Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing

6. Teenage Childbearing and Welfare Reform

Chapter 6 Teenage Childbearing and Welfare Reform SOON AFTER RWANDA Powers discovered she was pregnant, she applied for and received public assistance to help support her child while she finished school. Although the father of the baby was in jail, Rwanda explained to the interviewer, Mrs. Blau, that they were planning to marry as soon as he was released. That did not happen. A year after her first child was born, Rwanda was pregnant again with the child of another man, and she continued on public assistance. A high school dropout, Rwanda reported that she wanted to return to school so that she could find a good job. As she said, “I feel, if you have a family, you need to work, ’cause welfare doesn’t give you much. [And working] beats sittin’ around the house doing nothing.” Rwanda, however, did not return to complete high school or earn a GED in the immediate aftermath of her first birth. She was still receiving public assistance when interviewed at the seventeen-year follow-up, when she reported that she had never worked for any significant period. As we saw in chapter 2, Rwanda’s experience, although hardly typical of the women in the study, was also not uncommon. Nearly two-thirds of the Baltimore sample had received public assistance during part or all of the five years following the birth of their first child. Close to one-third of the study participants either remained continuously on welfare or cycled on and off during the decade and a half after they entered parenthood (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan 1987). Regardless of their aspirations, it appears that many of these teenage mothers failed to escape from welfare dependency—or at least so it seemed, based on the results of the initial stages of the study. 137 How did the welfare experience mark the lives of the women we followed and their offspring, many of whom grew up relying in part on public assistance? Is there reason to believe that the reforms introduced during the 1990s to reduce welfare dependence have improved the circumstances of poor women and helped to reduce the level of teenage childbearing? The evidence from our study provides a useful baseline against which to compare the efficacy of the reforms that were part of the elimination of welfare as a lifelong entitlement. By looking backward in time and examining the experiences of the women in the Baltimore Study, we can offer some provisional assessment of the costs and benefits of the new system that is now in place. This chapter explores these questions, examining how the experiences of the teen mothers fit the policies that aimed at replacing economic dependency with self-sufficiency, a strategy that many hoped would strengthen marriage and discourage nonmarital childbearing . It will probably come as no surprise that the evidence from the Baltimore Study and the larger literature on teen parenthood and welfare reliance often fails to match the direction of welfare policy reform intended to reduce the incentives for becoming a single parent. WELFARE AND SINGLE MOTHERS Government cash assistance to single mothers was a practice that began in the 1930s as part of the Social Security reforms designed to lift vulnerable families and the elderly out of poverty. The programs, which included what would later be known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), helped to “protect” single mothers, at the time largely widows, from being forced to enter the labor force. It was not uncommon during the Depression for mothers to work outside the home, but it was considered undesirable for the wellbeing of children, who, it was thought, required the care of a fulltime parent during their tender years (Gordon 1994). Not long after AFDC was established, the demographic composition of families receiving AFDC changed, and with these changes came a shift in the program’s racial and ethnic makeup. In a matter of several decades, recipients of aid shifted from mostly widows to a larger number of divorcées, and beginning in the 1960s the program 138 Destinies of the Disadvantaged began to serve a growing number of never-married mothers. As the program’s population shifted from whites to more blacks and Latinos, public sympathy for the welfare population began to evaporate. The relatively generous practices of the Johnson administration in the early 1960s were strongly embraced by a Democratic Congress that had made a commitment...