141
Values Underpinning
Poverty Programs
for Children
H. Hugh Heclo
Abstract
Values create a framework through which the American public gives meaning to particular concepts and events. To better understand the values underlying public support for poverty programs for children, this article examines public attitudes toward
children, poverty, and government. Although Americans continue to view helping
children as a top policy priority, there is ambivalence with regard to poor children
because of their inevitable connection to poor adults and the public’s expectation that
adults be self-sufficient. Rather than choosing between extreme ideological views of
the causes of poverty and the ideal role of government in curbing poverty, the
American public takes an integrative perspective that both values individual initiative
and supports opportunities for all Americans. Favored are government programs fitted to the practical needs of everyday life. Such programs should support personal
efforts but not assume responsibility for individual or particular group outcomes.
V
alue underpinnings are the normative standards that are brought
to bear on public policies for impoverished children. As defined
in this article, they are not abstract matters of philosophical
debate, but rather framing perspectives through which Americans assign
worth and meaning to public policy events and conditions.
In recent decades, attacks on national antipoverty policies have
shown that value underpinnings are of immense practical importance.
Commitments of tax dollars that are not seen to express and enforce
values shared by most Americans are highly vulnerable to political
attack and public rejection—regardless of what policy analysts might
have to say about program effectiveness, costs, and benefits. In fact,
empirical policy analysis has frequently been reinterpreted to serve
value-based political rhetoric.1 In this sense, antipoverty policies that
are not value-based will not work. They will lack the durable, mainstream support from the American public that makes for sustainable
policy.
The Future of Children CHILDREN AND POVERTY Vol. 7 • No. 2 – Summer/Fall 1997
H. Hugh Heclo, Ph.D.,
is Robinson professor of
public affairs at George
Mason University in
Fairfax, VA.
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THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN – SUMMER/FALL 1997
Value underpinnings demand especially serious attention in an era
when debates over social policies often serve as metaphors for cultural anxieties. The evidence from opinion surveys and the tenor of public discourse
demonstrates that, despite conditions of relative peace and material prosperity, Americans have grown deeply troubled by a sense that much of life is
spinning out of control—not only public and household budgets but youth
and schools, jobs, family life, crime, popular culture, and political processes.2
Such growing uncertainties carry a compensating insistence that public
policies affirm enduring values, however difficult it is for policymakers to
implement that sentiment. To the American public, the terms “children,”
“poverty,” and “government” are value-charged.3 Combined into the one
rubric of government-sponsored child poverty programs, these terms present an arena where intensely felt values can be deployed without directly
judging the behavior of the majority of citizens. They are also an arena
where the people in question—children and poor adults—are often not
politically present to speak for themselves.
This article examines American values concerning each point of the
conceptual triad—children, poverty, and government, in turn—and concludes with implications for program design.
Valuing Children
Americans in general place a very high value
on children. Despite its sad statistics on child
poverty, American society has long been
noted for doting on its children.
Historically, children have been seen variously as the hope for preserving the republic and its mission for the world, and as a
means of increasing the supply of consumers and future workers.4 Hence, it is not
surprising that “child-saving” became the
creed of many progressive era reformers
more than 100 years ago.5 They, as well as
later social reformers, understood that by
maintaining a focus on the issue of valuing
children, large reservoirs of public sympathy
could be tapped.
The public still feels this way about children. Even in the immediate aftermath of
the 1994 Republican victory in Congress,
Americans continued to assign very high
policy priority to children. By one survey,
three-fourths of voters agreed that political
leaders were not doing enough to help solve
the problems facing children; in December
1994, five times more Americans wanted to
see government spending on programs for
poor children increased (47%) rather than
decreased (9%).6 So ingrained is the public’s presumption of valuing children that
Democratic pollsters probing attitudes
about program cutbacks found that in 1995
Americans were unwilling to believe that
anyone would knowingly do something to
harm children; harmful policy consequences for children were seen by focus
groups as the unintended results of bureaucratic and political bumbling.7 The inherent
neediness of children resonates strongly
with that strand of American values that
endorses the idea of meeting basic human
needs for those who are in no position to
help themselves.8
While public sympathy for children’s
causes is obvious, some of the costs of
exploiting that sympathy have not been recognized. Child-focused strategies have sometimes taken the place of thinking seriously
about and mobilizing support for adult
needs. In a policy sense, child-focused
reform has turned parents into dependents
of their children, with parents’ access to certain benefits dependent on the presence of
their children. This tendency has prevailed
since the transition early this century from
institutionalized care and outplacing of children to mothers’ pensions (through the Aid
for Dependent Children program of the
1930s) and the gradual transformation of
that program from a widows’ to a divorced
and never-married mothers’ income support program. Often without knowing it,
modern advocates of various antipoverty
efforts have echoed the words spoken at the
Values Underpinning Poverty Programs for Children
1909 White House Conference on Children:
“. . . the circle of philanthropic effort has
widened to include the inefficient and delinquent parent, because of the child. . . .
