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

Q1. 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. So for working poor parents in Milwaukee, an offer went out that if you were willing to work 30 hours a week, this program would provide wage supplements so that your income would be above the poverty line. So the central premise of New Hope was that if you work you should not be poor.

And unfortunately in too many situations in this country, you can be a parent raising children, working full-time and being under the Federal poverty line. So New Hope was centrally meant to kind of combat that problem. And the program also provided childcare subsidies, health insurance subsidies, and case managers who worked with parents with much lower case loads than is typical for, for example, welfare case workers who have hundreds of cases.

But case representative in New Hope might have about 50 cases. And so these case representatives worked very closely with parents to facilitate employment, but also on other kinds of-- you know, providing emotional support, providing attention to other family needs, and those kinds of things.

The book, Making It Work, was our exploration of how low wage work unfolds in the lives of these parents, how their pathways through the low wage labor market might actually affect their children's educational and social outcomes. And remarkably, there have been almost no books on the effects of low wage work on children. Most of the work on low wage work has simply been looking at these adults as workers, and not so much as parents or in terms of their children's development. So we used the benefit of New Hope's multiple waves of survey data, the fact that it was a social experiment, and longitudinal ethnic graphic study that was embedded within it to provide really rich, multi-method information about the lives of these families and their children."

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Q2. 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?

"Okay, we found that two particular patterns of work trajectories made a difference for children's development. And one was a trajectory characterized by really high job instability. So that means a high number of job across a relatively short time period, so an average of about six jobs across two years, and with very little wage growth between those jobs.

So you can imagine that that might create a lot of stress in the family, a lot of disruptions to the daily routine. And those are patterns that we found that might explain why children of mothers whose work trajectories were characterized by this job instability did worse. So the children had lower levels of school performance and higher levels of acting out behaviors as rated by the teachers.

On the positive side, a work trajectory that's characterized by full-time work with wage growth over the period of the two years resulted in increases in children's school performance and reductions in their acting out behaviors. So we find a mixed picture for low wage workers. So up till now, I think many people think that low wage work, in and of itself must be either all good or all bad for families. But we find a more complicated picture, so that there are certain kinds of job trajectories that look like they are good for children and certain ones that are more risky.

So as far as how those affect children, it seems that parental stress plays a role. It seems that if you have a positive job trajectory, it also increases the parents' educational expectations for their children. And that in turn was related to the children's school performance and engagement. So essentially if you're able to provide hope to the families by providing positive work experiences that then result in increases in income over time, that that can help actually improve children's school success.

In terms of other mechanisms we found a surprising association of wage growth with entry in marriage. So that for moms who were single moms at the beginning of the experiment, if their wages went up over time, their rates of marriage also increased. And in fact there, we found an experimental effect, so that the New Hope Program, which increased both employment and income, also substantially increased rates of marriage among the single mothers in the program.

And so one policy implication of that is that programs that make work pay by increasing both employment and income could be considered as one root towards this policy goal of marriage promotion that is currently being encouraged by the administration in Washington.

As far as other kinds of work patterns, we also looked at the effects of work hours on children. So non-standard hours, so hours that are not during the daytime, 9:00 to 5:00, during weekdays are very common among this sample. So about 70% of these parents were working some number of non-standard hours. And when non-standard hours occurred in combination with shifting schedules from week to week, that seemed to create disruptions in children's lives and that lowered their school performance, and they had more problematic social behaviors.

So, on the other hand, the combination of flexibility during the daytime hours, so daytime hours with schedules that changed from week to week occasionally, was actually positive for children. And teachers reported that those children had fewer internalizing problems. And that is kind of depressive or withdrawn kinds of behaviors. And that suggests that flexibility during the daytime hours might be beneficial for children. And we think that that might be because the parents are more able to respond to children's needs during the day. So to be able to run errands, take the child to a pediatrician, to be able to respond to a medical emergency, that the flexibility during the daytime to respond to children's needs might be helpful for children."

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Q3. 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?

"So I think this study was very different from a general study of low wage work in children's development because it occurred within the test of a particular program and policy approach. Work support services are a major part of the policy picture for the working poor, and yet there have not been enough tests of innovative program models and especially ones that test how these programs affect children.

So we draw implications of the experiment for policy in the area of workforce development policies and welfare reform policies. And most of the public, when thinking about programs that improve children's lives and their educational success, don't think of policies related to parental work. But we show in this book that workforce development and welfare reform policies can affect children's educational success.

So the New Hope model was unusual in that it was operated out of storefronts, community-based organizations that were not affiliated with the welfare system, but provided a supportive and friendly environment, a non-stigmatizing environment in which to facilitate parent's positive work experiences and provide concrete help to them.

So we think it's a model that is worth replicating in other places in the country. New Hope was implemented in Milwaukee, in two low income neighborhoods. But we think the model is worth expanding and replicating. The program has had sustained positive effects on children at two-, five-, and eight-year follow-ups in the realms of school performance, standardized achievement and social behaviors. So we think it's a proven model with sustained, long-term effects, one of the very, very few examples of sustained positive effects on children of an employment and income-based program. So it was an enormous benefit to the research to have the experimental design of the research inform just how the world of work affects children's lives."

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Q4. 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 that were evaluated by MDRC, the policy research firm that did the evaluation of New Hope. And so this is work by people like Greg Duncan, Aletha Houston, Pamela Morris, and others, show that across these experiments, approaches to work employment policy and welfare policy, that both increase employment and increase income, can benefit children's school achievement.

That has now been replicated across five separate experiments that were conducted in the mid- to late-1990s. So the set of findings together provides strong replicated support for the idea that making work pay is a good policy approach for children. So in this book, we draw implications, both from New Hope, but also from these other experiments to suggest that the replication of this approach to work support that pays attention to income, that also provides support for childcare, can be effective, not only in increasing parents' earnings and their work effort, but also their children's school success and their behavior in the classroom.

So we think that the New Hope model, for example, should be replicated in both the welfare system, but also outside the welfare system, partly because the welfare system now serves a very different population than it served before welfare reform. So it's a more restricted sample of low income parents. And so to reach a broader chunk of the working poor population, you need to also go outside the welfare system in the more general income population. So we believe the New Hope model of work supports should be replicated, both inside and outside the welfare system.

We also suggest that expanding other forms of policies that make work pay should be considered. So, for example, the primary Federal policy to make work pay is a tax policy. It's the earned income tax credit. And it provides supplements to the working poor, contingent on how much they earn. And so the earned income tax credit we argue should be expanded, because the New Hope model suggests that an increment of income contingent on work to working poor parents can provide important benefits to their children.

And there's another tax credit called the dependent care tax credit which provides an additional source of income. But currently it is non-refundable, which means that for parents who don't make enough money in their employment to pay taxes, they don't benefit from this tax credit. And so we believe that the dependent care tax credit should be made refundable so that those parents would be able to benefit from that extra income.

Finally, in the workplace we suggest that flex time policies, based on our findings that flexible work hours during the day can benefit children, that flex time policies should be implemented in low wage work places."

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