Child support enforcement for teenage fathers: Problems and prospects

Data from the NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experiences-Youth Cohort) indicate that about 7.3 percent of teenage males become fathers and that very few of these fathers live with their children. Father absence and the concurrent increase in female-headed households are closely associated with the impoverishment of children. Most absent teen fathers never come into contact with the child support enforcement program, and the extent to which they financially support their children informally is not well understood. While the income of absent teen fathers is low in the teen years, it increases over time, as does the potential for collecting child support. Nevertheless, men who were absent teen fathers earn less in early adulthood than men who deferred parenting until age 20 or later and teen fathers who lived with their children. Early establishment of paternity and greater standardization in the treatment of adolescent fathers by the child support enforcement program are recommended. Further, the substantial and persistent income deficit experienced by adolescent fathers who live apart from their children raises an interesting dilemma. While children may benefit financially and psychosocially from living with two parents, the lower income of men who were absent teenage fathers may make them poor marital prospects. This raises doubts about the recent recommendations of some scholars that we should bring back the shotgun wedding.     

Does WIC work? The effects of WIC on pregnancy and birth outcomes

Support for WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is based on the belief that "WIC works." This consensus has lately been questioned by researchers who point out that most WIC research fails to properly control for selection into the program. This paper evaluates the selection problem using rich data from the national Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. We show that relative to Medicaid mothers, all of whom are eligible for WIC, WIC participants are negatively selected on a wide array of observable dimensions, and yet WIC participation is associated with improved birth outcomes, even after controlling for observables and for a full set of state-year interactions intended to capture unobservables that vary at the state-year level. The positive impacts of WIC are larger among subsets of even more disadvantaged women, such as those who received public assistance last year, single high school dropouts, and teen mothers.     

How welfare reform affects young children: Experimental findings from Connecticut—A research note

As welfare‐to‐work reforms increase women's labor market attachment, the lives of their young children are likely to change. This note draws on a random‐assignment experiment in Connecticut to ask whether mothers' rising employment levels and program participation are associated with changes in young children's early learning and cognitive growth. Children of mothers who entered Connecticut's Jobs First program, an initiative with strict 21‐month time limits and work incentives, displayed moderate advantages in their early learning, compared with those in a control group. A number of potential mechanisms for this effect are explored, including maternal employment and income, home environment, and child care. Mothers in the new welfare program are more likely to be employed, have higher income, are less likely to be married, have more children's books in their home, and take their children to libraries and museums more frequently. However, these effects explain little of the observed gain in child outcomes. Other parenting practices and the home's social environment do explain early learning, but these remained unaffected by welfare reform. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The Effects of Paid Family Leave in California on Labor Market Outcomes

Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY‐97), we examine the effects of California's paid family leave program (CA‐PFL) on mothers’ and fathers’ use of leave during the period surrounding child birth, and on the timing of mothers’ return to work, the probability of eventually returning to prechildbirth jobs, and subsequent labor market outcomes. We estimate multivariate difference‐in‐differences regression models that compare changes in the outcomes for new California parents before and after the enactment of CA‐PFL to those for corresponding parents in control states. Our results suggest that CA‐PFL raised leave use by almost five weeks for the average covered mother and two to three days for the corresponding father. Maternal leave‐taking appears to increase in the quarter before the birth and to extend through the two quarters after it. Paternal leave‐taking rises fairly quickly after the birth and is short‐lasting. Rights to paid leave are also associated with higher work and employment probabilities for mothers nine to 12 months after birth, probably because they increase job continuity among those with relatively weak labor force attachments. We also find positive effects of California's program on hours and weeks of work during their child's second year of life.     

Do child care regulations affect the child care and labor markets?

The effect of child care regulations on outcomes in the child care market and the labor market for mothers of young children is examined. The analysis uses a time series of cross sections and examines the robustness of previous cross‐section findings to controls for state‐level heterogeneity. Child care regulations as a group have statistically significant effects on most outcomes, with or without state fixed effects. However, regulations do not vary enough within state over time to allow precise identification of most individual regulation effects. The great majority of estimated regulation effects in all specifications are small and insignificantly different from 0. Some of the estimated effects seem reasonable in sign and magnitude, but others are clearly implausible. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Child Support and the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansions

A quickly developing literature has shown that the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansions have improved health insurance coverage, health, and financial well‐being among low‐income adults without dependent children. This population includes noncustodial parents. With substantial overlap in the population that is typically obligated to pay child support and the population that has strongly benefited from the expansions, there may be potential implications for child support enforcement. In this paper, I examine the effect of public health insurance eligibility to low‐income adults on child support outcomes. I find that the ACA Medicaid expansions increased child support distributed to custodial families as arrears by 8.5 percent. Evidence also suggests current support distributions increased by about 2 percent. There were no significant effects on paying toward a child support order. Among unmarried mothers, the likelihood of child support receipt increased by 8 percent. These results imply that access to public health insurance can increase the ability of noncustodial parents to pay child support.     

