
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, December 10, 1993                   TAG: 9312100106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WELFARE PROPOSAL: KEEP TEEN MOMS IN PARENTS' HOME

Teen-age mothers would have to live with their parents to qualify for public assistance under a draft White House proposal to overhaul the nation's welfare system and discourage out-of-wedlock births.

The idea is one of several President Clinton's welfare reform task force is considering.

The group, in a confidential draft, also seeks to translate the president's campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it" into a plan to impose a two-year limit on benefits while expanding education, training and child care for low-income families.

The 29-page draft does not address the cost of reform, how it would be financed, and the number of jobs that would have to be created for those who reach the two-year time limit.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration would pay for any new investments in education, training and child care by wringing savings from federal entitlement programs. "It will be pay as you go."

The task force calls teen pregnancy "an enduring tragedy" and notes the country is approaching the point when one of every three babies will be born to an unwed mother.

The costs are enormous, according to the Center for Population Options, an advocacy and research organization that estimates the federal government spent $29 billion in 1991 to support families begun by teen-agers, up from $25 billion in 1990.

A significant reason for the increase, the center said in a paper prepared for the task force, is that an increasing percentage of teen births are out of wedlock. Single-parent families are more likely than two-parent families to end up on welfare.

"If we are going to end long-term welfare use, we must start doing everything we can to prevent people from going onto welfare in the first place," the draft says.

It recommends that teen-age mothers be required to live in their parents' home to be eligible for welfare benefits. That would eliminate a possible incentive to having children out of wedlock: the resources a teen-ager would need to get out of her parents' house and establish her own household.

Poor single mothers not only receive a monthly cash benefit under Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the state-federal welfare program serving 5 million families, but generally qualify for food stamps and Medicaid as well.

by CNB