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Wefare Reform and Families in the Child Welfare System

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Wefare Reform and Families in the Child Welfare System University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 2002 Wefare Reform and Families in the Child Welfare System Morgan B. Ward Doran Dorothy E. Roberts University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Family Law Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Welfare Commons, and the Social Welfare Law Commons Repository Citation Doran, Morgan B. Ward and Roberts, Dorothy E., "Wefare Reform and Families in the Child Welfare System" (2002). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 586. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/586 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WELFARE REFORM AND FAMILIES IN THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM MORGAN B. WARD DORAN* & DOROTHY E. ROBERTS** INTRODUCTION There is little question that the sweeping changes in welfare pol- icy initiated by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) 1 will have an impact on fami- lies involved in state child welfare systems. Past research establishes an association between welfare receipt and involvement with child protection services.2 The primary goal of the PRWORA is to move people from welfare to the workforce.3 This goal has the potential to improve children's welfare by increasing poor families' income, but also to increase child maltreatment by throwing families into eco- * J.D., Northwestern University School of Law. ** Professor, Northwestern University School of Law; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Pol- icy Research. This project was supported by the Children and Family Research Center, School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is funded in part by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The authors would like to thank Dan Lewis and Kristen Shook Slack for their help in developing this project and Lisa Altenbernd, Elizabeth Gorenz, Emily Gorenz, Marla McDaniel, and Amber Stitziel Pareja for their skillful interviews of respondents. 1. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-193, 110 Stat. 2105 (codified as amended in scattered sections of 42 U.S.C. (Supp. V 1999)). 2. Howard I. Bath & David A. Haapala, Intensive Family Preservation Services with Abused and Neglected Children: An Examination of Group Differences, 17 CHILD ABUSE & NEGLECT 213, 218, 220 (1993) (presenting a study which found that 77% of the families referred to Child Protective Services for neglect received some form of public assistance); see also DUNCAN LINDSEv, THE WELFARE OF CHILDREN 4 (1994) ("Impoverished families . are, in over- whelming numbers, relying on the child welfare system for help,"); LEROY H. PELTON, FOR REASONS OF POVERTY 38 (1989) ("There is by now overwhelming evidence of a strong rela- tionship between poverty and child abuse and neglect."); Elizabeth D. Jones & Karen Mc- Curdy, The Links Between Types of Maltreatment and Demographic Characteristicsof Children, 16 CHILD ABUSE & NEGLECT 201, 213 (1992) (studying child abuse in light of specific demo- graphic factors, and finding that there is a "strong connection between neglect, poverty status and female-headed households"); Kristen Shook, Assessing the Consequences of Welfare Reform for Child Welfare, POVERTY REs. NEWS (Joint Center for Poverty Research, Chicago, IL), Winter 1998, available at http://www.jcpr.org/winter98/article2.html. 3. See Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act § 401 (a) (2) (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 601) (stating that one of the purposes of the Act is to "end the dependence of needy parents on governmental benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage"); see also Ladonna Pavetti & Nancy Wemmerus, From a Welfare Check to a Paycheck: Creatinga New Social Contract, 20J. LAB. REs. 517, 518 (1999) ("To ensure that state TANF programs emphasize work, PRWORA requires states to meet steadily increasing work participation rates to receive their full TANF allocation."). 2002] FAMILIES IN THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM 387 nomic uncertainty.4 Many welfare recipient families have exper- ienced a number of adverse life events, including economic strain, parental stress, and inadequate child care,5 which make them more vulnerable to charges of child maltreatment.6 In addition, the new behavioral requirements that welfare reform imposes as a condition of receiving benefits affect the parenting experiences of recipients who are concurrently involved with the child welfare system. 7 These fami- lies are at the intersection of two state programs that seek to modify the behavior of poor parents. The welfare and child welfare systems share overlapping histories, philosophies, and client populations. The PRWORA eliminated the federal guarantee of a basic income support for all families and re- placed it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a programmatic combination of work requirements and sanctions for nonconforming behavior 8 TANF incorporates a system of financial 4. ROB GEEN & SHELLEY WATERS, THE URBAN INSTITUTE, THE IMPACT OF WELFARE RE- FORM ON CHILD WELFARE FINANCING (1997). The authors anticipate that PRWORA will affect the child welfare system indirectly. They note that, because income level correlates with incidence of child abuse, PRWORA may result in either increases or decreases in levels of child abuse, depending on whether families' economic well-being improves or declines. Id. at 5; cf Pavetti & Wemmerus, supra note 3, at 535 (concluding that welfare reform's success or failure should be measured by its ability to respond not only to the labor market, but also to the conditions of families who "have previously depended on the welfare system for support"). But see Christina Paxson & Jane Waldfogel, ParentalResources and Child Abuse and Neglect, 89 Am. ECON. REv. 239, 242 (1999) (stating that "the upward trend in reports of child maltreatment may be spuriously correlated with trends in... the rate of labor-force participation of mothers and the general increase in income levels"). 5. See SARAH BRAUNER & PAMELA LoPREST, THE URBAN INSTITUTE, WHERE ARE THEY Now? WHAT STATES' STUDIES OF PEOPLE WHO LEFT WELFARE TELL Us 8-9 (1999) (noting that preliminary studies show that the average person who leaves welfare still has an in- come below the poverty level, but concluding that the economic status of recipients is still unclear); PAMELA LOPREST, THE URBAN INSTITUTE, FAMILIES WHO LEFT WELFARE: WHO ARE THEY AND HOW ARE THEY DOING? 23 (1999) (examining the success of parents exiting the welfare system, and noting that most parents work in low paying jobs, one-quarter of the parents work night schedules, and over half of the parents struggle with coordinating child care with their work schedules). 6. See Kristen Shook, Does the Loss of Welfare Income Increase the Risk of Involvement with the Child Welfare System ?, 21 CHILD. &YOUTH SERV. REV. 781, 782 (1999) ("Psychosocial theories of economic hardship and parenting predict that financial strain leads to heightened feel- ings of stress and depression, or lower feelings of life satisfaction, self-efficacy and self- esteem, which in turn diminish the quality of care that a parent provides."); id. at 803-09 (studying welfare parents' risk of involvement with the child welfare system, and finding that stressful life events increase the risk of such involvement). 7. See generally ROBERT GEEN ET AL., THE URBAN INSTITUTE, WELFARE REFORM'S EIECT ON CHILD WELFARE CASELOADS (2001). Families involved in both welfare and a child wel- fare system may be affected by inadequate coordination between the two systems. See id. at 36. 8. See Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act §§ 101-116 (codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. §§ 601-617, 619). MARYLAND LAW REVIEW [VOL. 61:386 punishments designed to deter disapproved behavior (e.g., out of wedlock childbearing, dependence of needy parents on government benefits) and to encourage approved behavior (e.g., marriage and ec- onomic independence).' In addition, job-training programs seek to improve recipients' attitudes about work.' ° State child welfare agen- cies similarly use removal or the threat of removal of children to co- erce parents charged with child maltreatment to comply with a set of requirements that typically focus on curing perceived parental defi- cits.1 Both the welfare and child welfare systems assume that poor families' problems are caused by internal deficiencies that can be rem- edied by improving parental behavior, rather than by external causes 12 that require social change. Each system is designed to effect change through a combination of rewards and punishments "that smacks of the behavioral science of B.F. Skinner."'" Parents involved with the child welfare system must attend parenting classes, enroll in drug-rehabilitation programs, pro- vide drug samples, and participate in individual and family counseling in order to keep or regain custody of their children.14 Similarly, par- ents who receive
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