Putting Children's Welfare First

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This paper is a response to New Safety Net Paper 3, "Family Security: Supporting Parents' Employment and Children's Development" by Shelley Waters Boots, Jennifer Macomber, and Anna Danziger.

By many accounts, welfare reform has been a success. Since the passage of the historic welfare reform legislation, welfare rolls have declined by 63 percent, down from 4.41 million families in 1996 to 1.66 million families today. Indeed, fewer families are on welfare today than any time since 1969; as a proportion of the population, the caseload is now at its lowest since 1954. Moreover, millions of Americans moved from the cash welfare rolls into work and productive employment. Among never-married mothers, the group mostly likely to be on cash welfare, full-time employment increased from 49.3 percent in 1997 to 62.0 percent in 2006. And child support collections nearly doubled during this same period.

All good news, to be sure. Nevertheless, as Shelley Waters Boots, Jennifer Macomber, and Anna Danziger remind us, while acknowledging its successes, we cannot forget that an even more important purpose of welfare reform is—or at least ought to be—to enhance the well-being of children living in low-income families. Indeed, as its very name suggests, the original intent of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the forerunner of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), was to support the positive development of vulnerable children. So, on that score, how has welfare reform performed?

On the positive side of the ledger, since enactment of welfare reform, the child poverty rate has declined from 20.5 percent in 1996 to 17.4 percent in 2006. Today, 1.6 million fewer children live in poverty than a decade ago (DeNavas Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2007).

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