theatlantic | A few weeks ago I wrote about how the welfare reform of the 1990s
led to many poor mothers being kicked off welfare rolls. While some
poor adults could still receive help from food stamps and disability
insurance, the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" dramatically cut how much cash aid they could collect. The hope was that they would find work, but many didn’t.
Meanwhile, spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF,
the only cash assistance program that non-disabled, non-elderly, poor
single mothers are eligible for, has dropped precipitously: It was lower
in 2007 than it had been in 1970.
That left me wondering—what happened to the moms who had neither jobs nor cash assistance through TANF, which comes with strict time limits?
The Urban Institute recently released a fascinating new qualitative study
that aims to answer that very question. Relying on 90-minute interviews
with 29 unmarried women in Los Angeles and 22 in southeast Michigan,
the nonprofit examined the lives of these so-called “disconnected”
women—meaning they get neither income from work nor TANF money. (About
one in eight low-income single mothers was disconnected in 1996, when
welfare reform was first implemented, but about one in five was
disconnected in 2008.)
