Making Ends Meet ─ How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work

Welfare mothers are popularly viewed as passively dependent on their checks and averse to work. Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems. Making Ends Meet offers dramatic evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels.
Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in four states over a six-year period. They learned the reality of these mothers' struggles to provide for their families: where their money comes from, what they spend it on, how they cope with their children's needs and what hardships they suffer.
Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that many would change yet few understand. If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families are to succeed, reformers must move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, the lack of affordable health insurance and child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living.

Kathryn Edin is assistant professor, department of sociology and Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University.