Teen Mothers: Citizens or Dependents? - book reviews

Adolescence, Winter, 1996

Horowitz examines one of the most critical questions of welfare policy: How can a government program help one of society's most needful groups move from welfare dependency to employment, independence, and responsible citizenship? Following a group of women through Project GED, a program designed to help teen mothers earn high school equivalency diplomas and to provide job-readiness training, the author discovers that efforts to reconcile the roles of mother, student, worker, and lover led to the self-reliance necessary for productive citizenship.

The book brings to life the dramas these women faced on a daily basis and identifies the reasons for the successes and failures of this program and others like it.