Families with Children

This collection of brief issue papers uses diverse data to describe 15 major problems facing American children and families. Each paper summarizes the state of knowledge about the scope of the problem, trends, current government expenditures, costs per case, effectiveness of current intervention strategies and public attitudes about the problem areas.

MAXIMUS, Inc. April 1988 This report was prepared under contract #HHS-100-85-0004 between HHS's Office of Social Services Policy (now the Office of Disability, Aging and Long-Term Care Policy) and MAXIMUS, Inc. For additional information about this subject, you can visit the ASPE home page at http://aspe.hhs.gov.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the health and disability status of AFDC families using information gathered in the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and to assess the implications for welfare work programs.

This paper presents the Survey of Income and Program Participation data on child care for working guardians on AFDC. These guardians use care by relatives 58% of the time for their youngest children under 6. They are thus using informal care arrangements which are generally free or low cost instead of more formal arrangements, for which one generally must pay.