Side Effect of Welfare Law: The No-Parent Family
Researchers say they cannot pinpoint the forces driving parents and children apart. But among them, they said, may be the stresses of the new welfare world — loss of benefits, low-wage jobs at irregular hours and pressure from a new partner needed to pay the rent.

The findings are helping reopen the debate on what shifting welfare rules are doing to families. They are contributing to second thoughts among some of the most optimistic analysts, even as the White House and some lawmakers are pushing to make the welfare law's work requirements even stricter. The law now requires 50 percent of welfare recipients to work up to 30 hours a week, with some exceptions for hardship.

One important study of census data in each state, recently presented to an audience of welfare experts at Harvard, concluded that among those most affected by the welfare changes — black children in central cities — the share living without their parents had more than doubled on average, to 16.1 percent from 7.5 percent, when researchers controlled for other factors.

What we're seeing is the complex relationship between this thing we call welfare reform and the impact on families," said Wade F. Horn, the Bush administration official who oversees the welfare program. "In some cases we see positive effects on family structures, and in other cases we see more children living in no-parent families."

Mr. Horn said new welfare demands might expose an unfit parent whose children are better off in foster care. On the other hand, he added, a West Virginia mother told to seek work in Ohio may feel obliged to leave a child behind to finish school.

"What it tells us," he said, "is that we need to do an even better job on understanding the complexities of these programs on real people."

In a support group in the Bronx, grandparents raising grandchildren spoke of the many pressures their families faced. Linda Woods, for example, finds it easy to understand how a decline in households with single mothers and a rise in children living apart from both parents could be two sides of a coin.

Ms. Woods's daughter, a sickly high school dropout who once worked in sales, supported her own daughter, China, on welfare after the girl's father abandoned them. Unable to work in exchange for benefits, she eventually qualified for Social Security disability payments and found a boyfriend with a job.

"She got married to him too quick," Ms. Woods recalled. "I tried to tell her, `You're making a big mistake.' " Two years ago, she added, China, then 7, telephoned from her mother's home in Queens, begging to be rescued from conflicts with her stepfather.

Now Ms. Woods, 53 and retired because of ill health, is struggling to care for China without any public aid. China's mother, with a second child to support, has separated from her husband.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/national/29WELF.html?pagewanted=all&position=top