This paper documents the well-being of low-income single mothers nearly thirty years after welfare reform. Using unique data from a monthly cross-sectional survey of 7,186 low-income single mothers who are currently receiving or recently received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, we consider how mothers are faring today as compared to similar mothers in the early 1990s, those who were part of Edin and Lein’s 1997 book Making Ends Meet. We report mothers’ employment, earnings, and use of the private and public safety net to make ends meet. We find that both single mothers who work and those who do not work rely on a variety of these resources to survive. Despite accessing an array of supports, single mothers experience very high levels of material hardship and back-owed debts. Employed mothers are able to draw on slightly greater economic resources as compared to mothers who are not employed, but they still experience extremely high rates of material hardship, suggesting that welfare reform has not effectively “made work pay” for the most disadvantaged single mothers.
Pilkauskas et al. (Fri,) studied this question.