are the rules the mainstream culture tries to live by, and they are the norms that are in danger of disappearing entirely in the underclass."

But is full-time work for mothers one of the rules that mainstream society lives by? Only a third of all married mothers work full time throughout the year.

And these women have a partner to assist in rearing

V the children, plus more money and conveniences--like cars and microwaves--that make juggling the earner-parent role easier. And of those moms who work, only 23 percent have children under three. Truly reflecting what is going on in society would mean that the children of welfare mothers, like the vast majority of children, get a healthy dose of parental presence in their lives.

Currently, the assumption is that day care will substitute for that parental presence, a prospect that has some conservatives waxing Orwellian. "AFDC did away with the welfare dad," says Robert Rector, a welfare and family issues analyst at the Heritage

Foundation, "and now some people want to see day

V care take the place of the welfare mother. We could have an entirely state-raised class of children."

Rector may be paranoid, but it's pretty rational to suspect that the real price of the full-time work trend will be paid by children raised in the disorienting world of low-cost day care. Pennsylvania State University psychologist Jay Belsky, who in the seventies was one of academia's leading proponents of day care, has since found that for young children, the separation from parents undermines their "sense of trust, of security, of order in the world." Most at jeopardy, Belsky says, are infants in day care for 20 hours or more a week. A 1984 study judged 31 percent of those children insecure; when researchers focused on children who spent 40 hours a week in day care as infants, the figure rose to 65 percent.

Child specialists who disagreed with Belsky's findings when they were first released countered that the important variables in day care were continuity and quality, both of which are scarce commodities at the low end of the business. Day care workers average $10,000 to $12,000 annually; four out of ten of them leave their jobs each year. As for quality, the compensation levels provided by the government are, understandably, not high enough to buy anything but the cheapest day care on the market. In 1990, the Child Care Employee Project, a California-based organization dedicated to improving day care, judged 227 day care centers in five cities on characteristics such as staff-to-child ratios, harshness of staff to children, and staff turnover. Most centers were judged "barely adequate."

If present trends continue, it is in such barely adequate settings that ever greater numbers of underclass children will spend the waking hours of their formative years. The experience of Jamie Cutter of Lansing, Michigan, could increasingly be the norm. Cutter ended her relationship with her boyfriend shortly after she got pregnant her senior year in high school. Two weeks after the birth of her son Joshua, she was attending vocational school to be a medical assistant and working part time as a waitress. Unable to find a doctor who would hire her, she took a full-time job as a cashier. Since June, Joshua, who is now 20 months old, has been spending his days and part of his nights in a day care facility in downtown Lansing. "I've been working these late hours lately," she says. "It gives me zero time to spend with him. And I can be gone all day and all night and when I get back he's not happy to see me. He won't even kiss me. It's really upsetting. His dad has noticed a difference too. He's like, |Why don't you spend more time with him?' But I really don't have a choice." Gauging the damage to toddlers of absent moms is necessarily an inexact science, but you don't need Benjamin Spock to tell you that Joshua is missing out on something important.

At the same time, there's evidence that Joshua benefits by seeing the example set by a wage earner. The gist of new research, by Dolores G. Norton of the University of Chicago and others, is that when a mother adheres to a schedule--goes to work and bring home a paycheck--the chances are greater that her children will be disciplined themselves. They will be more likely to be good students and more inclined to work when they reach adulthood.

Are women thus confronted by a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choice--being a positive role model and lousy mom, or a lousy role model and a good mother? No if they can get good part-time work or work at home. Every one of the positive examples being set by a working mother--the morning regimen of getting dressed for work, the earned income--can be set with a part-time job as well. And kids can also learn the work ethic by seeing it first hand when mom works out of the home. (Infants are another story. It's hard to imagine how a child of a year and a half or younger could benefit more from an example he can scarcely understand than from a mother who is around to provide him with love and attention.)

Admittedly, there are more than a few obstacles to both alternatives. Part-time workers, even accounting for their reduced hours, generally get paid less than nine-to-fivers--60 percent less, according the Department of Labor. And , worse for women, part-time workers are not covered by the Equal Pay Act, so there is no legal recourse to gender-bias in wages and

V less incentive for employers to treat their female employees fairly.

Complicating matters most part-time jobs don't offer health benefits, which can make welfare-to-work programs a round-trip ride for even the most motivated mother. Because the government provides health benefits for only a year after a person leaves the public rolls, when junior gets sick, falling back onto the dole to get Medicaid is a shortcut to care. "We've often said that we should just set up a welfare office in K-Marts," says Diana Pearce. "They are the kinds of places that offer part-time work to welfare moms but don't give them health benefits. So when their children get sick--and every kid gets sick a couple of times a year--these women go back to public assistance." With the rules rigged this way, being both a good worker and a good mother is a zero sum game.

