Teenagers were having babies long before welfare reform, yet even as states charge ahead on changing the rules for adults, there's little consensus on what helps the youngest parents become self-supporting.
Researchers and policy-makers agree it's critical to focus on teen parents. Although only a small fraction of welfare recipients are teen moms, they are the ones who have often become long-term welfare dependents.Historically, more than 70 percent of unmarried adolescent mothers have gone on welfare within five years of giving birth, and 40 percent of them have stayed there for at least five years. In addition, more than half of welfare families have been headed by women who gave birth as teenagers.
"There's not one simple answer," said Andrea Kane of the American Public Welfare Association. "No one knows what works."
Indeed, efforts to prevent teens from having more children, to help them finish school and to get them off welfare have shown only occasional success. And states vary widely in the attention they pay to teen mothers as they implement larger welfare reforms.
Among the programs formally evaluated:
- New Chance, which provided an array of services - job training and search skills, career counseling, parenting and life skills and family planning - had no effect on whether teen parents found jobs or left welfare. However, more of the teens did earn high school equivalency certificates.
- Learnfare, which reduced welfare grants if teen parents or children on welfare skipped school, did not make teens more likely to stay in school or graduate. Still, about half the states have duplicated the Wisconsin-originated program.
- An Ohio program offered a carrot and a stick, paying teen parents extra if they stayed in school and reducing welfare grants to dropouts.
It increased school attendance and decreased welfare dependence for parents who were still in school when they entered the program. But it failed to get teens back to school if they had already dropped out.
California took a different tack, paying extra to teens who got good grades. An evaluation is under way.
- The Teenage Parent Demonstration, run by the federal government, offered intensive case management, required teens to be in school, training or work, and reduced payments to those who did not comply.
It increased participation in school, training and work, but 85 percent of participants still lived below the poverty line. And it failed to prevent teens from having more children.
- In Elmira, N.Y., a home-visiting program had nurses regularly going to see unmarried and poor new mothers. It reduced the chances of a second pregnancy and increased work by mothers.
To test their conclusions, researchers ran a second program in an urban setting, Memphis, Tenn. Those results are to be published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The federal government, meanwhile, is running an experiment to see if home visits are successful when done by non-nurses who are paid less, like Faith Pickup of Portland, Ore.
A former teen mother who once collected welfare, 25-year-old Pickup says she can relate to troubles faced by the teens she visits.
"A lot of them feel very isolated," she said. "Friends they used to hang out with don't want to hang out anymore. Sometimes their families kicked them out."
Her presence, said Pickup, may give them "a little bit of hope" that they, too, can get off welfare.
But there's no evidence that programs like Portland's will work for large numbers of teen mothers. And with the exception of Wisconsin's Learnfare, no program is being replicated widely, largely because none has proven particularly effective.
The 1996 federal welfare overhaul law requires all states to adopt two new policies for teen parents: All of them must live with their own parents or another responsible adult, and no federal money may be paid to teen parents who are not in school.
Some states have decided that's not enough:
- Oregon requires teen parents in high school equivalency programs to participate in life skills classes.
- Michigan, Colorado and Oklahoma are trying variations on home visits.
- In some Virginia counties, "resource mothers" serve as mentors for teen mothers, teaching parenting skills and encouraging them to finish school.
- Maryland focuses on teen fathers, hoping to get them to pay child support and be involved in their children's lives.
- In Florida, all teen mothers in school are entitled to child care, transportation and health care.
"We really do need to find something that works for teen parents," said Cathy Mobley, who works on welfare reform for the Kentucky Department of Social Insurance. "I think we're still experimenting."