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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2000

Challenges for Studying Care After AFDC

Stacey Oliker

Mandatory work and low wages after the end of AFDC may propel changes in
the caregiving of children and dependent elders in single-mother families. This
article suggests some challenges facing researchers who will examine care in
single-mother families. Drawing on a qualitative study of care in the last years
of welfare, and on social network analysis, it suggests how changes in resources,
networks, and norms may affect practices of care and also make it difficult to
discover the changes.
KEY WORDS: welfare; single mother; care; family.

The end of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) challenges us

to learn what happens to care in single-mother families once paid work becomes
mandatory. The importance of studying family processes may seem obvious, but
there has been little concern about the nonpecuniary dimensions of family life
in public discussion of welfare. The debate over ending AFDC centered on paid
work. The issue of care for children and dependent elders in poor families rarely
entered the debates on ending the AFDC safety net. Concern with care for children
in single-mother families has receded from public discourse over several decades,
although it was central when AFDC was created early in the century (Gordon
1994). Ironically, welfare ceased to be a “work and family” issue just as a policy
domain of work and family issues expanded in U.S. politics.
Now that Congress has abolished AFDC, mandated work, capped and set time
limits on federal support, and devolved authority over eligibility and programs to
the states, citizens and scholars are asking how the end of AFDC has affected
poor families. Reasonably, their first questions are about the economic impacts
of welfare’s end, since proponents of a federal safety net predicted calamitous
economic results (Edelman 1997). Less reasonably, we have heard few questions
about the noneconomic impacts of abolishing the safety net. How does ending

Direct correspondence to Stacey Oliker, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,

P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201; e-mail: stacey@uwm.edu.
453
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C 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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AFDC affect parenting, nurture, supervision, tutelage, and care in the families of
single mothers who are mandated to become self-sufficient breadwinners? How
do poor single mothers balance work and family after AFDC?
This article suggests some challenges facing researchers who will examine
care after AFDC. The challenges come from several different sources. One is
the diversity in post-AFDC policy among the states. Welfare has not ended in
most states yet, and everywhere, it is ending differently. Second, sociology is just
beginning to offer frameworks for studying caregiving (Finch and Groves 1983;
Abel and Nelson 1990; Cancian and Oliker 2000). We need more inspiring ideas
about the dynamics of change in patterns of care. And third, some of our usual
methods of registering change in caregiving, whether qualitative or quantitative,
may be less reliable in a period of change.
Although my aim is to suggest how we can meet these challenges, I will do
this by imagining harsh changes in care at welfare’s end. The vision I create coun-
terbalances the optimism that prompted the move to end welfare and responded
to the phenomenal drop in welfare rolls and the increases in employment that fol-
lowed. An example of this optimism was the prediction that single mothers could
handle the transition to mandatory work because they had rich networks of support
to rely on (Kaus 1992; Mead 1992). After AFDC was abolished in 1996, this ar-
gument found a defensive echo among those who insisted that poor communities
would “pull together” in adversity, as they’ve always done.
My pessimistic predictions counter these optimistic ones by emphasizing the
weakness of networks of support among the poor and the ways that mandatory
work could constrict them. Against the optimism that has greeted plummeting
welfare rolls and growing employment rates, I will show how a mandatory shift
of priorities from care to work can hurt families, even if we have the improbable
experience of an endless economic boom, like the one undergirding current welfare
rolls and employment rates.
Both the challenges I identify and the dynamics I envision derive from a qual-
itative study of work and family patterns in the last years of AFDC (Oliker 1995a,
1995b). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I studied work-welfare programs
in two states’ largest cities, where I observed welfare programs and interviewed
program workers and participants. At that time, work-welfare reforms were un-
derway, creating various kinds of pressures on single mothers to find employment.
However, even programs that sanctioned mothers for insufficient work effort pre-
served a safety net under children’s benefits. Now, no safety net is required. I draw
the ideas about change that could follow AFDC from my findings on how single
mothers on AFDC balanced obligations to work and family, as well as from others’
studies of families in poverty, work-family relations, and social networks.
The conceptual framework of social network analysis is especially fruitful
for exploring caregiving in the context of family resources and supports. I will use
my qualitative study, network analysis, and studies of poverty and of work-family
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Care After AFDC 455

