Moms need cash

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.