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Dead Broke Dads


Since the days of the New Deal, the United States has provided financial support to the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income children and their mothers. This leaves out working-age people without children who are unable to support themselves, a group which has been considered the "undeserving poor" since medieval times. In New York City, the drop in single adults receiving public assistance has been as sharp as that for families. However, adult heads of families are eligible for job training and educational services, and for continued financial assistance when they reach the five-year time limit on federal benefits. Adults without children who left what is now called the "Safety Net" program had no such resources to fall back on.

Recently, politicians and social service providers have begun to rehabilitate the image of a large chunk of the adult population that does not live in a household with children. Many low-income men are "non-custodial fathers," meaning that they have children living apart from them, usually with the children's mothers. These fathers, who might be willing to support their children if they could afford to do so, are sometimes called "dead broke dads" to distinguish them from "deadbeat dads," who earn enough to pay child support, but don't.

By targeting all non-custodial fathers for child support payments, regardless of their financial resources, government agencies have discouraged low-income men from keeping in contact with their children. Fathers have an incentive to live "off the books," where they cannot be traced by welfare officials. This lifestyle may also prevent them from keeping in touch with their children.

Why Aren't Able-Bodied Men Earning A Living?

The labor market is not color-blind. In New York City, the unemployment rate for African-Americans is consistently double the rate for white workers, with Latinos falling somewhere in between. This does not include men who are in prison or jail, who made up 20 percent of jobless African-American men nationwide in 1996; they made up only five percent of jobless white men. Once they leave prison, ex-inmates are hampered in job-hunting by their criminal records.

According to the United States Department of Labor, for every hundred African-American women over the age of 20, there are 63 African-American men who are employed. Among white Americans of the same age group, there are 84 employed men to each hundred women. A 1995 study of employers' attitudes toward African-American male job applicants, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, found that employers believed they were lacking in "soft skills." This set of skills, which includes motivation and the ability to interact well with customers and co-workers, was considered nearly as important as the "hard skills" often learned through higher education, which fewer African-American men are pursuing.

Employers' attitudes may account for the fact that high school dropouts have a better chance of finding work in New York City if they are white. Two out of five young New York City men lacking a high school diploma were either unemployed or underemployed between 1996 and 1999; if they were African-American, the rate was four out of five. Things can only be worse now; since 1995, at least 140,000 new people have been added each year to those already looking for work in New York City. The new job-hunters are a mix of adults leaving public assistance, immigrants, and young people leaving high school. From 1996 to 1999, both unemployment and underemployment were more common in New York City than in the nation as a whole or the state of New York. This was true for all young adults with no education beyond high school.

What Can Be Done To Increase Earnings Of Non-Custodial Fathers?

There are many programs trying to help men be better fathers--the National Fatherhood Initiative has found a tenfold increase since 1994. The first wave of fatherhood programs was disappointing. A 1997 evaluation of one of those programs, Parents Fair Share, showed that efforts to help low-income fathers find better jobs were hampered by the participants' health problems, addictions, shortage of job skills, and hostile reception by their children's mothers.

A study of unmarried couples in New York City suggests that timing might be a factor in the success of such programs. Fathers may be most motivated to participate in income-raising activities at the time their children are born. In couples in which a teenager had recently become a mother, the unmarried father was usually eager to be a part of its life: to live with the child and its mother, and to help financially support the child. However, these fathers were unlikely to succeed as breadwinners. Most earned less than $20,000 a year, and had no education beyond high school. This was true even though two-thirds of them were over the age of 25.

In 2000, the Fathers at Work Initiative was launched in cities across the nation with federal and private foundation support. The Center for Employment Opportunities, a Manhattan-based organization established by the Vera Institute of Justice, is funded under this program to help New York City fathers gain skills that can lead to better jobs, to improve relationships with their children; and to help them navigate the child support system, if necessary. The agency's Responsible Fatherhood program serves nonviolent felony offenders who are on parole or probation; about 80 percent of participating fathers do not live with their children.