relations to tie propositions about changes in caregiving to changes in the social

networks of single mothers.
Social network analysis explores how the structure of social relationships
influences action. For example, network scholars often pay attention to the density
of ties (whether members of one’s network know each other). The same perspective
can take account of the content of network exchanges, for example, the kinds of
care that are exchanged or beliefs about caregiving that network members convey
(Fischer et al. 1977; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988). Below, I will suggest how the
end of welfare may affect the size and density of poor, single mothers’ personal
networks, and the caregiving and supports for care that network members exchange.
Few states have ended welfare and mandated work as thoroughly and precip-
itously as Wisconsin, which has cut its welfare rolls by 93% (Stephenson 1999).
Because of this, the best national and local coverage of family life after welfare
focuses on Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. For this reason, and in the ab-
sence of academic studies of family life after AFDC, I use newspaper coverage of
Milwaukee as my source of examples of projected changes after AFDC.

ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF ENDING WELFARE

I pay minimal attention here to paid work and concentrate on family, mainly
because we have research formations in place to learn about what happens to poor
single mothers in the marketplace, but fewer strategies of studying care. We’re
already learning what is happening to low-income single mothers in the market,
and I can summarize it succinctly: more are employed than before (at least, in on-
the-books jobs—as opposed to the ubiquitous informal paid work that was common
under welfare). While official employment rates are higher, jobs are unsteady, and,
steady or not, wages remain low for most. Many paid workers are poorer than they
were on welfare (Cancian et al. 2000; Pawasarat 1997; Primus et al. 1999). Wage
rates start low and remain low over time, especially for AFDC leavers who enter the
lowest-wage jobs (Burtless 1998). And these are the results for the single mothers
who left AFDC the fastest—who are better educated, have more job experience,
and have smaller families to support (Cancian et al. 2000). When the time caps set
by Congress go into effect, those with the least human capital and the rest problems
with health, substance abuse, and dependent care will be unsupported and in the
job market.

WORK MANDATES, DISCRETION, AND NORMS OF CARE

In my qualitative study of single-mother families during the last years of

AFDC, I used the rubric of a “moral economy” to think about how single mothers
allocate their resources between earning and caring (Oliker 1995a). The idea here
is that while economic interests shape the moral economies of poor single-mother
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456 Oliker

households, so do nonpecuniary considerations of the needs of loved ones for care.

Family allocations of resources and efforts are shaped by family and communal
commitments, as well as by economic pressures. In devising strategies of balanc-
ing work and family, single mothers are guided by communally negotiated and
reinforced commitments to care as well as by motives of economic gain.
Johnetta (a pseudonym), for example, is one of the single mothers I inter-
viewed. She lost a job during the period when she and two sisters took turns
commuting to the South from different states to care for their seriously ill mother
and cope with the effects of racist medical neglect. “I had to be here two weeks,
and then I would go down there for about two weeks, and we’d come back and go
there.” During the depression Johnetta suffered after her mother’s death, her adult
daughter moved in to care for her. Now her daughter was pregnant and Johnetta was
contemplating how she could help out her daughter, comply with work-welfare
requirements, deal with her school-age children’s health problems, and persuade
another daycare center not to expel the emotionally disturbed toddler nephew who
was in her care. “What can you do? You can’t just walk away and say, ‘Well, I
don’t give a damn.’”
This interview took place before welfare ended in Johnetta’s home state.
At that time, if she continued to let obligations to others take priority over her
work-welfare obligations, the state would cut off her grant, but her children would
continue to receive theirs. Not so after AFDC.
The end of welfare marks a break from work-welfare programs under AFDC
because it repeals the small amount of discretion that poor single mothers used
when deciding how to allocate resources to work and care. Work now must come
first. Work, or children do not eat. Work, or risk losing custody of children who
are not supported financially. In welfare’s last days, women had little discretion
to favor caregiving over earning. But they used their small space of discretion to
favor caring over earning when they decided it was in their children’s interest or
in the interest of another loved one.
Carol is another single mother I interviewed in my work-welfare study. She
had successfully packaged on-the-books and off-the-books employment to stay
off AFDC during much of her young children’s lives. Carol had moved to the
city she lived in now for its better jobs and to get her children out of dangerous
Chicago housing projects. She had even managed to hold onto a few part-time
jobs during the period that her son was hospitalized and recovering from a seri-
ous injury. Though her mobility in previous employment would not have seemed
likely to encourage optimism, Carol liked working and was optimistic about what
hard work could bring her family. She suppressed her worries that her children
“need their momma, too,” when she believed she could do better for them with
work.
After a fire displaced Carol’s family to a new neighborhood, the balance of
commitments shifted for Carol. The new neighborhood was more dangerous, so
the children needed more supervision, but Carol did not know neighbors who could
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Care After AFDC 457

