Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

13: Challenges for Studying Care after AFDC

289 13 Challenges for Studying Care after AFDC Stacey Oliker The end of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) challenges us to learn what happens to care in single-mother families once paid work becomes mandatory. The importance of studying family processes may seem obvious, but there has been little concern about the nonpecuniary dimensions of family life in public discussion of welfare. The debate over ending AFDC centered on paid work. The issue of care for children and dependent elders in poor families rarely entered the debates on ending the AFDC safety net. Concern with care for children in single-mother families has receded from public discourse over several decades, although it was central when AFDC was created early in the century (Gordon, 1994). Ironically, welfare ceased to be a “work and family” issue just as a policy domain of work and family issues expanded in U.S. politics. Now that Congress has abolished AFDC, mandated work, capped and set time limits on federal support, and devolved authority over eligibility and programs to the states, citizens and scholars are asking how the end of AFDC has affected poor families . Reasonably, their first questions are about the economic impact of welfare’s end, since proponents of a federal safety net predicted calamitous economic results (Edelman, 1997). Less reasonably, we have heard few questions about the noneconomic impacts of abolishing the safety net. How does ending AFDC affect parenting, nurture, supervision, tutelage, and care in the families of single mothers who are mandated to become self-sufficient breadwinners? How do poor single mothers balance work and family after AFDC? This article suggests some challenges facing researchers who will examine care after AFDC. The challenges come from several sources. One is the diversity in postAFDC policy among the states. Welfare has not ended in most states yet, and everywhere it is ending differently. Second, sociology is just beginning to offer frameworks for studying caregiving (Finch & Groves, 1983; Abel & Nelson, 1990; Cancian & Oliker, 2000). We need more inspiring ideas about the dynamics of change in patterns of care. And third, some of our usual methods of registering change in caregiving, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be less reliable in a period of change. Although my aim is to suggest how we can meet these challenges, I will do this by imagining harsh changes in care at welfare’s end. The vision I create counterbalances the optimism that prompted the move to end welfare and responded to the© 2000 by Human Sciences Press, Inc. Reprinted from Qualitative Sociology Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 453-466. 290 Stacey Oliker phenomenal drop in welfare rolls and the increases in employment that followed. An example of this optimism was the prediction that single mothers could handle the transition to mandatory work because they had rich networks of support to rely on (Kaus, 1992; Mead, 1992). After AFDC was abolished in 1996, this argument found a defensive echo among those who insisted that poor communities would “pull together ” in adversity, as they’ve always done. My pessimistic predictions counter these optimistic ones by emphasizing the weakness of networks of support among the poor and the ways that mandatory work could constrict them. Against the optimism that has greeted plummeting welfare rolls and growing employment rates, I will show how a mandatory shift of priorities from care to work can hurt families, even if we have the improbable experience of an endless economic boom, like the one undergirding current welfare rolls and employment rates. Both the challenges I identify and the dynamics I envision derive from a qualitative study of work and family patterns in the last years of AFDC (Oliker 1995a, 1995b). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I studied work-welfare programs in two states’ largest cities, where I observed welfare programs and interviewed program workers and participants. At that time, work-welfare reforms were under way, creating various kinds of pressures on single mothers to find employment. However, even programs that sanctioned mothers for insufficient work effort preserved a safety net under children’s benefits. Now no safety net is required. I draw the ideas about change that could follow AFDC from my findings on how single mothers on AFDC balanced obligations to work and family, as well as from others’ studies of families in poverty, work-family relations, and social networks. The conceptual framework of social network analysis is especially fruitful for exploring caregiving in the context of family resources and supports. I...