Reforms and child development.

SUMMARY Since their inception in the 1930s, U.S. welfare and income support programs have played an important rote in providing benefits to children. Unlike programs directly targeted to children, however, welfare programs are designed to produce economic and employment impacts on adults, so that any effects on children would be indirect. This article explores the influence of such programs on children's well-being and development, first by defining goals for children's healthy development, then by proposing a framework for understanding the impact of welfare policies on children. A review of the literature within each component of this framework reveals the following: * Measures of children's well-being should encompass physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development. * The physical and material environment, family environment, and social and community environment can all affect a child's healthy development. * Policies designed to increase maternal employment, reduce welfare use, and strengthen families do not necessarily lead to more positive environmental contexts and increased child well-being. The author concludes that to ensure positive impacts on children, welfare and income support policies must move beyond their exclusive emphasis on adults and include goals that focus on improving children's social and physical environments at home and in the community. ********** When Aid to Dependent Children was established in the 1930s, its principal goal was to promote the welfare of children. Under the assumptions of the day, that meant assuring not only that basic physical needs were met (orphanages could do that), but that children could be cared for by their mothers. Since then, children have been major beneficiaries of U.S. welfare programs for low-income families. In 1995, for example, approximately two-thirds of recipients in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program were children-many under age three. (1) Children's health and development is still an implicit goal of welfare programs, and policymakers often assert that program changes will produce benefits for children. For example, one common argument is that employed parents provide positive models of productive, self-sufficient citizenship. (2) At the same time, critics have worried that policy changes made in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 will diminish fami lies' ability to provide both material and personal resources to their children. Current federal welfare policy embodied in the new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), was designed to address the following three major goals: (1) to increase paid employment among parent recipients; (2) to reduce "welfare dependence"-that is, to reduce the number of families receiving welfare over a long period of time; and (3) to influence family structure by encouraging marriage and two-parent families, reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock childbearing, and requiring that both parents provide for the child. The framers of welfare reform legislation did not make poverty reduction a goal, but in recognition that merely trading welfare for work often does not improve a family's economic situation, states were given the option to include various financial incentives to encourage recipients to work. The 1990s also brought major changes in policies designed to help working poor families outside the welfare system, contributing to increased employment and other outcomes observed since welfare reform. For example, the maximum earned income tax credit (EITC) benefit for a family with two children increased from $1,511 in 1993 to $3,888 in 2000. Similarly, both child care assistance (3) and health insurance for children (4) have been extended to more nonwelfare working poor families. These changes are designed to reward employment, but unlike TANF, they also are explicitly intended to reduce poverty among working families with children. …