there is one cause for which we can obtain
wide sympathy and ample support, and that
is the child.”9
Attitudes Toward Poverty
When the public’s evaluation of poverty itself
is examined, an inherent tension in the value
framework regarding poor children becomes
clear. On the one hand, children are seen
as inherently needy and deserving. On the
other hand, children are also necessarily
attached to adults, and adults are expected
to be self-sufficient. In fact, there is probably
no more consistent and uniform finding in
survey research than that the public values
jobs and work for able-bodied poor adults.
As one researcher put it, “Work programs,
regardless of how they are explained, are
popular because they seem to engage all
sides of the public’s mind: its egalitarian
desire to help those in need, its hierarchical
desire to enforce a central societal norm,
and its individualist desire to foster independence and self-reliance.”10
When Americans marshal reasons for
fighting poverty, the emphasis is not on
income poverty as defined by statistical measures created and employed by academics
and program administrators. Rather it is on
poverty as a condition of misery, hopelessness, and dependency.11 Fighting poverty—
defined as raising the income level of those
at the bottom of the economic distribution
up to the poverty income line—has never
had strong support from the American public. Even at the height of 1960s radicalism,
there was never public support, including
among the poor, for income guarantees to
combat poverty.12 Support for governmental
help with jobs has consistently outweighed
any public interest in income assistance
for nonelderly adults. All the familiar
reform refrains in U.S. political history have
addressed this approach to poverty: help
for those who will help themselves, aid for
the deserving but no reward for vice and
folly, a hand up rather than a handout.
Academics and opinion leaders may disagree about whether children’s problems,
and poverty more generally, are a function
of individual moral and motivational failings
or of societal deficiencies. The truth is that
the American public considers both personal
responsibility and socially provided opportunity as essential. Because of the perception
that welfare programs replace work and
opportunity with cash and dependency,
however, Americans dislike welfare programs for families with children, while still
supporting children’s causes generally.10
Hence, value underpinnings for child
poverty programs embrace competing
desires for economic self-sufficiency and for
fulfillment of basic needs.13 Furthermore,
public attitudes endorsing the fulfillment of
children’s basic needs do not generally
extend to adults. Poverty statistics can be presented in a way that makes children appear
to be a demographically separate group, but
they are not viewed by the public as being
separate. The poverty of children is inherently bound up with the poverty of caretaker
adults, and there are few straightforward
ways to “fix things for kids” without also
working through or on adults.
Programs that do provide benefits directly
to children, rather than through caretaker
adults, have received more broad-based public support in recent years. For example,
efforts to modify the National School Lunch
Program (NSLP) as part of the Republicans’
Contract with America were defeated in 1995
as were similar efforts during the Reagan
administration. The 1995 proposal would
have reduced projected NSLP expenditures
by about 5% over five years and attempted to
achieve greater efficiency by block-granting
funding to the states and reducing federal
oversights. It was successfully beaten back by
an aggressive advocacy campaign that
focused on the prospect of large increases in
the number of hungry children if the programs were changed.14 In contrast, the wellpublicized finding that more than one million additional children would be plunged
into poverty under the 1996 welfare reform
bill because of the cutoff of cash payments to
their nonworking parents did not derail
enactment of that law. And, as described in
more detail in the article by Currie in this
journal issue, on a per-child basis, real Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
cash payments to poor families declined over
the past 20 years, while real expenditures on
in-kind programs for poor children grew
dramatically.
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THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN – SUMMER/FALL 1997
Similarly, the public desire to encourage
work and support those who help themselves has facilitated the dramatic fourfold
growth in expenditures on the Earned
Income Tax Credit (see also the article by
Plotnick in this journal issue), a program
designed to reward work for low wages.
