Word: parenting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...issue of whether welfare in fact encourages illegitimate births has been hotly debated. Most studies show there is no direct causal relationship. But the AFDC program, by its very nature, inevitably provides some economic incentives for the creation of single-parent families. It offers a steady (though meager) income to young women if they decide to have children they cannot support. It may encourage irresponsible men to father children without worrying how to provide for them. And it can produce a situation where a father with a low-paying job may feel forced to leave home so that his children...
Controversy still rages around many details of a welfare-reform program. Should work be required only from mothers of school-age children (roughly age 6 or older) or from parents of youngsters as young as 3? What should be done about mothers who continue to have babies and thus avoid the work requirements? What should be done about welfare parents who refuse to work or drop out of training programs; if their benefits are cut off, would that not amount to punishing the children for the sins of the parent? And will jobs be available in an economy where...
...That system, established 50 years ago to provide temporary relief for widows, was never meant to address the long-term problem of poor children in broken homes, he argues, and it certainly has proved incapable of coping with the "changed reality" of a country with 3.8 million poor, single-parent families...
...launched hearings on ways to replace the system. The former Harvard professor is an astute analyst of demographic trends, and these days he is frightened by what he sees: the nation's median family income is hovering at the same level it was 17 years ago, the stable two-parent family is becoming the exception rather than the norm, and 12 million children are growing up in poverty and with inadequate training for the job market. If the U.S. does not take drastic action soon, he warns, "then we will have demonstrated an incapacity which could weaken American society...
...when he was serving as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, he wrote a report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, that provoked a searing controversy. Using the work of Black Sociologists Kenneth Clark and E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan contended that the growing number of one-parent families living on welfare was preventing blacks from achieving true equality in American society. If the trend did not stop, he charged, the triumphs of the civil rights movement might be dissipated. The Moynihan report became a lightning rod for ideological fury. Critics faulted the study's methods, but they seemed most...