Americans have watched their jobs change with downsizing, declines in manufacturing, and surges in technological advances. There is much more to a country than its economy, and a glimpse at the social effect welfare reform has on America's poor helps us focus on America's face. Sailing toward the new millennium, America's ever-changing face is emerging. America's children are whom welfare was created to protect. Ironically, it is America's children who stand to lose the most from the new welfare reform laws.
Children are who feel the sting of welfare reform the most.
Nearly every sociologist agrees that a child's formidable years, birth to three years of age, are the most crucial in his or her development. She goes on to say that we have become a society in which many factors keep mothers and fathers from raising their children the way that they would like to raise them. Simply look at the statistics on teen pregnancy, violent juvenile crime, and youth drug abuse to help illuminate the picture more clearly. Homicides by youths under age seventeen have tripled between 1974 and 1994. America's rising problem is juvenile crime, which is growing more violent and random.