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Project Description

Project Advance and Teen Progress used case management and mandatory education, job training, or employment for pregnant and parenting teen welfare recipients with one child. Participation was mandatory for all teenagers who were receiving AFDC and were either first time parents or (in Illinois) had no children but were in the third trimester of pregnancy.

Project duration: Oct 1986 - Feb 1998

Sites studied include Chicago, Illinois
Camden, New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey

Sample Characteristics and Sites Studied

5,297 welfare recipients (89% of those eligible).

Random sample of 2,650 experimental group members and 2,647 control group members.

Recent Findings in Brief

02/01/98: Teenage Parent Demonstration Program: Moving Into Adulthood: Were the Impacts of Mandatory Programs for Welfare-Dependent Teenage Parents Sustained After the Programs Ended?

Final Impact Findings:

“The first phase of the evaluation showed that states can operate large-scale, mandatory work-oriented programs for teenage parents”(xvi).

“The demonstration programs increased rates of school attendance, job training, and employment but produced few significant differences in marriage, living arrangements, fertility, or child support during the first two years following intake”(xvii).

“For most of the young mothers, the cycle of welfare dependency has not yet been broken”(xvii).

“The promising early impacts of the programs on employment-related activities and welfare dependence faded once the demonstration programs ended and participants returned to regular AFDC and Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) programs”(xvii).

“The early impacts of the programs on employment-related activities and welfare started to erode at about the time sanctions and support services ended for the enhanced services group”(xviii).

“Mothers in both the regular- and the enhanced-services groups reported receiving very little financial aid support”(xviii).

“On average, during the six- to seven-year follow-up period, the young mothers in both the regular- and the enhanced-services group became pregnant twice and gave birth to between one and two additional children”(xviii).

“Exposure to the demonstration welfare policies and programs did not substantially reduce subsequent pregnancies and births”(xviii).

“When they were in elementary school, the first-born children of the teenage mothers performed poorly, compared with children nationally, on several measures of development and well-being”(xix).

“The programs produced no impacts on mothers’ parenting or on the quantity of the home environments they provided for their first-born children” (xix).

“Requiring teenage mothers to participate in activities, and increasing their use of child care when their children were very young, had neither harmful nor beneficial effects on their children’s development” (xix).

“Teenage mothers respond positively to clear expectations when financial consequences and support services accompany those expectations"”(xx).

“Most teenage parents are capable of employment but need encouragement and some support services” (xx).

“Ensuring access to child care was an important part of the intervention, but fewer participants use program-provided child care subsidies than had been anticipated” (xx).

“The evaluation results suggest that requiring teenage mothers of young children to participate in full-time (30 hours per week) out-of-home activities is not harmful to children, as some worried that it might be” (xxi).

“It is important to help teenagers reduce their fertility, but different strategies than those tried in this demonstration are needed” (xxi).

“The demonstration underscored the difficulty of changing the life courses of poor teenage parents by intervening after they become parents” (xxi).

“The noncustodial fathers of children born to poor teenage parents provide little social or economic support” (xxi).

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