Reducing Child Poverty: Did Welfare Reform Work?     7/16/2003
By Janice Shaw Crouse

Contrary to the dire predictions of the welfare advocacy community, welfare reform has worked.

Executive Summary

Contrary to the dire predictions of the welfare advocacy community, welfare reform has worked:

• The number of poor children living in poverty declined by nearly 3 million.
• The majority of the decrease (2.25 million) was in mother-only families.

The decrease in poverty was NOT solely the result of economic expansion:

• The economic expansion of the 1980s did not produce declines in poverty in mother-only families.
• AFDC produced dramatic increases in mother-only families.
• After the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, welfare rolls were cut in half and the growth in mother-only families declined.
• Poor mother-only families declined by 32% (the only significant period of decline since the upward trend began in the late 1960s).

Two negative trends have kept the declines in single-parent families from being even more dramatic:

• The growth in non-poor mother-only families has kept the total number of mother-only families from declining.
• The increase in father-only families has accelerated, adding significantly to the number of single parent families.

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