After years of collective denial, most politicians and welfare policy makers have finally acknowledged the link between unwed parenthood and long-term welfare dependency, as well as a host of other social problems.

However, once teenagers become unmarried welfare mothers, it is difficult to raise their family income or alter behavior. That's what researchers discovered in three large-scale demonstration projects started in the late 1980s which attempted to help unwed mothers on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) achieve self-sufficiency.

The three projects - New Chance, Teen Parent Demonstration (TPD) and the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) - offered a combination of job training, education, health care, counseling and family planning to randomly chosen welfare clients for periods ranging from a few months to five years.

The programs' costs ranged from $1,400 per family per year for TPD up to $50,000 per family for CCDP over a five-year period. TPD was the only program in which participation was mandatory. All three compared the progress of participants to "control" groups on regular welfare to measure effectiveness:

• The likelihood of remaining on welfare was about the same for both the experimental and control groups in all three programs.

• Only the Teen Parent Demonstration program saw any gains in employment.

• All three programs were relatively successful in enrolling mothers in education programs, but there was little gain in employability or functional literacy.

• New Chance produced even fewer young mothers who finished high school than the control group - 6 percent versus 9 percent - since the women opted to take an equivalency test rather than return to school.

• Although two of the three programs provided some family planning education, the majority of women in all three groups had a repeat pregnancy within the evaluation period and most opted to give birth - about the same as the control groups.

Follow-up studies found the families in the control groups were doing about as well as, and sometimes better than, those in the demonstrations. These results indicate that current proposals to reform welfare by providing services to improve education and employability may be ineffective.

Source: Douglas J. Besharov and Karen N. Gardiner, "Paternalism and Welfare Reform," Public Interest, No. 122, Winter 1996.