School-Age Children in Welfare Families Complete Less Education, According to Study

2/20/2003

From: Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington, Evans School of Public Affairs, 206-685-9044; plotnick@u.washington.edu

SEATTLE, Feb. 20 -- The following was released today by the Center for Public Information on Population Research:

It's too soon to tell whether current welfare-to-work policies help or harm children in the long run, but new findings suggest that teenagers do better in school when the family gets a paycheck instead of a welfare check.

Even allowing for differences in incomes, the researchers find that children in families who received welfare during their school years are more likely to drop out of high school than children in households that didn't receive aid, according to a study reported in the February issue of the journal Demography. However, this negative effect of receiving welfare does not show up with preschoolers -- only school-aged children.

Early adolescence is a particularly pivotal time; each year a child's family spent on welfare between ages 11 and 15 is linked to more than one-quarter of a year less of schooling by age 19, report demographers Inhoe Ku of Seoul National University and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington.

Young adolescents may "suffer most from the stigma of welfare and the lack of a positive role model," they note. Receiving welfare during a child's school years may reflect other underlying family difficulties, such as mental illness or a health crisis.

The researchers examined the effect of receiving welfare on later schooling, controlling for differences in family income. But, they caution, it is important to remember that the financial benefits of welfare alone may help children succeed in school by increasing total family income and reducing extreme poverty.

Their findings are based on a nationally representative sample of 2,249 U.S. children tracked between 1968 and 1997 (before new welfare policies instituting time limits and requiring work were in place).

Being on welfare during a child's preschool years had no impact on the number of years of schooling the child later completed and no effect on whether the child graduated from high school, according to Ku and Plotnick. They surmise that any negative effect of welfare receipt was offset by the larger, positive impact of parental care giving during preschool years. These findings imply that "moving mothers of young children off welfare quickly will not necessarily help those children succeed in school."

Plotnick is a professor at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Affairs, and an economist who does research on poverty and social policy. Ku received his doctorate at the University of Washington before joining the faculty in Seoul.

Demography is the peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Association of America. The full article, "Do Children from Welfare Families Obtain Less Education?" is available at http://www.prb.org/cpipr. Username: cpipr. Password: demography. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939- 5414. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.