keep an eye on the children or her place. “I don’t have anybody who can watch
[my kindergartner] get off the bus and stay on [to baby-sit].” The recent accident
and fire and new vulnerabilities had her worried and often panicked when she was
at work.
Finally, Carol pared down employment to one part-time job, remained eligible
for AFDC, and adopted a commonplace inner-city strategy of care: she kept her
children inside, and when they were not, “I’m watching every two, three minutes
making sure they in front.” She kept to herself: “I don’t socialize with too many
people. The less company you keep, the better off you will have stuff in your home.”
And she avoided taking jobs that interfered with her new level of supervision,
postponing full-time work until her children were both in school all day. “I want
something better, but I’m at a standstill now because of the kids.” Her “standstill”
did not involve standing still, but it did mean less income and optimism; she traded
them deliberately in her children’s interest.
I interviewed Carol before welfare ended. If she were in the same circum-
stances now, when everyone in her state must find work, her job history and drive
would probably place her among the former AFDC recipients who find work. But
whatever the level of crime in her neighborhood, however her children are handling
the crises in their family, and however panicked and worried Carol feels at work,
the choice she must make would be clear. She must keep working. The balance
between work and family commitments would be set for her.
The balance would be set, too, for Sandy, who had held a job throughout her
toddler’s first two years, but finally left it and drew AFDC when her employer
moved her to the late shift and she fell asleep when she was bathing her toddler.
Others who risked getting fired, and sometimes were, when they went to work late
because the babysitter was late, or when they left early to shadow a teenager who
was falling into dangerous habits, would also have the balance reset to make work
the inevitable priority.
Welfare allowed the very poor to adopt an ethos of attentive caregiving that
more affluent women pioneered a century before. I clearly heard the ethos in
accounts of single mothers in my AFDC study, for example, when they defended
putting off daycare and taking a job “until she can talk,” in order to be able to
monitor care by asking the child questions. I heard it in the accounts of those who
added hours to their work day by taking multiple buses to daycare and work, rather
than depend on unreliable relatives. And I heard it in the bitterness expressed by
mothers who had denied children’s needs for their time and attention in order to
support them, but who still remained poor.
Gwen, for example, was the mother of a thirteen-year-old who had started get-
ting into trouble at school. After years of working irregular shifts as a nurse’s aide,
“thinking, you know, it’ll get better, I just have to make another paycheck,” she be-
gan to rethink her commitment: “Where have I gotten with all that experience? . . .
Not a damn place . . . I mean I would have been better off if I would have spent my
time every day being at home with her.” “Who—who am I benefiting? I mean, I
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decided work is really important and [I was] really neglecting her.”

