The bond between mothers and babies has tremendous lifelong implications. It is widely recognized that the first relationships between an infant and her parent(s) form the basis for all future relationships. This is no less true for low-income moms and babies. A warm, nurturing environment with consistent, loving caregivers is critical for healthy brain development.
With the high cost of infant care and the rapid turnover of childcare workers, many child care arrangements available to low-income families can’t provide the kind of nurturing environment they need. Since the beginning of the program, W-2 has provided three months (12 weeks) of benefits with no additional work requirement, to allow participants to bond with their newborn babies.
The 2011-13 state budget cuts by one-third — from twelve weeks to eight — the length of time a new mom can receive a Caretaker of a Newborn Infant (CNI) benefit, and make corresponding cuts to funding for CNI of $268,500 FED in 2011-12 and $537,100. The cut in W-2 benefits is about $2 million over the biennium, but the actual savings to the program is only $800,000 after allowing for the projected costs to the WI Shares child care subsidy program for an increased need for infant care. The budget bill also made other policy changes to W-2 that will create more hardship for families and reduce local agencies’ flexibility in helping them. Both Community Service Jobs (CSJs) and W2 Transition (W-2T) positions require up to 40 hours of participation. However, prior to this budget, W-2 agencies could design individual work, training and education activity hours in a combination that made sense for the goals of the participant. The budget designates the specific hours participants must be in work activities (30 hours for CSJ, 28 hours for W-2T). Only the remaining hours can be used for education and training.
In addition, the budget restores the 24-month participation time limit for CSJ and W-2T position. Those time limits had been removed in the previous biennial budget, in part because W-2 agencies had to go through the administrative hassle of requesting extensions to those deadlines so often. Although a 60-month time limit on W-2 participation remained, removing the 24-month time limit gave the agencies more flexibility and reduced unnecessary paperwork. That flexibility is now gone.
W-2 is a work program. However, it will be more successful in its goal of helping low-income parents become self-sufficient if it returns to the more family-friendly practices of allowing a reasonable maternity leave for mothers and providing flexibility in the timing and the blend of work and educational activities necessary to advance to family-supporting employment.
Martha Cranley
Tomorrow—Way #9: Extra Cut to Tobacco Use Control Grants, Including Cuts to Successful Youth Smoking Cessation Programs
About the series: “31 Ways in 31 Days” is a series of posts to the WCCF blog exploring the recently-passed biennial budget’s impact on children and families in Wisconsin. Each day in July, we are posting a description of one way the budget will affect kids and families, with an eye toward what should be done going forward to help improve outcomes and move us closer to the goal of making Wisconsin a place where every child has the opportunity to grow up, learn, and thrive in a safe, healthy, economically secure home and community.
