The 1967 Work Incentive Program reflected the recognition that providing child care is an essential component of welfare reform. Child-care requirements in this and subsequent welfare-reform measures have been inadequately funded, their implementation left to local authorities who were often conservative if not downright hostile to single mothers. In the 1980’s child-care support for welfare recipients decreased while middle-class families got tax cuts and incentives for it. Child-care provisions will be inadequate as long as policymakers stay attached to the idealized, heterosexual, two-parent family model and fail to recognize that poor families, especially single-parent families, need to be assured of a basic level of household support including child care.