Judging the stresses her low-paying job caused to be “child abuse,” Gwen had
finally left the job, spent more time with the child who was in trouble, and made
plans to get schooling for a job that would leave them better off. After AFDC, she
would not have such choices. Without a choice, I wonder how long Gwen could
have faced the damage she believed her long work hours were causing her daughter.
Though we still lack data on life after welfare, I can offer a contrast to
Gwen’s stance in a story from a New York Times series based on extensive in-
terviews. Michele Crawford, still on her job thirteen months after leaving welfare
in Milwaukee (a rare achievement among the hundreds interviewed for the series),
was lauded by the Wisconsin state legislature as a role model for her young chil-
dren. She told the Times reporter, however, that her children were acting up in
school and hurting from the lack of attention from their mother: “I sometimes feel
like I’m not taking care of my family like I should.” But Crawford’s account also
“took an uncharacteristic turn toward the bitter”: “Right now, I’ve got to concen-
trate on myself and what I’ve got to do . . . I’m sorry my kids are taking it the way
they are. They’re acting like little selfish brats” (DeParle 1999, p. A13). Among
others who have no choice about long hours away from children, the turn toward
acceptance of neglect may not always be uncharacteristic.
After welfare, work must come first. If work takes inevitable priority, women
must surrender caregiving practices that are deeply invested with meaning, that are
normative, constitutive of identity in a community, understood to be beneficial, and
unlikely to be replaced. Renouncing the priority of care may require psychological
denial in order to cope with the pain of loss and failure. Whatever the psychological
motives, it seems plausible that the imposition of regular decisions to subordinate
caregiving to earning may encourage those who believed in doing otherwise to
minimize the damages this causes. At welfare’s end, mothers who had reviled
their children’s child care options may come to view poor daycare centers or
care by irresponsible relatives as adequate. The result here would not just be
changes in caregiving practices, but changes in individual attitudes toward care
and, eventually, in communal norms.
We might better imagine the way an ethos of care changes in a community
or society if we conceive of how communal norms are reinforced in communal
networks. So, before treating the large realm of ethos, I will explore the microstruc-
tures of social networks and relations among network members.

PERSONAL NETWORKS: SIZE, COMPOSITION,

AND RESOURCES OF EXCHANGE

Although optimists take for granted the capacities of personal networks to

cushion adversity, we should examine the effects of the end of welfare on networks
of support. Ethnographies of poor communities in past decades did show that poor
families were embedded in close-knit kin-based networks of support, exchanging
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Care After AFDC 459

child care and other material and emotional supports for care, and enforcing norms
of good care as well (Martin and Martin 1978; McAdoo 1986; Stack 1974). Ethno-
graphies in recent decades, however, question the extensiveness of kin supports for
poor families. Ethnographic studies of teenage mothers, new immigrant families,
and urban single mothers suggest that regardless of ideals of “familism” in poor
communities, many families lack the support of kin or close friends (Kaplan 1997;
Mahler 1995; Roschelle 1997).
Quantitative studies of large, national, representative sample surveys con-
ducted over two decades uniformly suggest that the poor are not richer than others
in supports from kin. To the contrary, they find that families in poverty, and minor-
ity families in particular, have smaller networks of extended kin. Affluence, not
poverty, increases the size of networks of support, the frequency of contact with
kin, and the amount of help and economic and emotional support that families re-
ceive from others (Hofferth 1984; Hogan, Eggebeen and Clogg 1993; Hogan, Hao
and Parish 1990; Kaplan 1997; Mahler 1995; Roschelle 1997). Just as important
for my argument, the large-scale studies show that the poor who receive support
are more likely also to give support to others than the nonpoor who get support,
and this too may affect care (Hogan et al. 1993; Roschelle 1997).
The quantitative studies do confirm that single mothers (especially minority
single mothers) are more likely to live with kin than are wives. Yet, while many
single mothers receive some kind of support from parents, a third of them receive
none (Hogan et al. 1993; Roschelle 1997). The poor are repeatedly found among
those who had no one who exchanges either advice, child care, or household help.
And it is mothers of very young children who receive help from kin. Single mothers
with older children are far less likely to be aided by kin. Taken all together, studies
of family and kin in poverty suggest we need to look closely at the ways poverty
both elicits and limits reliance on kin supports.
My qualitative study in welfare’s last days, along with others in this pe-
riod, found mostly small personal networks of exchange among single mothers,
anchored by and largely centered on the relationships of single mothers and their
mothers (Edin and Lein 1997; Kaplan 1997; Minkler and Roe 1993). Still, many of
the mothers I interviewed received rich supports for caregiving from the members
of their small networks, especially from their mothers. Above all, their mothers
provided child care. Some mothers of single mothers were primary child care-
givers; others provided part-time or back-up care. They prepared for holidays and
did other tasks of homemaking and kin-keeping for which employed mothers could
not spare the time. And they supported maternal care by being primary confidantes
and consolers for their daughters. Whether their mothers lived with them or not,
single mothers were likely to include only their mothers, along with their children,
among those they listed as “most a part of my life.” After mothers, grown daugh-
ters, aunts, fathers, and brothers (in that order) were the kin network members who
provided resources in support of caregiving.
Boyfriends rarely provided regular care for children and neither did children’s
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460 Oliker

