Released: August 22, 2006

Welfare: Many left behind in reforms

Source: By Erik Eckholm, New York Times (Free Registration)

Over the last five years, Mysheda Autry has received welfare checks and food stamps, gone through a welfare-to-work program and briefly held several jobs. She has also given birth to her second and third children.

Ms. Autry, 25, with a 10th-grade education, was finally overwhelmed by the demands of work and family, and in February she showed up at the People’s Emergency Center, a social service agency, with her three children, a fourth on the way, no job and no place to live.

She has exceeded the usual five-year limit for receiving welfare, and although the state has given her a reprieve, her benefits will be cut off, she has been warned, if she does not resume full-time job-skill classes and a job search within eight and a half months after her new baby is born.

As political leaders give two cheers on Tuesday for the 10th anniversary of the welfare reform law that helped draw many single mothers from dependency into the work force, though often leaving them still in poverty, social workers and researchers are raising concerns about families that have not made the transition and often lead extraordinarily precarious lives.

These include mothers who, so beleaguered by personal problems and parenting that they have not been able to keep jobs, continue to need counseling and cash. They also include another large group of poor mothers — one million by some estimates — who are neither working nor receiving benefits.

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