Child Care Subsidies and TANF
A Synthesis of Three Studies on Systems, Policies, and Parents
Over recent decades, policymakers have recognized that helping parents on welfare pay for child care is essential to help them move from welfare to work.
As such, child care subsidies that help defray some of or all the cost of child care have consistently been an integral part of federal and state welfare reform efforts.
They were a major focus of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and the cash assistance and welfare-to-work program it established (the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, program).
Although TANF families make up a relatively small proportion of the families that receive child care subsidy funding (with some additional families receiving child care support through TANF direct spending), child care is a key component of TANF welfare-to-work programs' efforts to help families move toward self-sufficiency.
Although the connection between child care as a work support and the TANF program's mandate to help welfare recipients obtain employment is conceptually simple, the actual processes and policies used by states and localities to ensure child care assistance is available for TANF families moving from welfare to work is far more complicated.
The complexity arises in part because child care subsidy and TANF welfare-to-work programs represent two devolved systems that differ in their goals, target populations, administrative structures, and policy frameworks.