fathers. Boyfriends were sometimes good sources of emergency care, though, more
often than fathers were. Close friends who helped with care were also not very
common. The mothers I interviewed were often reluctant to ask friends for child
care because it usually meant a trade of child care they could not easily manage.
In my study, like the larger surveys, a large minority of families lacked net-
works of support. No one provided them with resources that supported their care-
giving. Yet, having a network of close kin and friends was not necessarily an
advantage. Some women gave so much help and money to people in their network
that they were deprived of time and resources for care as often as they were en-
riched. And some networks only extracted time and resources from single mothers,
rarely ever supplying them. The single mothers whose extended families were rife
with substance abuse, homelessness, and mental illness gave care, help, and money
continually; they and their children bore the costs. Gwen, who earlier described
her paid work as abusive to her child, had not been able to depend on her hard-
living family for help. One reason she had delayed leaving her job to care for her
daughter was her hope of saving enough money to move out of state, away from
predatory siblings.
Although much of this article will concentrate on how the end of welfare
threatens the stability of networks and thus their support of care, the end of wel-
fare can also constrain women’s exit from networks and personal ties that inflict
harm or extract too many costs. Before welfare ended, single mothers moved out of
the homes of mothers whom they believed hurt their children with excessive disci-
pline. They broke ties with siblings who lured them back into drug use, boyfriends
who demanded money or beat them and their children, and children’s fathers who
wanted to renew abusive relationships. After welfare, when unemployment and
eviction are greater threats, the meager resources of money or help that these ties
offer may sustain them. The end of welfare could encourage damaging dependen-
cies, as single mothers struggle to keep their families afloat.
Before welfare ended, neighbors sometimes served as nonintimate, but none-
theless useful, ties for purposes of caregiving. Since AFDC enabled some single
mothers to be at home with their children, there were often neighbors around who
could informally “keep an eye” on children as they walked home from school,
waited at home for an employed mother’s return, or played outside. Worldly moth-
ers knew what an independent child’s “messing” looked, smelled, or sounded like,
and would report to a child’s or teenager’s mother before police or landlord figured
it out or before a child was deeply committed to trouble.
Work mandates should clear most adults out of neighborhoods during the
day, and so informal urban mechanisms of safety and surveillance may not persist.
These informal networks are also more threatened if unstable jobs, without the
meager stability of the welfare grant, cause more evictions, as appears to be the
case in Milwaukee (Derus 1988). Without the AFDC safety net, few mothers will
risk losing jobs to stay home to resolve problems, as did some women I interviewed,
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Care After AFDC 461

or to make surprise visits to entrap unsuspecting teenagers or neglectful babysitters,

as did others.
Mandatory work may also affect caregiving by changing what network mem-
bers give as support. In the absence of a safety net for periods of unemployment,
network members who want to keep families together may view money, rather than
care, as the essential exchange to offer. Like single mothers who are mandated to
work, those most involved with single-mother families may voluntarily shift their
investment from care to work in order to contribute to family subsistence. Personal
networks and family financial resources may remain stable, even as exchanges of
care diminish.