Public norms have also changed so that
mothers are now included in the overarching consensus that adults should be self-sufficient. Income assistance for poor children
and their parents grew out of a normative
order that saw mothers’ work outside the
home as a threat to family life. When a family lost its male breadwinner (through death
or abandonment), public payments were
legitimated as a way of keeping the family
together and upholding the main maternal
child-rearing role of women in their separate domestic sphere. Attitudes and behavior in this regard have been transformed
with astonishing speed in the past several
decades. Between 1949 and 1994, the proportion of married mothers with young
children and who worked outside the home
rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and
opinion surveys show a comparable shift
in American attitudes favoring the participation of mothers in the labor force.15 This
shift in attitude makes it even more difficult
than previously to combat child poverty
simply by transferring money to families
with children.
Attitudes Toward
Government
Since roughly mid-century, Americans have
expressed a declining trust in government,
public officials, and policymaking processes
as a whole. This appears to be part of a larger
cultural phenomenon of declining trust in
social institutions and expert authority,
and among people in everyday life.16
Ideologically charged disagreement among
opinion leaders and policy analysts may further this distrust by giving a picture to the
public of policy research as sophisticated
partisan advocacy.17 Hence, government policymakers, despite their expertise and presumed good will, enjoy little public forbearance. Today, public support for the use of
government to address problems of childhood poverty cannot be built primarily on
faith in experts’ technical knowledge, much
less on policymakers’ good intentions.
Opinion leaders present two extreme
ideological perspectives with regard to using
government to address problems of children. This divisiveness came into sharp focus
when First Lady Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book
celebrated the African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” as a suggested metaphor
for America’s approach to children.18
Mrs. Clinton writes, “There is no such
thing as other people’s children,” and adds,
“Children will only thrive if their families
thrive, and if the whole of society cares
enough to provide for them.”18 This vision
includes an extensive public and private support system with government playing an
important role in helping families with
their responsibility for children’s welfare.
It embraces a strong child protection system
with a broad conception of child abuse and
thus more intervention in families, as well as
developmental services, such as governmentregulated quality child care. As the First Lady
defines it, the village of our mass society is no
longer a place but “the network of values and
relationships that support and affect our
lives,” and there seems to be little that could
not be under the collective scrutiny, caring,
and provision of this extended village.18
Critics of this view claim to share some
similar values with regard to children and
the need for parental responsibility and supportive communities, but believe that it is not
the role of government to build communities
that nurture children. Its opponents criticize
the first perspective as a big-government, collectivist approach to child rearing.19 Similar
criticisms were voiced in the debate over the
Child Development Act of 1971, vetoed by
President Nixon, which declared that comprehensive child development programs
should be available as a matter of right to all
children.20 They arose with greater virulence in 1996 in reaction to It Takes a Village.
The turmoil can be expected to grow in the
future as conservative activists push for legislation protecting parental rights from what is
seen as the cultural liberalism of education
and government establishments.21
This second perspective focuses primarily
on energetic family support from local community institutions such as the church,
neighborhood groups, and volunteer organizations. It rejects a strong government presence in child and family matters and views
Values Underpinning Poverty Programs for Children
government as serving children and families
best by stopping the harm its policies already
cause families, schools, and voluntary community activities.22 As one proponent of this
perspective states, “We, not the government,
must take care of our neighbors. When it
comes to welfare, we are the ones who must
give sacrificially of our time and money. . . .
Cultural change must be fought for and won
in our homes, in our schools, on Main Street,
even in our places of worship. The only reason to rebuild the village is to solidify those
non-governmental institutions that support
and offer resources to the family. True cultural change will inoculate us when political
change threatens our values.”23
The American public, however, holds a
third, more integrated view of government,
as both problem and problem solver. It both
values the family as a fundamentally private
unit that should carry the prime responsibility for children and acknowledges that the
welfare of children in families can be significantly strengthened or weakened, depending on what the government and communities do or do not do.
