“Family Control”: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Non-Marital Births and State-Level TANF Expenditures

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 12. Families and Inequality

Abstract

Welfare reform in 1996 was meant to help single mothers get off welfare and become employed, with promises of childcare, job training, transportation, and other supports aimed at decreasing the number of single mother households. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program was established in the 1996 welfare reform, replacing the program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) which provided assistance to more people and was more generous, but many thought it allowed too much dependency by single mothers, or “welfare queens” in particular. Yet, there is little evidence that the money spent on efforts to promote marriage does effectively reduce single mother or single parent families. Although we know that increased cash payments to families reduce child poverty, current U.S. welfare policy continues to include spending on “family control,” i.e. “out-of-wedlock” pregnancy prevention and two-parent family formation and maintenance. This leads me to look more specifically at the factors that shape TANF allocation levels toward cash assistance, work-supportive services, and family control in the United States and ask generally, where and why are we still spending money on “family control”? How do factors such as “out-of-wedlock” births or the racial composition of states shape their TANF spending on Cash Assistance, Work Supports and Family Control? I find that the unmarried birthrate does not seem to drive higher welfare spending on “family control”, unless in a state with more Black and more Latinx people; there are still different “models” of welfare distribution used around the US, but what explains them needs more investigation. For example, a difference emerges between states with higher unmarried birthrates and more Latinx people, their spending on cash assistance is significant and positive but in states with higher unmarried birthrates and more Black people, their spending on cash is significant and negative.

Author

• Tess Snodgrass, University of Massachusetts-Amherst