Welfare Law May Return Teens to Unstable Homes

ORANGE — There are many reasons 17-year-old Elizabeth would never leave her baby daughter with her parents, but the main one is that her mother and stepfather are crack addicts.

They will smoke the rent money, the food money, the money for clothes. If they aren’t high, Elizabeth said, they may remember to send her brothers and sisters to school.

“At my mother’s house, the adults are the kids and the kids are the adults,” she said.

She ran away to her boyfriend’s home last year when she was pregnant, and since then it has been Elizabeth’s goal to keep her 7-month-old daughter far away from her parents.

But because Elizabeth receives welfare and food stamps, soon the county will decide whether she must move back home.

Under new laws, states cannot give teenage parents welfare unless the teen lives with a parent, guardian or other adult relative. But Elizabeth, and several other teen mothers on welfare in Orange County, stressed they had good reasons for leaving home, and it wasn’t because their parents gave them stability and support.

Because the federal government granted the state a waiver, California is implementing the program ahead of schedule. This month, social workers begin determining where teenage welfare mothers should live. If they find a girl’s family is abusive or the parents will not take her back, they will help her make other living arrangements, with another relative, for example. Otherwise she must live at home.

About 430 teen mothers in Orange County receive welfare, and most live at home, as do the majority of teen mothers nationally, said Gail Dratch, director of the county program supervising teenagers on welfare. In Orange County, fewer than 100 girls will be affected by the new rules. The federal government expects the move-home requirement to affect only 6,500 girls nationwide.

Because of the small number of girls involved, the immediate savings to the welfare program are expected to be meager. The federal government estimates about 60% of teen welfare mothers who live on their own will be exempted because of abuse issues, but that it will yank welfare from about 30% of the girls who refuse to return home. The savings nationally is expected to be $12 million, according to a UC Berkeley study prepared for the U.S. General Accounting Office last year.

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The study cites research estimating teen motherhood costs taxpayers almost $16 billion yearly in welfare and food stamps, increased medical care expenses, foster care, lost tax revenue and in increased incarceration expenses.

Other teen pregnancy experts have argued the figure is dramatically inflated. Even if most teens on welfare waited until they were older to have babies, they would probably still be poor and uneducated, and their children would require the same social services, they say.

The Berkeley study also cites the Clinton administration’s contention that the change will prevent pregnancies among teens.

“With greater nurturing and support, the administration hopes teen parents will have greater likelihood of completing school and breaking out of a cycle of poverty, thus incurring a smaller cost on public funds,” the report said.

But the move-home rule is about more than saving money.

“They have to understand that they just can’t go out and have children and expect the government to pay for them,” said Assemblyman Jim Morrissey, R-Anaheim. “Welfare reform is about personal responsibility.”

Teen mothers interviewed said the reasoning behind the new law is wrong. They said if they could be safe and happy at home they would already be there.

” I got taken away from my mother when I was a month old, and they gave me to my godmother while my mom went to prison,” Elizabeth said. She lived with her godmother until age 12, when the juvenile court returned her and her four brothers and sisters to her mother. Soon, her mother was using again.

Her mother, Elizabeth said, still has the right to bring her home. “They can come and they can pick me up, but I’ll just come back here,” she said.

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At Florence Crittenton Services home for pregnant and parenting teens in Fullerton, four girls talked about the paths they took to early pregnancy. They are white, African American and Latina. All wish they had waited to have children but say welfare reform won’t stop teens from getting pregnant. They all tell a variation of the same story--childhoods filled with parental alcoholism and drug addiction, of violence and of being unwanted. The girls are wards of the court, and social workers verified their stories, They have asked that their last names not be used.

The idea of a nurturing home is foreign to them.

“My mother was an alcoholic my entire life. All I ever heard was that I’m no good, that I’m stupid,” said 16-year-old Omeka, who is pregnant. “They have to understand that everyone doesn’t have the same advantages. Everyone doesn’t come from a nice, happy family.”

What to do with girls who will not return to their homes when told to do so has many social workers stumped.

“There are child abuse and child welfare issues in all these cases, and it’s not difficult to envision situations in which the teen parent and her baby have no means of support because they refuse to comply with this order,” said Social Services Agency Director Larry Leaman.

“Do we just walk away from them and let the mother and the baby live on the street?”

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Christina, the 17-year-old mother of a baby girl, was incredulous at the idea of needing parental supervision.

“How can they tell me I can’t raise a child when I pretty much raised my brother from the time he was 2?” she said.

But 16-year-old Tessie, the mother of a toddler, voiced the strongest reason the girls do not want to live with their parents. They do not want to raise their children the way they were brought up.

“All my mom ever did was hit, and now I’m trying to teach her that’s not the only way to discipline a child,” Tessie said. “But that’s all she knows.”