Family Facts: Social Science Research on Family, Society & Religion
Top Ten Findings
A Closer Look at Welfare
August 2006
For decades, the welfare state’s incentive system encouraged
idleness and single motherhood. The 1996 welfare reforms aimed
to reduce welfare dependency and to lift individuals out of poverty
by promoting work and stable family formation through premarital
abstinence and healthy marriage. |
1. Men who grow up in a welfare family are less likely to marry the mother of their baby. In the event that they father a child out of wedlock, white men were 39 percent less likely to marry the baby's mother and black men were 6 percent less likely to marry the baby's mother if they had grown up in families that had received welfare, when compared with peers whose families had not received welfare.
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2. Welfare dependency has an intergenerational effect: Women whose families receive welfare are more likely to be on welfare themselves. Compared with daughters of families that never received welfare cash benefits, daughters from families that had received welfare were 2.5 times more likely to give birth and three times more likely to receive benefits themselves within three years of their first child's birth.
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3. Early sexual activity is linked to higher levels of child and maternal poverty. Early sexual activity was linked to higher levels of child and maternal poverty. Twenty-seven percent of mothers who began sexual activity at ages 13 or 14 were living in poverty at the time of the survey. By contrast, 11.7 percent of mothers who began sexual activity at ages 21 or 22 were poor at the time of the survey.
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4. Women are more likely than men to live below the poverty line after a divorce. Divorce exerted greater economic consequences on women than men. Three months after divorce, 45.2 percent of custodial mothers not receiving child support were living below the poverty line, as were 38.0 percent of those receiving child support; non-custodial fathers, in contrast, exhibited poverty rates of 9.5 percent before paying child support and 10.5 percent after making those payments. At 16 to 18 months after divorce, 42.5 percent of custodial mothers not receiving child support lived in poverty, as did 35.4 percent of those receiving child support. In contrast, 10.5 percent of the non-custodial fathers (whether paying child support or not) lived in poverty.
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5. Parental divorce increases the likelihood that a daughter will be on welfare later in life. Women whose parents divorced during childhood were more likely to be less educated, earn a lower income, be on welfare, and live in social housing at age 33 than women whose parents did not divorce during childhood.
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6. Women who have children in their teens are less likely to marry and more likely to live in poverty. Roughly 42% of the welfare population consists of single women who first gave birth as teens. When compared to those who did not first give births as teens, those who did first gave birth as teens are more likely to have never married, less likely to receive a high school diploma, more likely to have four or more children, and more likely to live below 50% of the poverty line.
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7. Among mothers on welfare, an increase in their work hours lowers their teenage daughters’ likelihood of becoming pregnant. Among a sample of adolescent females whose families had received public assistance, a 1,000-hour increase in the mother's yearly work hours (an additional 20 hours per week) was associated with a 33% decrease in the likelihood that their teenage daughters would give birth at age 17 or 18.
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8. Compared to single mothers who remain unwed, single mothers who marry are less likely to be on welfare. At Wave 2, women who first had a non-marital birth but then married and had a subsequent marital birth were statistically indistinguishable from women with two marital births on measures of family income, full time employment, and welfare receipt. On the other hand, mothers who first had a non-marital birth, followed by an additional non-marital birth were significantly more likely to be receiving welfare and had significantly lower incomes at Wave 2 when compared to mothers whose subsequent birth was a marital birth.
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9. Children are less likely to live in poverty when their mothers remarry after a divorce. Children whose divorced mothers remarried tended to be better off economically compared to children whose divorced mothers remained single or entered into a cohabiting relationship. There was a 66 percent reduction in poverty among children whose divorced single mothers remarried and a 40 percent reduction in poverty among children whose mothers cohabited following a divorce. The poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers remarried was 9.4 percent, while the poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers cohabited was 28.8 percent. The poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers remained single was 42.4 percent.
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10. Abstinence is effective in reducing unwed teenage pregnancies. The factors most strongly related to the decline in teen pregnancies and teen births from 1991 to 1995 were an increase in abstinence and a decline in the percentage of teens who were married. Increased abstinence among teens accounted for most of the reduction in births and for 67 percent of the reduction in out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies.
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Events:Religious Practice and Civic Life: What the Research Says October 4, 2007 |