Welfare policies and adolescents: exploring the roles of sibling care, maternal work schedules, and economic resources

Who Cares if Parents have Unpredictable Work Schedules?: The Association between Just-in-Time Work Schedules and Child Care Arrangements

Working parents must arrange some type of care for their young children when they are away at work. For parents with unstable and unpredictable work schedules, the logistics of arranging care can be complex. In this paper, we use survey data from the Shift Project, collected in 2017 and 2018 from a sample of 3,653 parents who balance work in the retail and food service sector with parenting young children 0 to 9 years of age. Our results demonstrate that unstable and unpredictable work schedules have consequences for children's care arrangements. We find that parents' exposure to on-call work and last-minute shift changes are associated with more numerous care arrangements, with a reliance on informal care arrangements, with the use of siblings to provide care, and with young children being left alone without adult supervision. Given the well-established relationship between quality of care in the early years and child development, just-in-time scheduling practices are likely to have consequences for child development and safety and to contribute to the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.

INTERGENERATIONAL EFFECTS OF WELFARE REFORM: ADOLESCENT DELINQUENT AND RISKY BEHAVIORS

This study investigates effects of welfare reform in the United States on the next generation. Most previous studies of effects of welfare reform on adolescents focused on high-school dropout of girls or fertility; little is known about how welfare reform has affected other teenage behaviors or boys. We use a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework to identify gender-specific effects of welfare reform on skipping school, fighting, damaging property, stealing, hurting others, smoking, alcohol, marijuana, and other illicit drugs. Welfare reform led to increases in delinquent behaviors of boys as well as increases in substance use of boys and girls, with substantially larger effects for boys.

Safety Net Policies, Child Poverty, and Development Across the Lifespan

The United States has developed an effective safety net of programs starting during the Great Depression, picking up steam in the War on Poverty of the 1960s, and continuing to this day. These efforts have been impactful. Child poverty rates tracked by the supplemental poverty measure have dropped by nearly 50% since the 1960s. Causal studies show that many of these programs improve child outcomes by alleviating income poverty. Some of the evidence shows that such impacts last into adulthood. Nevertheless, addressing child poverty is unfinished business for the United States. Children are still the poorest age group in our society. More robust versions of present safety net programs, as well as the possible introduction of child benefits/child allowances, which many other high-resource countries already provide to families, will need to be considered if we are going to make further progress in substantially reducing child poverty.

Effects of Maternal Work Incentives on Youth Crime

This study exploits differences in the implementation of welfare reform across states and over time to identify causal effects of maternal work incentives, and by inference employment, on youth arrests between 1988 and 2005, the period of time during which welfare reform unfolded. We consider both serious and minor crimes as classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, consider differential effects by the youth's gender and age, investigate the extent to which effects were stronger in states with more stringent work incentive policies and larger welfare caseload declines, and use a number of different model specifications to assess robustness and patterns. We find that welfare reform led to reduced arrests for minor crime among youth ages 15-17 years by 9-11 %, with similar estimates for males and females, but that it did not affect youth arrests for serious crimes. The results from this study add to a scant knowledge base about the effects of maternal employment on adolescent behavior by exploiting a large-scale social experiment that greatly increased employment of low-skilled women. The results also provide some support for the widely-embraced argument that welfare reform would discourage undesirable social behavior, not only of mothers, but also of the next generation.

Understanding gender roles in teen pregnancy prevention among American Indian youth

OBJECTIVES

To examine the impact of gender norms on American Indian (AI) adolescents' sexual health behavior.

METHODS

The project collected qualitative data at a reservation site and an urban site through 24 focus groups and 20 key informant interviews.

RESULTS

The reasons that AI youth choose to abstain or engage in sexual intercourse and utilize contraception vary based on gender ideologies defined by the adolescent's environment. These include social expectations from family and peers, defined roles within relationships, and gender empowerment gaps.

CONCLUSIONS

Gender ideology plays a large role in decisions about contraception and sexual activity for AI adolescents, and it is vital to include redefinitions of gender norms within AI teen pregnancy prevention program.