Self Sufficiency, Parenting Adequacy, and Child Wellbeing: Lessons from New Chance, the Teenage Parent Demonstration, and LEAP

Work requirements and time limits for welfare recipients, which are being implemented on a large scale as a result of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, will no doubt have repercussions for poor mothers and their children. It is not clear, however, exactly what these repercussions will be. In the broadest sense, the new legislation will either enable mothers to become better providers for their children and perhaps better parents, or it will throw them out into a world they simply cannot handle. Ultimately the outcome will depend on complex interactions of factors such as the actual implementation of these measures and the economy, as well as mothers' readiness to work, child care arrangements, living arrangements, and parenting skills. The New Chance, Teenage Parent Demonstration, and LEAP experiments, which aimed to increase the self sufficiency of teenage mothers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, can provide some insights on how the new legislation will affect the group with the longest-term welfare dependence-teenage mothers. While these programs, like most welfare-to-work programs, were designed primarily to increase young mothers' employment and earnings and to reduce their dependence on welfare, often overlooked are the effects such programs may have on parenting. In addition, although self sufficiency programs are often advertised as a means of breaking the intergenerational "cycle of poverty," policymakers and researchers have not sufficiently addressed the effects of these programs on child wellbeing. New Chance and the Teenage Parent Demonstration both contained some parenting interventions and thus may have affected parenting directly. In addition, all three programs had the potential to improve parenting indirectly. According to Wilson, Ellwood, and Brooks-Gunn (1995), labor force participation of poor, uneducated, and single mothers is likely to increase maternal stress, depression, guilt, and anxiety, and to result in a number of negative parenting behaviors: Mothers may become more irritable, less organized, less consistent, less warm, or more demanding with their children. Furthermore, these negative parenting behaviors have been associated with adverse cognitive and behavioral child outcomes. Additionally, these mothers will have less time to spend with their children, and thus the interaction of quality and quantity of parenting will come into play. On the other hand, labor force participation can have positive effects for poor mothers that may translate into improved parenting. For example, self sufficiency may raise a mother's self esteem or provide more structure, causing her to engage in positive parenting behaviors and perhaps improving the overall wellbeing of her children. Since there are many forks on the road to self sufficiency and how these forks will play out is unknown, it is unclear what the net effects of welfare reform on parenting and child wellbeing will be. Parenting is only one mechanism by which self sufficiency programs can affect the wellbeing of children. There are likely to be economic repercussions, for better or worse, that change the child's access to medical care and community resources. In addition, child care, an integral part of most welfare-to-work programs, has enormous potential to improve child wellbeing. Although high quality day care can provide cognitive stimulation to children that they might not otherwise receive at home and thus improve child wellbeing, the quality of day care situations is highly variable and in some cases can do more harm than good. Thus, the future effects of current welfare reforms on children will rely on a complex set of factors and interactions, the net effects of which are far from clear. This paper will address these important issues by focusing on the effects of New Chance, the Teenage Parent Demonstration, and Ohio's LEAP program on the parenting skills and behaviors of teen mothers and on the wellbeing of their children. The first section will discuss the programs in brief and will describe the parenting interventions, parenting outcomes, early child interventions, and child outcomes associated with each. The second section will review the literature on other programs designed to improve parenting and child wellbeing. Section three will place the results from New Chance, the Teenage Parent Demonstration, and LEAP in the context of this larger literature and examine how the evaluations of these three programs add to our knowledge about the expected impacts of welfare reform on both parenting and child wellbeing. The last section will discuss implications for future research and policy.