In welfare and employment programs that provide earnings supplements, increased family income plays a key role in improving children's school achievement.
Over the past 30 years, welfare and other public programs for poor families have focused increasingly on promoting parents’ self-sufficiency by requiring and supporting employment. Evidence from a diverse set of random-assignment experiments now reveals some of the conditions under which promoting work among low-income, single parents helps or hurts children.
This report summarizes the results of recent research conducted as part of the Next Generation Project, a collaboration between researchers at MDRC and several leading research universities, which draws on data from welfare and employment experiments launched in the early 1990s aimed at increasing the self-sufficiency of low-income parents in the U.S. and Canada. In addition to providing evidence for policymakers to assess evolving welfare policies, this research helps advance our understanding of the effects of parents’ economic circumstances and child care arrangements on the development of low-income children.
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