So deeply embedded is the premise that
the central responsibility for children’s wellbeing rests with parents that governmental
assumption of responsibility can fail to occur
even under the most dire circumstances, as
in the well-publicized failures of child protective service agencies to intervene in some
cases of extreme child abuse.24 Likewise,
although well-run programs that assume
parental functions appear capable of helping young children who are identified as at
risk of school failure and antisocial pathologies, proposing strong government intervention in this direction runs the risk of a public backlash.25
Therefore, from 1986 to 1994, despite
the changes in party control of the
Presidency and Congress, the American
public varied little in its feeling that there are
roles for both government and individual
self-help in improving the living standards of
poor Americans.26 Moreover, surveys taken
in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan
Revolution, suggest that the public view of
antipoverty programs depends on the kinds
of needs different people are thought to
have and the nature of the public program
in question.27 The proportion of Americans
in favor of scrapping government welfare
programs remained in the single digits. Cash
assistance and food programs were seen as
appropriate for the elderly poor and disabled persons but inappropriate for other
adults. Food programs were seen as a high
priority for poor children but not all children. Special kinds of training and education programs were most willingly supported
for all disabled persons and nonelderly poor
adults because they could bring new groups
of people closer to the independence that
comes with employment. Priority for catastrophic health insurance was given first to
children, then the elderly, but not to other
adults. The public’s overwhelming priority
for poor parents was for work and workrelated services. Though these data are crude,
they do provide a picture of public thinking
that shows the complex ways in which value
judgments are made.
Increasingly, however, policy reforms
such as an aggressive government jobs
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THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN – SUMMER/FALL 1997
146
program or tax increases to finance new
programs to help children must confront
the public’s distrust of government and
politicians’ promises. Rebuilding trust,
always a slow process, will depend on showing the public that new policies and the people who make them are, in fact, trustworthy.
Conclusion
Americans generally agree that there is a
public, governmental responsibility to assist
those who are lacking the necessities of
life—the necessities being understood to
include a promise that all persons have a reasonable chance of working toward their own
individual notions of success. This promise
has come to be called the American Dream,
and Americans today still generally stand
together in supporting this long-standing
dream.28 What exists in the public mind is a
blending of value categories—joint responsibility for assuring opportunity to all and personal responsibility for working hard and
honestly to make use of it.29 Such a public
ethos supports a pragmatic approach that
endorses finding workable programs to fill
practical needs and fit everyday life.
Work holds center stage as a value for the
behavior of adults, but it is work with—and
not as a substitute for—public help in entering and surviving in the labor market,
including educational and other assistance
offering people second or additional
chances to make something of themselves.
To fit public value preferences, public policies should support personal efforts but not
assume responsibilities that rightly belong to
individuals or guarantee outcomes for individuals or particular social groups.
Because children’s poverty is seen as
inherently connected to adult parents, it is
within this connection that any children’s
right to income must first reside. Any child
has a publicly enforceable right to material
support from the two human beings who
brought him or her into the world. Only
recently has this public value begun to be
used to promote the enforcement of child
support laws.30
In public valuations, however, the
national minimum standard of living is not
a matter of income but of life chances in
which people can get the help that is needed to take responsibility for themselves and
their children. It does not yield to a neat
aggregate measure any more than does the
American Dream. The way to achieve this
national minimum is not through a government program but through a commitment
involving the whole nation in which opportunities for parents to become self-supporting
are offered throughout both public and private sectors.
Reformers committed to a view of poverty
as an income gap problem may argue that
this approach will not help if minimum
income needs are not met. For example,
moving mothers off welfare and into jobs
that pay below-poverty-level wages does not
represent success from an income-poverty
perspective, but it may well be a success to
the public eye. Working parents are seen
as positive role models for their children.31
Furthermore, working is regarded as a
worthy way to live and a societal norm
Americans seek in navigating between the
values of personal responsibility and a fair
chance for all.32
The looming problem foreshadowed in
public values is that disparities in these life
chances may result as state variations are
given full play in the current era of policy
devolution from Washington.33 Though it is
currently small, increasing concern about
inequality of opportunity across states will
likely play a large part in driving the next
cycle of child poverty reforms.
1. Schram, S.F. Words of welfare: The poverty of social science and the social science of poverty.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
2. Popular accounts of this development are in Yankelovich, D. New rules: Searching for self-fulfillment in a world turned upside down. New York: Random House, 1981; Hunter, J.D. Culture wars:
The struggle to define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991; Engelhardt, T. The end of victory
culture. New York: Basic Books, 1995; Himmelfarb, G. The demoralization of society. New York:
Knopf, 1995; Wattenberg, B.J. Values matter most. New York: Free Press, 1995.
