Mother’s Work, Welfare Receipt and Children’s Health Status

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Families and Health

Abstract

During more than a decade since the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, numerous studies have explored how this welfare policy change has influenced the lives of welfare recipients and their families. Since many of the welfare recipients are female single parents, their transition from welfare to work has been considered to generate unintended consequences for their children’s well-being, particularly health.

The objective in this study is to examine how maternal work and welfare assistance affect mothers’ perception of their children’s health. The study sample included children in low-income families enrolled in the Illinois Families Study: Child Well-Being (IFS-CWB). The IFS study cohort consisted of a stratified random sample of 1,899 families in Illinois, who received welfare during the last quarter of 1998. As a subsample of IFS, the IFS-CWB sample consisted of children who were <3 years old at the first survey conducted in 1999 - 2000. A child-year data set with up to four records per child was constructed and child health status was modeled as a function of maternal work and welfare assistance, adjusting for child and maternal characteristics, using a random-intercept logistic regression.

For low-income families, maternal work had a significant negative association with children’s health as reported by their mothers, while welfare assistance had no significant association. Children’s health status was the poorest during periods when mothers worked without welfare assistance.

Authors

• Elissa H. Oh, University of Chicago and Northwestern University

• Min-Woong Sohn, Northwestern University and University of Virginia