Effects of welfare and antipoverty programs on participants' children.

Evidence from a diverse set of experiments now illustrates some of the conditions under which policy-induced increases in employment among low-income and mostly single parents can help or hurt young children’s achievement. This article summarizes the results of research conducted as part of the Next Generation Project, a collaborative effort involving researchers at MDRC and several universities. The analysis described in this article concentrates on younger children, and on understanding the pathways by which the programs affected children’s achievement. Several theories predict how policies might affect children and adolescents. As in the policy debates, suggested mechanisms include parent employment, family income, child care, maternal mental health, and parenting. We find considerable support for the importance of income and center-based child care, and virtually no support for maternal mental health and parenting, as key policy-induced mediators in promoting child achievement.