RECIPROCITY AND NETWORK STABILITY

Observers of families embedded in extended networks of kin often admiringly

invoke the expression “what goes’ round, comes’ round,” forgetting that it extols
giving as well as receiving support. Studies of social networks emphasize the
constitutive principle of reciprocation, and my study also suggested its importance
(Fischer et al. 1977; Uehara 1990; Wellman et al. 1988). Single mothers who
received help from mothers or others also gave help to them. For example, one
single mother whose mother took care of her grandchild, took care of her mother
during a long illness. Another woman took her brother’s children any time he
“dumped them” because he lent her his car when she had night shift work. (She
eventually was dropped from a training program that provided care for her child,
but not for the nephews who were in her care).
In addition to direct reciprocation, the mothers I interviewed also participated
in another kind of reciprocation, which network theorists call “generalized” ex-
change. In networks that feature generalized exchange, reciprocation is indirect.
Over time, one gives commensurably with what one gets, but does not necessarily
give back to the giver (Uehara 1990; Wellman et al. 1988). In my study, for exam-
ple, one grandmother had provided shelter, comfort, and child care but asked little
in return. Still, it was the tie to her mother that encouraged the woman I interviewed
to take in and care for a cousin’s child. This single mother was estranged from
her drug-addicted cousin, but her mother called on her to help her sister’s family.
Other members of the kin network showed their appreciation in various ways.
As the large-scale surveys also suggest, in my study, women whose network
members were also poor had burdensome obligations to reciprocate, as well as
obligations to care for others which would not be reciprocated any time soon
(Roschelle 1997). Before welfare ended, single mothers weighed those obligations
against the work obligations and sanctions imposed by work-welfare programs.
They sometimes used welfare for a time, to meet their commitments to family
and kin, and to accept the economic sacrifice that entailed. By fulfilling their
obligations, they completed the round of exchanges that kept their networks of
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support intact.
At welfare’s end, single mothers who are compelled to find work or face
losing their children will be less able to find the time to reciprocate the help others
give them. The low-wage job market they enter will leave most of them no more
able financially to replace the care they once provided by purchasing services, like
home health aides or taxi fares. Will increasingly asymmetric exchanges in close
kin networks damage close relationships and constrict networks? In networks of
generalized exchange, which is the form of exchange in many, but by no means
all kin networks, the answer may be no, at least in the short run. The failure to
reciprocate is more likely to damage looser-knit networks, like friendship networks,
in which direct and immediate exchange predominates (“You take my kids this
weekend, I’ll take yours next”) (Uehara 1990).
The tighter weave of kinship networks allows its members to view reciproca-
tion in the much longer run. In the long run, however, studies of social networks
suggest that stark asymmetries undermine even the more trusting and committed
ties of generalized exchange. Those who give a lot but do not receive begin to feel
exploited or just “burn out” (Minkler and Roe 1993; Stack and Burton 1994; Stack
1974).
This long-run dynamic may explain anecdotal evidence in Milwaukee that
publicly registered homelessness among whole families has increased in the after-
math of welfare, but not enormously. There have been much greater increases in
the numbers of single mothers entering shelters as single women (whose children
have been placed in others’ care) and in the numbers of homeless teenagers (the
children most likely to be first “liberated” from care) (Huston 1998). These may
be first, but not ultimate, patterns of adaptation to welfare’s end. Doubling up in
housing has long been a first, unstable step toward homelessness (Gerstel et al.
1996; Rochefort 1998; Torrey 1997).
Social network scholarship suggests that mandatory work in low-paying jobs
may limit mothers’ capacity to reciprocate without enabling them to substitute
money for time—purchasing services in place of giving of themselves. The ab-
sence of discretion to limit work in favor of family obligations thus may diminish
caregiving by diminishing capacities of reciprocity.
If networks of flexible, generalized exchange do constrict, and single mothers
desperately try to rebuild networks of survival among kin and nonkin, immediate
obligations to reciprocate are likely to intensify, and these will be harder to meet
under a regime of mandatory work. Desperate network builders will inevitably
draw in others desperate enough to depend on mere velocity of exchange.
As Carol’s strategy, earlier, suggests, before AFDC ended, single mothers’
moral economies were often suffused with a wariness of those who are not proven
friends. Some avoided getting involved with men as boyfriends, some avoided
neighbors or associates. Census sample data that show increases in coresidence
with nonrelatives, especially boyfriends, may suggest that need is already eclipsing
older cautious strategies (Jencks and Swingle 2000).
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Care After AFDC 463

