April Mouser is a shift manager at a Hardin County fast-food restaurant, earning $8.90 an hour. Though she works full-time, she gets no benefits — “no sick leave, no insurance,” she said. She feels lucky that while she’s working, her mother watches her four children, ages 14, 12, 10, and 8. “Hopefully, they’ll go to college,” she said.
This is the type of family that 1996 welfare reform legislation was designed to help, said Sharon Seiling, consumer sciences researcher with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

“Clearly, welfare reform was an attempt to increase well-being,” Seiling said. “The feeling was that people would have higher incomes and be better off if they were in the workforce.”
Seiling has examined welfare reform’s impact on rural families as part of a 10-year national study, beginning in 1998. Since then, she and researchers in 13 other states have conducted three extensive interviews with 414 low-income mothers with at least one child 12 or younger.

Seiling has found that most participants live much more complex lives than “anyone with a standard job can imagine,” juggling work schedule changes and child-care arrangements and living under the constant stress of the working poor.

Seiling’s study corroborated evidence of the unique nature of the rural poor. For example, they often have work schedules that vary from day to day and week to week, and work that involves very early hours, second or third shifts, and weekends.

“There are no day-care centers providing care at the times needed, and the variability in shifts makes it challenging to schedule child-care arrangements. Most of the working mothers in our study used friends or family members as child-care providers, and those arrangements were not always reliable.  Mothers spoke of having to have two or three back-up providers for emergencies.”

Incomes that vary on a weekly basis caused many mothers to juggle bill-paying and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find bargains. “At the same time, they often pay higher food costs at nearby stores because of the cost of — or lack of — transportation,” Seiling said. Their cars often had a lot of maintenance problems making them unreliable. Finding alternative transportation to work was an additional challenge.

Health problems also often take a toll. “Physical, mental, or dental health problems go untreated because of lack of insurance coverage, the cost of health-care treatment, and a lack of providers in the community who take Medicaid patients,” Seiling said. “Because many do not have sick leave as a job benefit, they miss work when they or their children are sick.”
Although many want full-time work, they often can’t find it locally. “There’s not a lot of moving up” in these areas, she said. Seiling hopes more options could be available for these families, such as:

• Encourage more businesses to offer sick leave — the number that don’t is “staggering,” Seiling said. “Many of the mothers were fired when they had to take care of sick children.”
• Provide more opportunities for advancing education. “We found that if you have a child before you finish your education, it’s likely you’ll never get more schooling. Some can do it, but most say it’s just too much” trying to make ends meet.
• Extend access to health insurance, either through employers or by expanding government-sponsored programs, and broaden access to mental health care, often not available in rural areas. “Mental health is a huge barrier in getting work for many of these families,” Seiling said.
• Provide some type of public transportation. “Some communities have been creative, using senior-citizen vans to serve low-income workers getting to and from their jobs,” Seiling said. As Mouser knows full well, many rural areas have no public transportation, “not even a taxi,” Mouser said.
• Find ways to support family members who assist low-income parents day-to-day, or at least do more to publicize programs already available.
• Consider the benefits a higher minimum wage could have on low-income families, or expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. “That’s a big benefit — most families used it to pay bills.”

Additional information is available at http://fsos.che.umn.edu/projects/rfs.html .