3. See, for example, Chapters 7 and 8 of Gutmann, A., and Thompson, D. Democracy and
Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Values Underpinning Poverty Programs for Children
4. These themes are described in Pangle, L.S., and Pangle, T.L. The learning of liberty. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1993; Leach, W. Land of desire. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
5. Tiffin, S. In whose best interest? Child welfare reform in the Progressive Era. Westport, CT: Westport
Press, 1982; Ashby, L. Saving the waifs: Reformers and dependent children, 1890–1917.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.
6. Lake Research and the Tarrance Group. National survey of registered voters, July 18–19,
1995. Information about surveys conducted by these two groups may be obtained by calling
(202) 776-9066; DeParle, J. The nation: Despising welfare, pitying its young. New York Times.
December 18, 1994, at Section 4, p. 5.
7. Celinda Lake of Lake Research. Comments at the conference entitled Whither American
Social Policy? New York City: Carnegie Corporation, November 10, 1995.
8. Bob, L., and Smith, R.A. Antipoverty policy and racial attitudes. In Confronting poverty. S.H.
Danziger, G.D. Sandefur, and D.H. Weinberg, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1994, pp. 382–83. Throughout the past 50 years of public opinion polling, Americans have
shown a strong commitment to government’s helping those who cannot help themselves. See,
for example, Page, B.I., and Shapiro, R.Y. The rational public. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992, pp. 118, 126.
9. Proceedings of the conference on the care of dependent children. Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1909, p. 207.
10. Teles, S.M. Whose welfare? AFDC and elite politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996, p. 55.
11. Hochschild, J. What’s fair? American beliefs about distributive justice. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981; McClosky, H., and Zaller, J. The American ethos. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984; Gans, H.J. Middle American individualism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991.
12. Davies, G. From opportunity to entitlement: The transformation and decline of Great Society liberalism.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. As Davies makes clear, this shift to “entitlement
liberalism” was in opposition to, rather than expressive of, the Great Society policy agenda. At
the height of antipoverty rhetoric, the Heineman Commission proposed a sweeping national
income guarantee with no justification beyond a passing reference to the intolerableness of a
situation in which some people lack basic necessities in an era of plenty. Poverty amid plenty.
Report of the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs. Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office, November, 1969, pp. 9, 41. At that same time, 62% of
Americans opposed guaranteed income proposals, but 79% favored the idea of a government-guaranteed job for all Americans. Davies, p. 9; see also Marmor, T.R., Mashaw, J.L., and
Harvey, P.L. America’s misunderstood welfare state. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
13. Smolensky, E. What’s wrong with welfare and what should we do about it? Public Affairs Report
(November 1992) 33,6:1.
14. Pear, R. G.O.P. finds it difficult to deflect attacks on the school lunch proposals. New York
Times. April 9, 1995, at Section 1, p. 18. There exists a broad base of support for school feeding programs from nonpoor groups including low- and middle-income families who may
receive subsidized meals and farmers whose surplus commodities are used in the program.
Support from these groups may help account for the resiliency of the program in the face of
attempts to cut it back.
15. Bronfenbrenner, U., McClelland, P., Wethington, E., et al., The state of Americans. New York:
Free Press, 1996, p. 110; Davis, J.A., and Smith, T.W. General social surveys, 1972–1994:
Cumulative code book. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 1994, Items 199, 200, and
252; Garfinkel, I., and McLanahan, S.S. Single mothers and their children. Washington, DC:
Urban Institute, 1988.
16. See, for example, data from the Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard Survey. Morin, R., and Balz,
D. Americans losing trust in each other and institutions: Suspicion of strangers breeds widespread cynicism. Washington Post. January 28, 1996, at A1, A6–A7. See also Rosenstone, S.J.,
Miller, W.E., Kinder, D.R., et al. American national election study, 1994: Post-election survey.
Variable nos. 1033, 1035, 1037. Conducted by the University of Michigan, Center for Political
Studies. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, and Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (producers), 1995; Weisberg, J. In
defense of government: The fall and rise of public trust, New York: Scribner, 1996, Chapter 2; and,
for some manifestations in public policymaking, see Baumgartner, F.R., and Jones, B.D.