Welfare and child support: Complements,not substitutes

In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support paid on their behalf. This policy, which treats welfare and child support as complements, was evaluated through an experimental design. This paper reports the key results of the experimental evaluation, using state administrative data to examine the effects on child support outcomes and governmental cost. We find that when custodial mothers keep all child support paid on their behalf, paternity establishment occurs more quickly, noncustodial fathers are more likely to pay support, and custodial families receive more support. These outcomes are achieved at no significant governmental cost. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Reversal of Favorable Child Living Arrangement Trends of the Late 1990s

During the late 1990s, there was a notable shift in child living arrangements toward two‐parent households and away from single parenthood. Whether due to economic factors, declining teen birth rates, welfare reform, or some other cultural cause or a combination of these factors, something happened in the 1990s that stabilized marriage rates and led to declines in single‐parent households. There was also considerable hope that the federal welfare reforms enacted in 1996 might be responsible for the change in these trends. However, since 2000, while the downward trend in teen births continues, the gains in percentage of children living with two parents have been virtually eliminated. This article carefully documents these recent trends, examines the relationship of recessions on child living arrangements, and concludes that it is impossible to disentangle the role of welfare reform from its broader economic, policy, and demographic context.     

Accountability via Performance Measurement: The Case of Child Protection Services

Since the 1980s child protection agencies have been subject to enormous scrutiny about perceived poor performance. Concerns are expressed about the capacity of services to cope with demand, the quality of practice, out‐of‐home care standards, and poor outcomes for children. Enter performance measurement. Using quantitative data to monitor effectiveness and efficiency, performance measurement promises improved resource management and accountability. This article discusses national, Victorian and Queensland child protection performance measurement regimes. It examines the extent to which performance measurement is used to promote accountability, as well as the indirect role of performance measurement in communicating policy intent. It suggests performance measurement is under‐utilised in child protection, but could be enhanced to contribute to better outcomes for children and families.     

Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence From Age‐of‐Youngest‐Child Exemptions

This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low‐income children's cognitive and social‐emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age‐of‐youngest‐child exemptions—as a source of quasi‐experimental variation in first‐year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work‐requirement‐induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.     

Malnourished children? Child health disparities and its causes in Eastern India

The disparity in child health outcomes across Indian districts, particularly in Eastern India, is alarming. Approximately half of the districts in this region exhibit very poor child health outcomes, evidenced by alarmingly high neonatal, infant, and under-five mortality rates. This study analyses the existing levels and patterns of child health outcomes across 112 districts of Eastern India, a region known for its low levels of child health status. To do this, we have constructed a composite child health index (CHI) using nationally representative data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5). Using Principal Component Analysis, the study uses the CHI values to categorize the districts into high, moderate, and low-performing districts. The results show a significant variation in CHI outcomes across the districts, with striking regional disparities. Notably, all high-performing districts were located only in the state of Odisha. In contrast, a substantial proportion of the low-performing districts were in the state of Bihar, suggesting systemic healthcare deficiencies. Using discriminant function analysis, we obtain the critical determinants of CHI to be sanitation facilities, mother's education, marriage before 18 years, and low body mass index of the mother. Our findings confirm that improvements in these areas are crucial for enhancing child health outcomes and ending intergenerational transmission of poor health outcomes. The implications of this study extend beyond eastern India, offering valuable insights into similar challenges in global low- and middle-income regions.     

The Social and Productive Impacts of Zambia's Child Grant

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer (CT) programs across the world suggests that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost‐effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. However, individual published impact assessments typically focus on only one program and one outcome. This article presents two‐year impacts of the Zambian Government's Child Grant, an unconditional CT to families with children under age 5, across a wide range of domains including consumption, productive activity, and women and children's outcomes, making this one of the first studies to assess both protective and productive impacts of a national unconditional CT program. We show strong impacts on consumption, food security, savings, and productive activity. However, impacts in areas such as child nutritional status and schooling depend on initial conditions of the household, suggesting that cash alone is not enough to solve all constraints faced by these poor, rural households. Nevertheless, the apparent transformative effects of this program suggest that unconditional transfers in very poor settings can contribute to both protection and development outcomes.     

Child Health in Elementary School Following California's Paid Family Leave Program

We evaluate changes in elementary school children health outcomes following the introduction of California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, which provided parents with paid time off following the birth of a child. Our health outcomes—overweight, ADHD, and hearing‐related problems—are characterized by diagnosis rates that only pick up during early elementary school. Moreover, our health outcomes have been found to be negatively linked with many potential implications of extended maternity leave—increased breastfeeding, prompt medical checkups at infancy, reduced prenatal stress, and reduced non‐parental care during infancy. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) within a difference‐in‐differences framework, our results suggest improvements in health outcomes among California elementary school children following PFL's introduction. Furthermore, the improvements are driven by children from less advantaged backgrounds, which is consistent with the notion that California's PFL had the greatest effect on leave‐taking duration after childbirth mostly for less advantaged mothers who previously could not afford to take unpaid leave.     

