Employment Barriers Among Welfare Recipients and Applicants With Chronically Ill Children

Abstract

Welfare recipients and applicants with chronically ill children face substantial barriers to employment, including high child health care use rates and missed work. The welfare reform reauthorization scheduled to occur later in 2002 should address the implications of chronic child illness for parental employment.

Does parental unemployment affect adolescents’ health?

“…Thirdly, the design of the study does not allow conclusions as to whether worse health is the result or the cause of parental unemployment, or is associated with variables increasing the chance for unemployment. This has been studied for example by Kuhlthau and Perrin [36] and Smith et al [37].…”

Impoverished Women With Children and No Welfare Benefits: The Urgency of Researching Failures of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program

“…Because the cost of care for more than one child exceeds the earnings of most low-income mothers, these women must earn well above the minimum wage. 8,124 Women who are poor are also more likely to use home-based child care, which is not well regulated and can be of lower quality. 125 Child care subsidies are a limited TANF mandate and may or may not continue for a period after women exhaust their 5-year lifetime eligibility for TANF cash benefits.…”

“…The federal legislation that created TANF in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 1 did not require data to be gathered about parents who were unsuccessful in TANF and were terminated from the program. [6][7][8] Administration of the reformed welfare program was devolved to the states, as was its evaluation. States were required to report only caseload numbers, percentages of persons with basic education and job skills, employment statistics, and changes in absolute poverty.…”

Women Who Did Not Succeed in the Work-Based Welfare Program

“…The TANF workfare program focused on "job readiness," which was operationalized as preparation for entry-level jobs. We have limited empirical knowledge about what has happened to persons who were unsuccessful in the TANF program, or unsuccessful in the job market under those rules, because the legislation that created this federal program did not include data-gathering requirements about them (Anderson, Halter, & Gryzlak, 2004;Knitzer, Yoshikawa, Cauthen, & Aber, 2000;Smith et al, 2002).…”