Stay at home, moms - making teen mothers live at home

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1996 by Amanda Ripley

Under the new federal legislation, teens who manage to gain exemption from living at home are to be placed in adult-supervised settings. Given what the data show on the quality of teen mothers' family situations, you would think states would be scrambling to prepare for an influx of teen mothers into group homes.

Hardly. Consider Wisconsin, which plans to force all teen mothers to either return home or live in adult-supervised residences next year under an even more radical reform program than it now has. Jean Rogers, an administrator in the state's Department of Work Force Development, says she's confident that group homes will be able to accommodate all mothers unable to return home. "We expect that only a fraction ... will need to be placed [in group homes]," she says, because "a number will stay with their parents when faced with the alternatives." The idea of teens returning to abusive or unsuitable homes does not concern Rogers, who claims that "often the homes are not all that terrible.... It's often just a combination of a frustrated parent and a rambunctious teen." But all available research contradicts her sunny assessment.

Not only that, but administrators of living centers in Wisconsin strongly disagree that there are enough adult-supervised settings to absorb the exempted population. Gerard Hall, a residential support center for teen mothers, has been in operation for 70 years. But today, according to supervisor Julie Conway, "a lot of teens fall through the cracks." The center provides teens with parenting courses, requires them to pursue educational goals, and offers counseling and substance abuse treatment, all for about $119 per day, per mother and child. Yet Gerard Hall frequently turns needy teens away, even as it operates below full capacity, because of insufficient county funding.

The same is true across the country. A statement compiled by advocacy groups such as the Center for Law and Social Policy, Family Service America, and the National Women's Law Center notes that "adult-supervised living options are largely unavailable." In Tennessee, there are three such centers in the entire state. Robinson Regen, an administrator at Monroe Harding Children's Home in Nashville, has watched state funding dry up during the last few years, leaving her agency struggling to raise about $100,000 in lost aid.

But don't look to the congressional welfare reform bill to solve the problem: It provides no additional federal funding for the "adult-supervised settings" it says exempted teens must live in. That means it's in states' interests not to see problems at home, because doing so means finding a costly alternative placement.

Without money to back it up, in other words, the live-at-home policy has real flaws--a fact U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman Michael Karfen concedes. "It's not a perfect picture," he admits, even as he maintains that the live-at-home requirement is a "good, appropriate policy." Asked how HHS plans to monitor and learn from states' experiences, Karfen acknowledges that no formal procedure is in place. Instead, he expects anecdotal information to "trickle in" over the next few years. To make sure things don't go awry in the implementation, he says, the public will just have to pressure states to "be more accountable." Given widespread public indifference to the plight of welfare mothers, it's hard to be optimistic that such pressure will materialize.