Making it Work: Low-wage employment, family life, and child development
HGSE Professor Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Many families with young children are living in poverty, even when a parent is employed. A persistent policy challenge has been to determine how various public policies may affect low-income families' financial and life circumstances. In Milwaukee, the New Hope Project aims to move people out of poverty by offering supports, such as income supplements, transportation, and childcare, in exchange for working 30 or more hours per week.

The research efforts of HGSE professor Hirokazu Yoshikawa and his colleagues reveal that some patterns of parental workforce engagement, job flexibility, and supports offered through New Hope raise children's school performance and improve their behavior at school. In this interview, Yoshikawa discusses key findings from the study, reported in his new book, Making it Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development (editor, with T. S. Weisner and E. Lowe, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

"Making it Work " – A Q&A with Hirokazu Yoshikawa

1. Can you tell us about the New Hope Project, and the context of the Making it Work research?

"The New Hope Experiment was a program to fight poverty in a new way, which is to directly reduce poverty..."
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2. In this study, you identified several different pathways characterizing how low-income mothers in the program experience employment. Can you describe some of the key findings relating mothers' employment pathways to children's behavior and success in school? What seems to be the connection, here, between parents' employment and children's outcomes?

"We found that two particular patterns, or trajectories made a difference for children's development..."
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3. This program was implemented as a social experiment, allowing you to make comparisons between families who did and did not receive New Hope services. How did this experimental design contribute to the conclusions you drew from this work?

"I think this study was very different from a general study of low wage working children's development because it occurred within the test of a particular program and policy approach..."
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4. The New Hope approach to workforce development and welfare reform really seems to be working in Milwaukee. There are some strong policy implications here. Can you tell us what you think should happen at the federal policy level to bring about change? What about policy changes in the workplace to support working parents?

"The message of New Hope, that making work pay benefits children, has also been replicated in other experiments..."
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Read more about these important research findings and policy recommendations here.

Interview conducted by Maria Fusaro, doctoral student in Human Development and Psychology at HGSE