The Effects of Welfare Reform Policies on Children

A Publication of the Society for Research in Child Development Article begins on page 4 Over the past 30 years, welfare and other public policies for families living in poverty have developed a primary objective of increasing parents’ self-sufficiency by requiring and supporting employment, culminating in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This legislation gave states considerable latitude in designing their welfare policies. At the same time, however, there has been very little research on the effects of welfare policies on children to inform decisions policymakers are making. Fortunately, there now is consistent evidence from well-designed studies about whether promoting work among low-income single parents helps or hurts children, and under what conditions it does so. This policy report summarizes the results on children from a synthesis of nearly a dozen welfare experiments aimed at increasing the self-sufficiency of low-income parents.