What is TANF and what is its impact on Child Welfare?

In August 1996, federal welfare reform legislation was enacted that changed the way in which cash assistance and other services are provided to needy families throughout the fifty states.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act created the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Program. TANF replaced the entitlement program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program which had provided cash assistance and medical assistance to families for more than fifty years. TANF funding will be in effect through September 2002. If it is to continue after September, Congress must reauthorize it by September 30, 2002.

The 1996 federal legislation allows states to spend federal TANF dollars in "any manner that is reasonably calculated" to accomplish the statutory purposes of TANF. These are:

• To provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;

• To end the dependence of needy parents on governmental benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;

• To prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish numerical goals for preventing and reducing the pregnancies; and

• To encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

Child Welfare professionals were quite concerned that the enactment of TANF would impact the incidence of child abuse and neglect because of the link between poverty and child maltreatment. Unlike AFDC, TANF has mandatory work requirements, a five-year lifetime eligibility, and is not an entitlement. The law prohibits states from sanctioning single custodial parents for failure to comply with work requirements if the parent demonstrates that she/he is unable to obtain needed day care for a child under the age of six. However, it is not clear that TANF recipients are aware of this exception, and they may believe that they risk losing cash assistance if they do not comply with the work requirements. In addition, the exemption does not apply to lack of childcare for children six or older. Yet, a number of states include failure to supervise children up to the ages of 10 to 12 within the definition of neglect. Therefore, some parents may be faced with charges of neglect either because they leave their children unattended to go to work or because they lose their cash assistance and cannot adequately care for the child.

While the connection between poverty and maltreatment is not fully understood, research indicates that child maltreatment is highly correlated with poverty. The risk of child abuse and neglect is 22 times greater for children living in families with annual incomes below $15,000 than for children in families with incomes greater than $30,000 [1]. This issue was not lost on the framers of the TANF legislation; one provision of the law specific to Child Welfare is a funded national longitudinal study on child maltreatment. In addition, the 1996 law includes provisions that:

• Require continuation of state foster care maintenance and adoption assistance programs;

• Tie Title IV-E eligibility criteria to 1996 AFDC standards. (Title IV-E is the major federal funding stream for child welfare services. It covers the cost of room and board for foster care, subsidy for adoptions, and training of child welfare personnel including foster parents.) Therefore, children eligible for AFDC and SSI are also eligible for Title IV-E funding;

• Require states to give preference to kin when placing a child outside of his/her family's home;

• Permit for-profit child care agencies (serving no more than 25 children) to receive foster care maintenance payments;

• Extend the enhanced funding of the Statewide Automated Data Collection Systems (SACWIS), which is a system for collecting child welfare data, through 1997;

• Permit TANF spending on a wide array of child welfare services.

This final provision, if not eliminated when TANF is reauthorized, will have positive implications for sustaining Systems Of Care in communities approaching the end of their CMHS grant funding. Some examples of current state expenditures using TANF funds are home visiting, parenting education, family preservation, family support, substance abuse treatment, subsidized guardianship, and kinship care services. TANF funded subsidized guardianship and kinship care programs vary considerably across states. For example,

• Some require legal guardianship, some do not;

• Some require child welfare adjudication, some require a finding of risk, some require neither;

• Some provide financial assistance equivalent to foster care payment, some provide a benefit between foster care payment and the TANF grant;

• Some provide services and non-financial supports.[2]

In addition to the connections between poverty and maltreatment, Child Welfare and TANF are linked at many other levels, particularly in their shared mandate to serve needy families. Both systems serve kinship care families. Furthermore, both Child Welfare and TANF assist families in which issues of substance abuse, mental health, domestic violence, and poverty overlap. The two systems also have legislative and funding overlaps.

The Center for Law and Social Policy, www.clasp.org, has extensively researched these issues and, along with the Technical Assistance Partnership for Child and Family Mental Health, is another source of information.

Sources:
[1]. Sedlak, A.J. and Broadhurst, D.D., Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect Final Report, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1996.

[2]Center for Law and Social Policy, Child Welfare and TANF Reauthorization, February 2002.  www.clasp.org