The Center for Employment Opportunities entered the fatherhood arena as a result of its experience as an employer of low-income men. The agency received child support enforcement orders from officials who did not realize that many of the employees who owed support had been in prison or jail, unable to earn money.

Fatherhood services offered by the center range from cooking classes provided by God's Love We Deliver, to legal advocacy regarding child support arrears. "If we teach them how to take care of themselves, they can be better fathers," an agency spokesperson explained. A participant works in the agency's transitional jobs program, generally in maintenance and repair work crews, until he finds a non-subsidized job with one of the employers whose trust has been earned by the organization during its 20-year history.

Another veteran at helping the hard-to-employ find and keep jobs is STRIVE, based in East Harlem. Their fatherhood program is independent of their employment program: clients are free to enroll in either program or in both. The majority of men in their fatherhood program are initially drawn to STRIVE by a desire to increase their income. Once they are in the employment program, participants are encouraged to take responsibility for all aspects of their lives. According to agency spokesperson Gregory Amos, the STRIVE employment program "gets them to realize that they have a shared responsibility for the financial and emotional support" of their children.

Men enrolled in STRIVE's fatherhood program are not required to be there to be eligible for employment services. Some are motivated by large back payments owed for child support, which could cause them to be sent back to jail, but most join the fatherhood program simply because they want to play a larger role in their children's lives. Similarly, in the Center for Employment Opportunities' father support groups, staff found that, "When we ask, 'What keeps you straight?' the answer is their kids."

The Shortfall Of The Minimum Wage

Five hundred years ago, the English Parliament passed a law outlawing execution of vagabonds, and the less drastic punishment of burning through their right ears. Instead, they were to be kept in prison. Laws governing the treatment of the poor have progressed a long way since then, but at least one traditional principle is still followed by American policy makers. Public assistance is kept at a level below the minimum wage, and even below the poverty line.

The average monthly cash grant to a New York City adult who lives alone is $331, for an annual income of less than $4,000, when the poverty line for a single adult is $9,039. Working a thirty-five hour week at minimum wage will bring in $9,373 a year, slightly above the poverty line, but not enough to keep a parent paying child support out of poverty. Until all men and women--with and without children--can earn a living wage, stinting on public assistance will continue to hurt children, the one group of low-income people that everyone wants to help.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

Children In No-Parent Families


The latest news on American families is that more children are living in no-parent households. These are not the packs of ten-year-olds found on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Bucharest. Children in no-parent U.S. households are cared for by grandparents, other relatives, unrelated foster parents or in group homes.

According to "Side Effect of Welfare Law: The No-Parent Family?" written by Nina Bernstein for the New York Times of July 29, 2002, researchers are wondering if a recent increase in no-parent families is related to the pressures of welfare reform on low-income parents. The Times article cited a study by the Rand Corporation and the University of California which found that during the 1990s, the share of black urban children living without either parent rose from 7.5 percent to 16.1 percent.

Sending children to live with relatives is not a new phenomenon, and is not confined to any particular social or economic group. Most children raised by their grandparents do not live in central cities, and more of them are white than black. There are many reasons why children live without their parents, including divorce, mental and physical health problems, unemployment, alcoholism, drug use, domestic violence, child abuse, and incarceration.

However, there is some evidence that welfare reform has played a growing role. An evaluation of Iowa's welfare-to-work program found that by 1999, welfare applicants randomly assigned to a new work program two years earlier were more than twice as likely to have a child in foster care as were applicants placed in a program operating under the old rules.

Welfare reform in Wisconsin showed similar results: five percent of parents who no longer received public assistance reported sending their children to live with someone else because they could no longer care for them. Researchers expect that the percentage is actually higher, because the most troubled families were under-represented in the study. Another unexpected outcome was an increase in the number of children on public assistance after Wisconsin finished setting up its new welfare system. Children in no-parent families can receive welfare themselves as child-only cases, regardless of their caregivers' income.

