Teenagers and Welfare Reform

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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I. Introduction

When Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, teenage parents were on center stage. They were likely to end up on welfare, reported researchers, and their children were likely to experience poor health, have a hard time in school, become teen parents themselves, and spend time in prison. In an effort to respond to these concerns, two provisions were added to the welfare bill, one mandating that teen parents attend school, and a second requiring that they live with a parent or with a responsible adult, as a condition for receiving cash assistance.¹

Six years later, though, when Congress took up reauthorization of the welfare bill, no one asked how these teen parent provisions had worked out. Indeed, the subject of teen parents rarely came up. In part, this was because the teenage birth rate had dropped², and because there were now fewer teen parents on the welfare rolls. The problem has not disappeared, however. While the teen birth rate may have fallen, the number of teen parents rose by 25 percent between 1991 and 1996. Teenagers were having fewer children, but there were many more teenagers around. Moreover, a 1997 study showed that 81 percent of women who have an out-of-wedlock birth before reaching the age of twenty are on welfare by age thirty.³ So the notion that the teen parent problem is somehow behind us is a myth. And there is a pressing need to find out how our past efforts to address this challenge have worked out.

There are other reasons to be interested in teenagers. Welfare reform influences welfare caseloads in two ways: it affects how many of those who are currently eligible actually apply; and it influences longer term behaviors, such as continuing in school and avoiding out-of-wedlock childbearing, that will help determine how many people are eligible in the future.⁴ In studying teenagers, we are concerned with this second category—to what extent is welfare reform changing the behaviors that lead to welfare dependency. These have received less attention from researchers, but they are of paramount importance in determining welfare reform's long run success.

The remainder of this report is organized as follows: section 2 examines the 1996 law's stay-in-school and live-with-a-parent requirements. The conclusion of this review is that relatively little can be learned from looking at individual state programs. So the analysis is expanded to look at welfare reform as a whole. Section 3 examines the previous research in this area, while section 4 describes the data employed in this analysis, and lays out the research design. Section 5 presents the results of a multivariate analysis, which seeks to determine the degree to which welfare reform is responsible for the observed changes. Finally, section 6 summarizes the results and presents some of the implications of our findings.

Notes from the Introduction

1. By the time the 1996 legislation passed, a majority of states had already implemented one or more of these provisions through special waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services.

2. It dropped by 22 percent between 1991 and 2000.

3. David & June O'Neill, "Lessons for Welfare Reform: An Analysis of the AFDC caseload and past welfare-to-work programs," Kalamazoo, Mi.: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997.

4. Robert Kaestner and June O'Neill, "Has Welfare Reform Changed Teenage Behaviors," National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., May 2002.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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