The Impact of Welfare Reform on Children:
An Interview with Kathleen Wells

Aired October 26, 1999

David C. Barnett–Kathleen Wells is an associate professor with the Mandel School of Applied Social Science at Case Western Reserve University. She's conducting a study on the impact of welfare reform on children and joins us in the studio this morning. Welcome.

Kathleen Wells–Thank you.

DCB–Can you describe for us the life situations of a typical child on the welfare system?

KW–Sure. In the child welfare system, the typical child is young, that is not an adolescent, comes from a family that receives public assistance, has been maltreated seriously, either through neglect, which means typically that the parents are very poor and not providing adequate care and nurturance, or physical abuse.

DCB–Are they living with the parents or have they been separated from them?

KW–At the time of entry into the public child welfare system, most are still living with their families, but not all.

DCB–Do have any idea how many children will be affected by welfare reform?

KW–Well, we know that between about 1992 and 1997, up to half of all children in Cuyahoga County between the ages of 0 and 5 received some form of public assistance during that period of time, so potentially, it's a very large number of children who will be affected by welfare reform in Cuyahoga County.

DCB–Give us an idea of what kind of effects we're talking about here, too.

KW–Well, the major effect on children of welfare reform, if their families do not find and keep paid employment, is poverty, and we know that poverty has negative effects on children. Some of those effects include low birth weight, and the physical and learning problems that come with low birth weight. They can have growth stunting, which means they have a low height relative to their age. They can suffer from lead poisoning, which comes from living in deteriorated housing. Poverty also affects, at least in the short run, cognitive abilities and school achievement, so these effects are very pronounced, particularly for children who live in poverty for many years and in extreme poverty, which is half the federal threshold.

DCB–That's kind of a vicious cycle, too, isn't it, because they're living in this situation and these effects occur because of that very poverty.

KW–That's right, that's right. These effects come out because there's inadequate food, there's a deterioration of the home environment, dysfunctional parent-child interactions, parental mental health problems, and neighborhood conditions all contribute to this cycle of impoverishment and negative consequences for children.

DCB–One of the things we've heard over and over again as we conduct this examination into welfare reform is the difficulty in keeping statistics, keeping track of people, and that sort of thing. Now, how has that impacted you in this study that you're currently engaged in?

KW–Well, it's a challenging study, partly for that reason. In our study, which I'm conducting with my collaborator Shin Yang Quo(sp?), we're looking at the impact of welfare reform specifically on children in the public child welfare system, which is just a part of the, obviously, child population in Cuyahoga County, and we are using the department children and family service's data that they collect to examine how the size of the caseload and the characteristics of the caseload changes over time. So getting access to those data and analyzing them has been a challenge, but we're moving ahead.

DCB–How long is this study going to go on?

KW–It's going on for five years, since we're about a year into it, so we'll be able to look at how the public child welfare system changes during the period of welfare reform.

DCB–You know, another thing that's associated with doing this series, for us, is that there's a whole lot of negativity that we have to tell people about, that the system is just-there's a lot of bad things going on, and sometimes we worry about the fact that there's a kind of, people are "compassioned out," if you know what I mean, it's like, "we care about these things, we care about what we're hearing from you, and that sort of thing and these terrible situations, but we just don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with it." How do you talk to somebody like that?

KW–Well, I think one of the critical things to recognize, it's not them, it's us, it's all of us, so there's the basis, one way to get through to somebody is to help them see that this is not just affecting other people that you can wall off and just not look at. It affects the whole community and the future, really, of all of our children.

DCB–How so? How so does it affect all of our children?

KW–The climate created in schools, the proportion of the population that does not have jobs affects the social problems that we have throughout society, so it contributes to our entire culture, really.

DCB–Kathleen Wells is an associate professor with the Mandel School of Applied Social Science. Thanks for joining us this morning.