About 30,000 New York City children are in "public foster care," meaning that they have been formally placed in a household of relatives or strangers by child welfare workers. No count is kept of children in "private foster care"-those living with non-parents, usually relatives, without official oversight by the child welfare system-but according to Jerard Wallace of the Grandparent Caregiver Law Center, only one in eleven children living with relatives is in the public foster care system.

For caregivers, which of the two systems they are in can mean the difference between financial ruin and the ability to maintain a household in relative comfort. Public foster care entitles each child in a household to the same basic grant. Children with special needs receive larger grants. Children in private foster care are eligible for "child-only" welfare benefits instead. These are smaller payments that make no allowance for children with special needs, and rise only slightly with each additional child in the household. In either system, most children are eligible for Medicaid, and those in low-income households can receive food stamps.

However children in private foster care are much less likely to know about or receive public benefits. Wallace believes that the child welfare system fails to fully inform relative caregivers about available benefits, in part because of a philosophy he summarizes as, "Family should take care of family without us having to give them money."

As a result, many relatives care for children at great cost to themselves. Wallace has captured the effects of this burden in a videotape of nine grandparents speaking about their lives as relative caregivers.

"You cannot watch this tape and not cry," he says. For private foster care, Wallace notes, public assistance "is the de facto support system, and if we are interested in saving children, we have to make this system work."

The Census Bureau estimates that of the 80,000 New York City grandparents raising their grandchildren in 2000, more than one in four lived in poverty, and the majority had no high school diploma. Nearly two-thirds had been responsible for their grandchildren for at least three years.

These conditions in themselves put children at risk. Children in no-parent households with income lower than the poverty level, and headed by an adult who did not graduate from high school, are three times as likely as children in general to be unemployed high school dropouts by age 17. If they are girls, they are five times as likely as girls in general to be raising a child of their own by age 17.

Private foster care also puts children at a disadvantage because of their caregiver's lack of legal status. Without formal custody or guardianship, schools and hospitals can refuse to allow non-parent relatives to make arrangements for children to receive services. Eligibility workers for government benefits programs may not realize that kinship caregivers are entitled to benefits. However, many caregivers are reluctant to take formal steps to gain custody or become guardians, because it may disrupt their families further and delay the children's reunification with their parents.

There are some bright spots in the growing recognition of the needs of relative caregivers. New York State plans to stop cutting child-only welfare payments in half for households where the caregiver is receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit available only to low-income families.

In New York City, relative caregivers can turn to the Department for the Aging's Grandparent Resource Center, which offers support groups, information forums, a hotline for referrals to appropriate services, a resource library, and a directory of resources. Center Director Rolanda Pyle also conducts conferences, collects children's toys for the holidays, and has a small emergency cash fund for grandparents in crisis situations.

Pyle helped draft a state bill-which was not enacted-that would have given relative caregivers legal rights regarding children, such as the authority to enroll a child in school, write notes to excuse absence from school, and consent to medical treatment. Similar laws exist in California, Delaware, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

The New York Times followed up its July 29th article with one on August 14, 2002, entitled "Child-Only Cases Take Up a Bigger Share of Welfare." This time, Bernstein noted that child-only cases now make up over one-third of all family assistance cases, inspiring some critics of welfare policy to accuse caregivers of collecting the $352 monthly payments in order to avoid having to work.

The new focus on child-only welfare cases has the potential to bring the needs of caregivers who are relatives into the debate on reauthorizing the federal public assistance laws, and into the training programs of New York City's front line public assistance and child welfare workers. Children living apart from their parents already face major challenges. It might be a wise investment in our future to identify and support children in no-parent families.

Help and information for grandparents raising grandchildren, and other caregivers

  • The Grandparent Resource Center of the New York City Department for the Aging. Rolanda Pyle, Director. Services include an information hotline, mayoral conferences, technical assistance, and a support group facilitators network. Telephone (212) 442-1094.
  • The Grandparent Caregiver Law Center of the Brookdale Center on Aging, Hunter College. Jerard Wallace, JD, Director. Telephone (646) 366-1015 or (518) 434-4571, or visit the website.