Mommy tact

Giving moms who work a fighting chance at their dual roles will start with reforms that make part-time work a viable option: guaranteeing that part-timers get paid the same per hour as their full-time counterparts for the same work, making pensions portable, and substituting the employer-based health care system we currently have for universal coverage. Women of all income levels stand to gain from these reforms, but the government is not pushing for them, and unions--even ones like the Teamsters, with 400,000 female members--have yet to put flex- and part-time work anywhere near the top of their agendas. They think part-time work undermines their contract negotiations. And unions have actively battled work at home in the courts, fearing that workers earning sub-union wages in the comfort of their homes will undercut dues-paying laborers.

Many of the most daunting roadblocks to fair welfare work are not entrenched in the economy but inked in the law books. Back in 1935 when AFDC was conceived, it was envisioned as a way to provide for widowed mothers so they didn't have to go to work, freeing them to provide care to their children. But in the last three decades, mothers, married and single, entered the work force by the millions, causing more and more voters to wonder why moms on the dole couldn't do the same.

While the public now wants welfare to act as a leg-up-for-work program, the bulk of the system's regulations are still geared to the antiquated handout approach. Changing our attitude about welfare but not its ground rules has led to an incentive program that managers at a pre-glasnost Yugo plant would be proud of: In all but 10 states women face close to a 100 percent tax rate four months after finding work, a dollar for dollar reduction in benefits for everything earned above the AFDC grant. The crucial first step is, borrowing Harvard professor David Ellwood's phrase, to "make work pay." That entails expanding the earned income tax credit that allows those on the dole to actually earn money when they work.

Could a program that combined part-time work and generous earned income tax credits lift moms out of poverty? If New York State's Child Assistance Program (CAP) is any indication, the answer is yes. The scheme, operating in several counties since 1988, is among the rare welfare experiments in the country to acknowledge, in the words of New York State Department of Social Services Commissioner Mary Jo Bane, "that parenting obligations may preclude [a welfare mother] from working full time." While taxpayers get a sense that they're not subsidizing laziness, CAP children get a parent who can play with them, prevent them from overdosing on Ninja Turtle cartoons (or anything else), and explain why the sky is blue; in short, they get a mom.

CAP's chief innovation is shaving benefits by only 10 percent as a woman gets to the poverty line and then reducing them by two thirds after that. The checks continue until a family is at 150 percent of the poverty line--around $13,000--which, not coincidentally, is close to the national median income for a woman with two children and no husband. The program also received a federal waiver to eliminate another incentive-crushing relic of old welfare assumptions, the assets test, a rule that cuts off welfare to any family with accumulated equity. Putting some money in the bank lets CAP mothers cushion against job instability, which makes them less likely to return to welfare when they run up against temporary setbacks.

The program doesn't replace AFDC so much as provide a rational alternative to it: For CAP to make economic sense, a family needs to be making $350 a month. Though it offers little by way of job search assistance or training, CAP is a step in the right direction because the average recipient's work stint is 25 to 3 hours long. The theory is that once a woman gets set in a job she will win promotions and raises that will eventually bring in sufficient funds to get her off welfare. "We intentionally set up the algebra so that women can work part time," says one of CAP's architects, Bill Shapiro. "Thirty hours is the average week for mothers in the mainstream economy. Expecting a single mother to work 40 hours is not realistic."

The program's limited run has already yielded promising, if modest, results. Slightly over 3,000 people have enrolled in the program since it started; more than 800 of those have left the dole, a significant success rate in an area where triumphs are usually measured in single digits. Some 1,700 are still receiving benefits, but even these families are costing taxpayers less because benefit levels are lower in CAP. Less than 700 have gone back to AFDC.

Work fair

Work programs, especially ones that shoulder training and job search costs, are expensive. Most states have been unable or unwilling to put up enough money to retrieve all of their federal matching funds. Today, states are drawing down, on average, only 65 percent of what Washington has made available to them through the Family Support Act. A first step to "moving ahead" may be for legislators to put some money where their ardor is. While Michigan, for instance, makes more mothers with younger kids eligible for full-time work, it has ponied up for only 34 percent of its matching funds. New rules qualifying more women for entrance into underfunded programs is an easy sop to angry voters, but more money in training and education is what will get mothers working.

Three years ago, a poll by The Washington Post found that 62 percent of mothers working full or part time outside the home would quit if they could afford to. For those in the economic mainstream, it's become almost axiomatic: Kids gain from having their parents around. Why ask of welfare mothers something that the middle and upper classes believe will be toxic to their own children? New York's initial results suggest that with well-thought-out, common-sense, income-enhancing rules in place, cajoling mothers to work full time is not necessary. We should demand that welfare recipients join the workforce, but it is both unfair and shortsighted to saddle them with hours that punish their kids.

David Segal is an editor of The Washington Monthly.