News and Events

This talk focuses on the interaction of science, policy, and the media using the example of our recent publication in Science. The Welfare, Children, and Families Study was designed to examine the effects of the significant changes in the welfare system instituted in 1996 (most notably increased work requirements) on low income children and their families in three cities. We sought to bring a child development and family process approach to a dialogue that was focused on global issues of poverty, child care, and work discipline. Details about the study, including policy briefs, can be found online at www.jhu.edu/~welfare and public access data at www.sociometrics.com. Briefly, this multi-disciplinary team interviewed over 2,000 children (primarily African-American and Latino) in two phases to look at broad main effects, and conducted smaller embedded developmental studies and ethnographies (using observational and qualitative techniques) to investigate processes and subgroups. We identified early childhood (0-4 years) and early adolescence (10-14) as key transition periods to examine. Results suggest that neither mothers’ employment nor welfare transitions had any noticeable effects on preschoolers’ cognitive or behavioral/emotional functioning. For adolescents, there were also mostly null findings, but transitions into work were associated with small (effect size .15) improvements in mental health (e.g., lower anxiety). In addition, transitions off welfare were associated with increased reading skills and lower drug use, whereas transitions onto welfare were associated with short-term lower reading skills. Possible mechanisms of effects include an increase in family income, teenagers’ sensitivity to financial strain in the family (e.g., higher stress due to economic hardship when mothers were not working), loss of time spent with parent, and perhaps increased maternal self-esteem. Whereas teens did not actually experience less parental time due to work, preschoolers lost 2 hours/day. The net effect of increased income but decreased parental time likely cancelled out any effects for preschoolers.

Such studies can provide critical information about the impact of major policies on child development, but they involve a huge delay of gratification—we began in 1996 and this was the first article (by necessity limited to main effects and no process or subgroup investigations). Importantly, this sample is unique in its inclusion of a range of low-income families (60% were never on welfare) and the different economic climate at present compared to when the study began. The media response to this publication was greater than anticipated, perhaps due to the upcoming reauthorization of welfare reform, a desire to discuss policy controversies, being good news to those who thought kids would be harmed by the policy (but not sufficient for those who thought children would be helped), and given that there is still controversy about the effects on children of mothers in the labor force. In the end, we were pleased with the balanced media coverage (including an emphasis on associations not causality), but it took a great deal of foresight and planning (e.g., anticipating questions, preparing responses, issuing press releases).