The long‐term effects of public housing on self‐sufficiency

Recent years have witnessed an intensification of the debate about the fundamental purpose of public assistance to the poor and the effects of these programs on children. This study uses enriched data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the effects of living in public housing as a child at some point between 1968 and 1982 on four young adult outcomes: welfare receipt; individual earnings; household earnings relative to the federal poverty line; and employment. Living in public housing during childhood increased employment, raised earnings, and reduced welfare use, but had no effect on household earnings relative to the poverty line. The beneficial effects could have arisen because public housing improved physical living conditions, reduced residential mobility, or enabled families to spend more of their income on items that benefit children's development. Whether these effects apply to contemporary public housing is unknown. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effect of child support on welfare exits and re‐entries

Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipient characteristics and state‐level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979‐1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examines whether child support affects the likelihood of leaving and re‐entering welfare. The results indicate that strong child support enforcement is important in helping young mothers exit and stay off welfare. Women with $1000 child support payments in the previous year were 18 percent more likely to exit welfare and 12 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. Compared with women in states that pursued child support least vigorously, women in states that had passed extensive child support enforcement legislation and that spent more money on child support enforcement were 79 percent more likely to exit welfare and about 60 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Is Democracy Good for the Poor?

Many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor. This article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim. Cross-national studies tend to exclude from their samples nondemocratic states that have performed well; this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies. Once these and other flaws are corrected, democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates. Democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies, but these benefits seem to accrue to middle- and upper-income groups.     

The Impact of Child Care Subsidies on Single Mothers’ Work Effort

Access to affordable child care is a formidable barrier to employment for many families. Following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 , funding for child care assistance increased dramatically. Using data from the National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), the impact of child care subsidies on single mother’s work effort is evaluated. The results indicate that not only are women more likely to be employed when they receive child care subsidies, they are also more likely to be employed full time. Single mothers who reported receiving assistance with child care worked, on average, 9.4 hours more per week than mother’s who did not receive help. While growth in funding for child care has slowed in recent years, findings like the ones presented here highlight the importance of affordable child care in the employment decisions of mothers with young children.     

The impact of child support enforcement policy on nonmarital childbearing

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women with a significant chance of needing public assistance in the event of a nonmarital birth and their male partners. We investigate this hypothesis with a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44 before marriage and during periods of non‐marriage following divorce or widowhood. The estimates indicate that women living in states with more effective child support enforcement are less likely to bear children when unmarried, especially if they are young, never‐married, or black. The findings suggest that improved child support enforcement may be a potent intervention for reducing nonmarital childbearing. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

From Birth to School: Early Childhood Initiatives and Third‐Grade Outcomes in North Carolina

This study examines the community‐wide effects of two statewide early childhood policy initiatives in North Carolina. One initiative provides funding to improve the quality of child care services at the county level for all children between the ages of 0 to 5, and the other provides funding for preschool slots for disadvantaged four‐year‐olds. Differences across counties in the timing of the rollout and in the magnitude of the state financial investments per child provide the variation in programs needed to estimate their effects on schooling outcomes in third grade. We find robust positive effects of each program on third‐grade test scores in both reading and math. These effects can best be explained by a combination of direct benefits for participants and spillover benefits for others. Our preferred models suggest that the combined average effects on test scores of investments in both programs at 2009 funding levels are equivalent to two to four months of instruction in grade 3.     

Institutional racism in child welfare

Three reasons are most often provided to explain the persistent overrepresentation of black children in the child welfare system. One, since black families have more risk factors (unemployment, single-parent families, poverty, etc) that cause them to abuse and neglect their children more than white families, the higher representation of blacks is appropriate. Two, since blacks are more highly concentrated among the poor than whites, blacks are expected to be overrepresented in child welfare due to their lower class status—not because of their race. But this article focuses on a third explanation—institutional racism. This thesis holds that systemic discrimination, which emanates from decision-making processes in child welfare, is a major contributor to the disparate representation of black children.This analysis examines how institutional racism influences the operation of the child welfare system to result in disparate adverse effects on black children and their families. The evolution of blacks in child welfare is viewed from an historical perspective. It assesses the impact of other systems (notably mental health, special education and juvenile justice) on the child welfare system. It examines the extent to which decision-making processes at various stages of child welfare screen in black children and screen out white children. It describes how systemic racism denies vital social and economic supports to kin caregivers who are responsible for their related children. This assessment ends with practice, policy and research recommendations to reduce the overrepresentation of black children in child welfare.