Study: Kids Suffer When Off Welfare
By David Ho
Washington, Feb. 4 - Moving off welfare and into the work force can be traumatic for single mothers, but their children can also suffer by receiving poor child care that provides little stimulation or direction from adults, researchers say.
``The welfare rolls are shrinking, but the number of toddlers placed in poor child care is expanding,'' said Bruce Fuller, co-author of a study examining the impact of welfare reform on nearly a thousand single mothers and their children.
Most of those receiving poor care spent hours watching television with little exposure to reading or educational materials, according to the study released Thursday.
Beginning in 1994, strict new rules and a vibrant economy caused welfare rolls to shrink. The number of welfare families, mostly single mothers and their children, fell from more than 5 million in 1994 to half as many last year.
During the second half of 1998, researchers from Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, randomly selected single mothers who had recently enrolled in welfare programs. About a third went to work during the six-month study.
The families lived in or near one of five cities: San Francisco or San Jose, Calif.; Manchester or New Haven, Conn.; and Tampa, Fla.
The researchers interviewed the mothers, visited their child care providers and studied the children's early language and social skills.
While centers receiving federal or state funding cared for a third of the children, most of the children were cared for in homes by family, friends or baby sitters.
Fuller said that in the centers, 65 percent of the teachers or caregivers had some training beyond high school, while in the homes only 39 percent had higher education.
``The education of the adult the child spends his or her day with is one of the strongest predictors of child development,'' he said.
The home care environments were also more likely to be disorganized, unclean and lacking educational materials.
The federal government gives about $3 billion to the states each year for child care subsidies, which can be used for professional providers or even family members who take care of the children. But many families don't take advantage of the aid because they simply don't know they're eligible and the program is often confusing, Fuller said.
In California and Florida, the researchers found that only half of all eligible women studied drew child care subsidies, including slots in centers and vouchers. In Connecticut, where nearly four out of five children were cared for in homes, only 13 percent of eligible mothers received aid.
Other studies also have found low participation among former welfare recipients in child care programs.
Ellen Schwentke, 41, a San Francisco mother who participated in the study and was on welfare for three years, said it took more than six months to find child care.
``There's a catch-22. You can't work if you don't have child care and you can't get child care if you're not working,'' she said.
Since the study, Ellen has married and gotten a job as programmer, and her daughter Nicole has had steady care in a center.
``We have a really great life,'' she said. ``But I had to fight for every bit of it and I don't feel like I got a lot of help.''
The study also found:
-The proportion of mothers in the study experiencing depression was about three times higher than the national average.
-The researchers said they detected delays in the language development of participating toddlers and preschoolers in California and Florida, but these problems could not be directly linked to welfare reform.
-One in five of the mothers said their household includes one member with an alcohol or drug abuse problem.
``These deeper problems facing poor women and their preschoolers are not solely attributable to welfare reform,'' Yale researcher Sharon Lynn Kagan said. ``But the fact is that single mothers, now under pressure to leave home and find a job, are finding only mediocre child care at best.''
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Carl
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