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Waldo E. Johnson Jr., PhD’93, an assistant professor in the
SSA, says that while they tend to be dismissed as “deadbeat
dads” or as violent and abusive, he believes that social-science
research has not drawn a fair and full portrait of these men. A
major flaw in the new welfare law, he notes, is that fathers aren’t
even mentioned in it, except with respect to paternity tests and
child support. The fathers, he says, may be as low-skilled and as
much in need of job training as the mothers.
“It’s important to recognize that when we’re trying
to improve the lives of women and children, if we’re ignoring
other people in their lives, then we’re not getting the full
picture,” says Johnson. “Fathers are involved. It’s
a question of whether we decide to acknowledge them and bring them
into the picture.”
Johnson hopes to speed this process as one of ten investigators
in the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, the first national
longitudinal study of its kind. The four-year, 20-city study will
follow 4,700 African-American, white, and Latino families—including
3,600 unwed couples and 1,100 married couples—to assess the
conditions and capabilities of new, unwed parents, especially fathers;
the nature of the couples’ relationships; how public policies
affect their behavior and living arrangements; and the long-term
consequences of the new welfare rules.
Johnson’s segment of the study—backed in part by the
Ford Foundation—hones in on how unmarried, low-income, nonresident
fathers become involved with their children. Initial findings from
interviews conducted in Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California,
says Johnson, show that more than 90 percent of the nonresident
fathers were involved with the mothers during pregnancy and provided
financial and other forms of assistance, such as helping out with
chores and accompanying the mothers to prenatal-care visits.
The relationships of these men with their children, he says, run
the gamut from fathers who provide both financial and emotional
support to those whose involvement is virtually nonexistent, adding
that some who appear unconnected are actually paying child support
outside the formal system. Johnson plans to conduct more in-depth
discussions with a group of men interviewed in a Chicago pilot study
last year to better understand the complex individual and structural
situations that help and hinder their paternal involvement.
While their colleagues evaluate specific aspects of the new welfare
system, other U of C scholars are grappling with the myriad social
factors that foster inequality and lead to the need for government
aid in the first place.
As director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research, Susan Mayer
helps affiliated scholars inject fresh, apolitical, social-science
research into debates on topics from teen pregnancy to public housing
to health care. The center’s working papers series includes
nearly 40 articles on welfare reform—more than on any other
topic. The center has sponsored conferences on what is likely to
happen to the poor if the economy goes into recession, on the labor
market for low-skilled workers, and on how the changes in welfare
will affect family functioning. In September 1999, the center will
sponsor a Washington, D.C., conference on how states can use economic
incentives to improve the lives of low-income families and children.
In her own work, Mayer says she is “trying to take a longer
view to get at some of the more basic questions that would inform
any welfare program. I’m stepping back from the programs themselves
and looking at how income matters to children’s life chances.”
Mayer’s What Money Can’t Buy: How Parental Income Influences
Children’s Outcomes (Harvard, 1998) concludes that additional
income makes the biggest impact when it can prevent hunger or homelessness
or buy medical care, but that its rewards drop dramatically after
the basic necessities have been met. This suggests, she explains,
that relative rather than absolute income has a greater effect on
children’s well-being—a hypothesis she plans to test as
part of a two-year, $200,000 research grant from the Russell Sage
Foundation. And with Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, she’s
wrapping up a book, Did We Lose the War on Poverty?, which rethinks
standard measures of material and physical well-being and challenges
the idea that the major social-welfare programs of the past 30 years
were failures.
From another big-picture perspective, nothing short of a revolution
in the nation’s social-welfare policy will do for James Heckman,
the Henry Schultz distinguished service professor in economics,
the Harris School, and the College. He says that policymakers should
adopt a “life-cycle perspective” that considers the role
of all intervention policies—training programs, school-based
programs, school reform, and early childhood initiatives—together,
not in isolation.
In “Education and Job Training Myths,” published in the
Spring 1999 issue of The Public Interest, Heckman argues further
that welfare policies will not be successful until “politicians
and the public recognize the importance of informal sources of learning,
the cumulative character of learning, and the value of incentives
in formal education.” After six years studying how people develop
skills, Heckman has taken the stand that wage subsidies, such as
the earned income tax credit, are the most effective support for
underemployed adults. Funds now earmarked for welfare-to-work programs,
he says, should instead be invested in infants and young children.
“If and when the bottom drops out of the market, we will be
back to where we started, with a population that is not that employable,”
says Heckman. “The reform efforts got caught up in specific
programs, but there can be an enormously high gain in looking at
how to improve the problems over the long term. We’ve got to
get to the problems when they are easier to solve.”
Judging from the questions raised by these Chicago researchers,
the latest welfare reform law does indeed need to be reformed. And
if the next overhaul is done on their terms, the law will be changed
only after taking an even harder look at the underlying causes and
consequences of poverty, at how the law can be applied fairly and
equally, and at the special needs of the working mothers, at-risk
children, and estranged fathers who are arguably stuck more in the
low-wage workforce than on welfare.
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