  • AARP Grandparent Information Center, in Washington, DC 20049. Telephone (202) 434-2296 (English) or (202) 434-2281 (Spanish). Visit the website of AARP.
  • Grandparents and Other Relatives Raising Children, a project of Generations United. Ana Beltran, Project Director. Telephone(202) 662-4283 or visit Generations United's website.

  • National Resource Center for Respite and Crisis Care Services.

 

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

Welfare Reform, Round Two


By the fall of 2002, Congress will decide how hard the lives of the poorest Americans will be for the next few years. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is about to expire, putting all the questions about welfare reform back on the table in a changed political climate.

In 1996, the nation's economy was booming, unemployment was closing in on a 30-year low, Washington was intent on conquering the federal deficit, and the president was a Democrat who had already vetoed two welfare reform bills. Today the economy is struggling out of a slump, the unemployment rate started to go up in April 2001, and the deficit is about to reappear. This time, no one cares if we run a deficit, as long as we do so in order to fight terrorism.

Five years of experience with welfare reform have generated results ambiguous enough to support arguments on both sides of the issue. Supporters of the reforms point to the decrease in the poverty rate that paralleled the drop in the welfare rolls as proof that welfare benefits discouraged recipients from working their way up financially. Opponents say that poverty was reduced by the overall rise in prosperity, which has now ended.

New York City has also changed since 1996. Our poverty rate has dropped slightly, welfare rolls were reduced by about 60 percent, we lost 139,000 jobs between December 2000 and April 2002, and we now have a mayor who does not call welfare a "sick culture of dependency." The new commissioner of the Human Resources Administration pledges to provide more job training and support services, including child care and transportation, and the Department of Employment is spending the city's allotment for job training, which the previous administration failed to use.

However, the number of people on public assistance in New York City continues to fall by an average of about one percent a month. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's contingency plan for the coming year's budget eliminates money earmarked to expand the supply of subsidized child care slots, which are too few for the low-income mothers already at work. The administration refused to apply for a waiver that would have allowed unemployed adults without children to receive food stamps for longer than three months.

The debate about welfare reform reauthorization is most heated around a small set of questions with large implications for public assistance recipients:

  • What counts as work? Everyone agrees that paid or unpaid employment is work, as are on-the-job training, and community service. The disagreement concerns whether work requirements can also be met by looking for work, going to vocational school, or learning job skills.
  • How much of a work week has to be "primary" work? Now only 20 hours have to be the kind of work universally acknowledged as work, and the rest of the week can be any training or education related to employment. There is pressure to raise the primary requirement to 24 hours.
  • How many hours a week do you have to work to be considered employed? Thirty hours is the number for most welfare recipients now. Conservatives want to raise it to forty, even for parents of children under six, for whom the requirement is twenty hours at present.
  • What kind of learning should you do to prepare for work, and for how long? Now you can go to vocational school for a year and count it as primary work. Proposals about this vary widely, from reducing the year to four months during any two-year period, to increasing the year to two years, to broadening the type of schooling to include basic literacy classes, English as a Second Language, and/or college.
  • How long should it take to recover from substance abuse? Several proposals want to allow three or six months of treatment before clients have to start working.
  • How long should you be excused from work requirements in order to rebuild your life after surviving domestic violence? This is considered a "barrier removal" activity, because it prepares you to hold a job. Other barriers that might need to be removed are mental health problems and substance abuse. Advocates for the poor propose counting "barrier removal" as work for as long as it takes, rather than for a defined period of time.
  • What are you supposed to do with your children when you are at work? This is not explicitly discussed, but it underlies the haggling over whether child care funding should be raised only enough to keep up with inflation, or enough to cover care for all the children already on waiting lists, or enough to prevent new waiting lists from forming if more parents have to work more hours.
  • How many of the people getting welfare benefits should be able to find and keep jobs? Now the minimum is 50 percent; some want to raise it to 70 percent. There is also negotiating room over whether that fraction comes out of the large pool of everyone who gets a welfare check, or the smaller pool of people who are capable of work on any given day. As of March 3, 2002. over a third of the people receiving public assistance in New York City were classified as "unengageable," due to such reasons as being under 16 or over 60 years of age, having AIDS/HIV infection, caring for a newborn baby, or being temporarily incapacitated by a health problem.

