Trajectories to timing out and the snare of undermining conditions: A retrospective analysis of meeting lifetime limits to welfare

ABSTRACT

Using qualitative interviews with a panel of parents over two years (n = 33 and 23) and a retrospective biographical framework, I ask how welfare recipients reach their 60-month lifetime limit; specifically, what conditions, experiences, and circumstances keep them from exiting welfare permanently before 60 months? Recipients traversed an array of trajectories based on differing relationships to the labor market, including cycling in and out of the labor market and welfare, navigating the margins of the labor market, and working toward a four-year degree. Despite following different trajectories related to labor force attachment, the analysis shows that these parents who timed out of welfare shared a common set of circumstances which created a snare of undermining conditions—destabilizing events which interacted with the challenges of the low wage labor market, parenting in poverty, and a tattered safety net. Given the challenges of poverty in the U.S. even strong attachment to the labor market did not prevent a third of the sample from exhausting access to cash assistance. My analysis broadens our understandings of how individuals meet their lifetime limits to welfare by looking beyond individual-level characteristics, such as labor force attachment, and highlighting the ways experiences of timing out are situated in race, class, and gender inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare reform
• TANF
• lifetime limits to welfare
• disconnection
• timing out
• gender
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Author calculations based on Administration for Children and Families (2011–2015) data.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the California State University San Marcos.