›› South Carolina Young Adults Count State Report

Family Economics: Appendix B

In Making Ends Meet, a revealing study of welfare mothers, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein concluded the following:

We found that for most welfare-reliant mothers food and shelter alone cost almost as much as these mothers received from the government. For more than one-third, food and housing costs exceeded their cash benefits, leaving no extra money for uncovered medical care, clothing, and other household expenses. When we added the costs of other necessities to the mothers' budgets, it was evident that virtually all welfare-reliant mothers experienced a wide gap between what they could get from welfare and what they needed to support their families. In fact, with only one exception, we met no welfare mother who was making ends meet on her government check alone. Mothers filled the gap through reported and unreported work and through handouts from family, friends, and agencies...The vast majority of our welfare-reliant mothers' expenses were at the very low end of widely shared national consumption norms.

Despite spending far more than their welfare benefits, many of the families we interviewed experienced serious material hardship. Variations in benefit levels had real consequences for welfare-reliant single mothers and their children. Lower benefits substantially increased material hardship as did having larger families.

(Edin and Lein, pp. 58-59)

One of the four sites of their study was Charleston, S.C. where sample families each month spent $146 more for food and housing than their $492 from AFDC and Food Stamps, except for the few families receiving subsidized housing. As a result, in Charleston one-third had experienced times with no food, one-quarter experienced hunger, one-quarter had their utilities cut off, one-quarter had to share housing, another quarter had experienced homelessness, and two-fifths had lacked phone services. To "make ends meet", one-third of the budgets of the families in the study by Edin and Lein were balanced by unreported work (10%), help from family and friends (7%), assistance from boyfriends and absent fathers (11%), and other strategies. What Edin and Lein found for welfare mothers applies to other low income families, many of whom are young adults.

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