 

The first move on welfare reform reauthorization came in February 2002, when President Bush laid out his vision of an improved system. Bush urged Congress to raise the percentage of recipients who must work from 50 percent to 70 percent, and extend their work week from 30 to 40 hours. On May 16, 2002, the House of Representatives passed a bill including those proposals, among other provisions that are more likely to discourage or disqualify people from receiving benefits than to prepare them for successful careers.

Also in mid-May, the Bloomberg administration sent Congress a 30-page wish list of what the city hopes to see in the next phase of welfare reform. In line with his attention to the Board of Education, Bloomberg calls for a new purpose to be added to the four already on record for Temporary Aid to Needy Families: "Prevent future dependence on government benefits and promote self-sufficiency by providing education and training to children, youth, and adults, in order to develop and enhance job skills."

More concrete city proposals include increased funding for child care to meet the full need for it, increased funding for public assistance to keep up with inflation, and restoring eligibility for federal benefits to all legal immigrants. Advocates for welfare recipients will welcome the city's recommendations to keep the percentage of recipients who must work at 50 percentage, and stopping the clock on the five-year lifetime limit for federal benefits during periods when the recipient is working full-time. Many recipients earn so little that they still qualify for cash assistance; others are using their five years while they receive only smaller benefits meant to encourage work, such as subway fare or child care assistance.

There are multiple bills in the Senate already, where the Democratic majority is expected to pass a less stringent measure than the Republican-controlled House. One bill is being called "tripartisan," because its sponsors include Republican, Democratic, and Independent Senators. This version would keep the work week at 30 hours, allow education and training to count as work for two years, and raise the required work participation rate to 70 percent.

Hillary Clinton has co-sponsored a bill considered more conservative, introduced by Senators Evan Bayh and Thomas Carper. It would increase the work week from 30 to 40 hours for most parents (although single parents with children under the age of six would still only have to work 20 hours), and add $8 billion for child care over the next five years. A detailed comparison of the current law, the House bill that passed, three Senate bills, and two other proposals has been prepared by the Center for Law and Social Policy and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Washington debate seems far removed from reality in New York City, where the Jobs section of the Sunday New York Times is so thin, you can hardly find it. The number of jobs in the city increased slightly in April, by 7,300, but so many more people were looking for work that the unemployment rate also rose, from 7.6 percent to 7.7 percent. According to Stephen Bell of the Urban Institute, who reviewed nine studies of welfare caseloads, historically, the number of welfare cases has fallen five percent for every one percent drop in the unemployment rate. It seems reasonable to expect a similar rise in caseload when unemployment goes up.

So far, we haven't seen that in New York. However, welfare benefits do not begin until unemployment benefits run out. Those who lost jobs in September 2001 can receive unemployment checks until July 2002. They will face increased competition for the small supply of job openings if the reauthorized version of welfare reform requires more public assistance recipients to work.

Some opponents of welfare reform are starting to talk about unemployment insurance reform. Unfortunately, our unemployment insurance system is geared toward full-time factory workers needing a few months of checks to tide them over during temporary layoffs. It is not geared to part-time workers. But welfare recipients often find themselves in part-time jobs when they first start working, and go for weeks or months between jobs until they find one that lasts. Now that public assistance as we knew it has ended, it may be time to acknowledge that unemployment as we knew it ended years ago.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.



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