It is not that government can do no good for children. It has enhanced their material well-being. Poor children almost certainly live better today in terms of housing, health care, diets and schooling than ever before. This may seem hard to believe, given the high official poverty rate for children: 21 percent in 1996. But this familiar statistic is misleading, because it counts only people’s cash income and ignores food stamps, Medicaid and other noncash government support. These reduce poverty by a third, to 14 percent.
The President’s Council of Economic Advisers recently reviewed studies of children’s well-being and found steady gains. Less than 2 percent of children go hungry in a year because their families can’t afford food. Children from families below the poverty line are visiting doctors more often; for those in “fair or poor health,” the average number of visits rose from 11 a year in the late 1980s to 14 in the mid-1990s. Housing has improved. In 1978, about 9 percent of children lived in crowded housing (more than one person per room); by the 1990s, this was 6 percent.
But these material gains have not prevented social breakdown: neighborhoods with too much crime, an explosion of single-parent families, the glorification of instant gratification. Government hasn’t generally done what Clinton thinks it ought to do. It has not been able to “invest,” in the sense that what’s spent today will make poor recipients more productive, self-reliant and responsible people tomorrow. The latest evidence of this comes from the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP).
Created by Congress in 1988, the CCDP was modeled after a Chicago program called the Beethoven project. The idea was to provide intensive social services to poor mothers for the first five years of their children’s lives. They would get everything from parenting classes to job training to drug counseling. This would make them more competent parents; their children would benefit. The federal program was intended as a demonstration to see whether this approach could work nationally. By taking programs shown to work on a small scale–so it was said–and making them widely available, the plan responded to complaints by children’s advocates that government had never seriously attacked child poverty.
Under the CCDP, young mothers received home visits every two weeks from “case managers,” who taught parenting skills, advised on personal problems and identified useful government services. About 4,400 families were enrolled in the study. Half received the extra counseling; half (the “control” group) didn’t. All were below the government’s poverty line; 58 percent were single mothers; 51 percent had not finished high school; 35 percent had had their first child before 18. Annual spending was high: $15,768 per family. This amount (equal to or greater than their cash income) covered only the extra counseling. It excluded other government payments–for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid–that families also received.
And the result? Here’s what Abt Associates, a research firm, concluded: “CCDP did not produce any important positive effects on participating families.” Many mothers did make progress. Some went to school. Some got jobs. Probably many became better parents. But the same progress–or lack of it–occurred among the control group that didn’t get extra counseling.
The similarities are stunning. After five years, 40 percent of the mothers in the program had jobs; so did 41 percent of the mothers in the control group. Their weekly wages ($245 and $239) were almost identical. Similarly, 68 percent of families in both groups received food stamps. The results for children were also the same. At the age of 5, the children in the program scored 81.1 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test; children not in the program scored 81.0. Children in both groups visited doctors at the same rate; there were no differences in behavioral problems.
To use Clinton’s language: the return on this investment for society was zero. It was a waste of money. This does not mean that the experiment was a mistake. Demonstration projects aim to show what works and what doesn’t. The theory behind the program seemed humane and workable. The experiment cost $326 million over nine years. It is now being discontinued. Perhaps we have saved ourselves billions. But the broad results also suggest two obvious lessons about the rhetoric of “investing.”
The first is that what people do for themselves matters more than what government tries to do for them. Government should provide social services and income support for the desperately poor. But these are more expressions of collective decency than “investments.” And there is a dilemma. A society that is too free with its decency will promote dependency. It will induce those who could do for themselves to let someone else do for them.
The second lesson is that the “investments” that truly count for children come from parents: love and security, discipline and instruction, a sense of worth. Being rich is no guarantee that parents will provide these; being poor is no indicator that they won’t. But large federal programs, whatever their benefits, can’t undo parental failure. Nor can they offset the ill effects of family breakdown. To think otherwise sanctions the behaviors that put children at risk.
If society can “invest” its way out of social problems, then individuals are relieved of responsibility. Marriage loses its social value. Young men can father and abandon children. Mothers and fathers can easily leave troubled marriages. Americans once embraced a moral code that had strong taboos against these behaviors. Though often violated, the taboos imposed useful restraints. Perhaps we need old morality more than new investment.