NETWORK CHARACTERISTICS AND THE ETHOS OF CARE

The networks that are rebuilt amid pressing need after the constriction of
older networks are likely to be more heavily composed of people who are not
bound by the moral obligations of close kinship and who consistently have few
resources to share. However, voluntary networks are harder to build and to sustain
among people who have desperate instrumental needs of each other. Such networks
are likely to be looser-knit than kinship networks are, and thus, they break down
easier (for example, because there is no one in the role of the aunt who sits feuding
siblings together at a holiday meal). In the looser connections of such networks,
network capacities of communal reinforcement are weaker, and this may weaken
a communal ethos of caregiving. In this dynamic, both the structural and the
communal supports for caregiving erode—reducing the supply of care and also its
centrality.
The reinforcement of a communal ethos of care can thus erode as tight-knit
networks constrict and looser or smaller ones replace them. But a communal ethos
can also weaken in tight-knit and solidary networks: If the ability of families to
give care declines because work must take first priority and family crises threaten
the possibility of government intervention to protect children by removing them,
network members who are intent on keeping families together share the mother’s
incentive to redefine adequate care. That is, if children cannot be nurtured, su-
pervised, taught, and protected, communities and individuals who want to keep
families from breaking up can help to do so by revising norms of care and perceiv-
ing that children can do alright without these privileges.
If communal networks cannot generate resources to prevent a decline in care
in poor families, their interests in keeping families whole may favor silences about
poor care or even revised norms of care. We could see fewer reports of child neglect
and abuse even as rates increase, and we could hear fewer accounts of poor care in
qualitative field work, even if we listen carefully. For researchers, the usual ways of
registering change—whether by official data or respondent accounts—may fail us.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, when welfare is no longer available, but wages are insufficient

to purchase good substitute care, the domestic moral economies that favored care-
giving over earning may be impossible to recreate. Personal networks of support
may weaken, as the capacity of single mothers to reciprocate declines. The close-
knit networks that remain may concentrate on the exchange of material subsistence
rather than caregiving. The norms of care that personal networks transmit and re-
inforce in an era of meager social provision may change once provision ends.
Communal support for subsistence and keeping families together may become
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464 Oliker

paramount. And reliable strategies of care in poor urban neighborhoods may be-
come less accessible. Through such dynamics, caregiving declines and the social
ethos of care does also.
This grim portrayal of the prospect of deteriorating care after AFDC presents
a number of challenges for researchers who will examine life after AFDC. For
those who have been waiting to begin research until the remnants of AFDC in
their states have finally disappeared, this article suggests that we should begin
now. Long-term study of moral economies and network patterns before and during
the end of AFDC may be crucial for capturing what happens afterward, for changes
in care may quickly be normalized. If respondent accounts become less reliable,
long-term study will address that problem, and the ways accounts of care change
becomes a worthwhile subject in itself.
If this turns out to be a period of change in family arrangements, personal
communities, and strategies and ideas about caregiving, qualitative researchers are
well positioned to contribute to the sociology of caregiving and of work-family
decisions in poverty. We are able explore emergent meanings, adaptations that
become norms, and the unexplored nuances of exchange in networks. Quantitative
studies of caregiving will depend on us to refine concepts and questions about
families and care that they incorporate into large impact studies.
Large-sample studies, on the other hand, may be the first to register changes in
household and network forms and patterns of exchange that qualitative researchers
will want to explore. For example, the abovementioned census sample finding that
single mothers live more often with nonrelatives now than in 1996 invites the
qualitative researcher to find out how live-in boyfriends or doubled-up households
affect child care coverage, child abuse, children’s contact with fathers, and elder
care. This early finding on life after welfare inspires us to use qualitative methods to
explore why the first changes preceded or substituted for increases in moves to live
with relatives. (I would guess that these patterns reflect the slow movement of most
states to end grants: the prospect of insecurity may encourage coresidence with
boyfriends; the final cutoffs of aid—still not widespread—may radically escalate
coresidence with kin. Single mothers who can live peaceably with kin may already
do so.)
We will need a range of strategies to study caregiving at welfare’s end. Soci-
ologists are well able to meet the challenges the issue presents to researchers. The
most daunting challenge will be drawing public attention away from the bottom
line of jobs and incomes to the other resources from which people make families.
Persuasive qualitative research may be just what it takes to revive a concern in
poverty policy for families as sites of care and to make work and family policy a
cross-class policy domain.
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Care After AFDC 465

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