Agendas and instability in American politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
17. Smith, J.A. The idea brokers. New York: Free Press, 1991; see also note no. 10, Teles, Chapter 4.
147
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18. Clinton, H.R. It takes a village and other lessons children teach us. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995. Reviews indicative of the ideological divide include Cockburn, A. Hillary reveals her
true colors. Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1996, at B9; Fox-Genovese, E. Village person.
National Review (March 11, 1996) 48,4:62–64; Schiffren, L. Hail to the Chief. The American
Spectator (March 1996) 29,3:67–69; Gigot, P. Hillary’s book: It takes memory loss. Wall Street
Journal. January 19, 1996, at A10; Pinkerton, J.P. Big brother knows best for children. Los
Angeles Times, January 18, 1996, at B9; Shulevitz, J. The virtue monger. New York (January 29,
1996) 29,4:46–47; Elshtain, J.B. Suffer the little children. New Republic (March 4, 1996)
214,10:33–38.
19. Looking at this viewpoint more broadly, there is little reason to confine the village concept to
children. It also takes a village to deal well with the infirm and ill, the elderly and homeless,
and the economically downtrodden.
20. Cohen, A.J. A brief history of federal financing for child care in the United States. The Future
of Children (Summer/Fall 1996) 6,2:26–40.
21. See, for example, the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act of 1995, a constitutional
amendment proposed and defeated in the 104th Congress (S. 984/H.R. 1946). For parental
rights legislation at the state level, see the proposed Colorado Parental Rights Amendment,
Amendment 17, defeated in the November 1996 elections.
22. Olasky, M. The tragedy of American compassion. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992;
James, K.C. Transforming America: From the inside out. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995.
23. James, K.C. Transforming America. Imprimis (February 1996) 25,2:5.
24. See D.J. Besharov’s account of work on the New York Commission on Child Abuse and New
York City Child Fatality Review Panel, reported in Besharov, D.J. How to save children.
New York Times. January 13, 1996, at Section 1, p. 23.
25. Wilson, J.Q. Culture, incentives, and the underclass. In Values and public policy. H.J. Aaron,
T.E. Mann, and T. Taylor, eds. Washington: Brookings Institute, 1994.
26. Survey participants were asked to respond to the following statement, “Some people think
that the government in Washington should do everything possible to improve the standard of
living of all poor Americans.” Those who agreed were at point one. Those who felt it is not
the government’s responsibility and that each person should take care of him- or herself were
at point five. Responses were consistent in each of the eight years in which the survey was
conducted. Between 13% and 19% of respondents were at point one (the government should
do everything possible). Between 8% and 12% responded at point five (people should take
care of themselves). The largest category of responses (43% to 48%) was at point three (there
is a role for both the government and for individual effort). National Opinion Research
Center. General population surveys. Chicago: NORC, 1986–1991, 1993, 1994.
27. Cook, F.L., and Barrett, E.J. Support for the American welfare state. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992, pp. 72–76.
28. Hochschild, J.L. Facing up to the American Dream. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
29. Sklar, J. American citizenship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
30. Garfinkel, I. Economic security for children: From means testing and bifurcation to universality. In Social policies for children. I. Garfinkel, J.L. Hochschild, and S.S. McLanahan, eds.
Washington: Brookings Institute, 1996, pp. 33–82.
31. Wilson, W.J. When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Knopf, 1996.
32. All of this comes into view with reported public attitudes regarding welfare reform. Ninety
percent or more of Americans seek welfare reform to give people the means to become selfsufficient and not to cut costs by getting people off the welfare rolls. Sixty percent agree with
the practice of providing welfare payments to unmarried mothers under 18 who have no
other way of supporting their children, but 90% want welfare mothers with small children,
like other able-bodied welfare recipients, to be required to work or learn a job skill. Many
Americans support time limits on the receipt of welfare but, most strikingly, when the deadline is followed by a community service or job requirement. Weaver, R.K., Shapiro, R.Y., and
Jacobs, L.R. The polls—trends, welfare. Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 1995) 59,4:606–627.
33. Peterson, P.E. Budget deficits and the race to the bottom. In Report I: Whither American social
policy? S.B. Kamerman and A.J. Kahn, eds., New York: Columbia University School of Social
Work, 1996; Kondratas, A. Reflections on national welfare policy and state reform options.
In Report II: Planning a state welfare strategy under waivers or block grants. S.B. Kamerman and
A.J. Kahn, eds. New York: Columbia University School of Social Work, 1996.