Welfare Rules Ripped As Bad For Babies Workfirst Reforms Ignore Social Realities And Endanger Children, Critics Say

More than 600 babies from impoverished Spokane County families are in great danger unless extraordinary steps are taken, a chorus of politicians, social workers and doctors said.

The babies’ mothers are on welfare and, as of July 1, must find work three months after giving birth.

There are just 23 openings citywide in care centers accepting infants, on welfare or not.

Leyli Woodfield, a public health nurse, said some of the welfare mothers she serves are being told to find impossible-to-find care for disabled kids.

“(Their) stopgap is a boyfriend who I wouldn’t trust my car with,” Woodfield said.

A forum Wednesday in the Spokane City Council chambers was supposed to be about the new rules shrinking welfare mothers’ post-natal bonding time from one year to three months.

Few among the 100 in the audience were welfare moms themselves. There were no babies.

Forecasts of doom took center stage.

Child care for 619 welfare infants - not to mention for babies of financially independent parents - is so scarce that “we’re talking crisis level,” Sen. Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, said.

Failure to keep the waiver for new welfare moms at one year was the “lowest point of my legislative service,” Brown said.

A state child-care inspector said illegal child-care facilities are already springing up - centers run by drug addicts, some polluted by toxic materials and prowled by vicious dogs.

And those are just the ones the state knows about, said Lee Williams, an inspection supervisor.

Dr. Deb Harper sees the results of bad child care.

“I get to see a lot of dead babies, permanently brain damaged babies, blind, unable to eat or sleep or walk,” said Harper, a pediatric doctor with Group Health.

“What I hear again and again is mom is at work and left the child in unlicensed child care.”

Usually, the abuser is a man between 18 and 25, Harper said. Half the time it’s the baby’s father. Less than half the time he’s a drug abuser, unemployed, with a criminal record. Most have a history of abusing animals, Harper said.

“What I’m concerned about, when I hear there’s 600 kids coming down the pike and 23 slots … that leads to a lot of children in tenuous situations.”

Catholic Charities debated opening a big new child-care center, but found it economically impossible, social services director Donna Hanson said.

It would cost about $14,000 a month in staffing; revenue would be $8,300 a month. “We cannot make it work,” she said.

The Department of Social and Health Services, which is enforcing the new law, is taking extraordinary steps to protect the kids, deputy assistant secretary James Kelly said.

Mothers who are forced into using unsafe child care, should call him in Olympia, Kelly said.

“It’s important that we do this right,” he said.

Social workers will make sure new moms are getting health care and have work-search plans tailored to their lives. Get-to-work welfare has few loopholes, but mothers of infants will have wide latitude, he said.

As the meeting ended, Julie Graham, a former welfare mother, took the podium.

“I just ask why, why are we doing this to future generations, when we’re putting our children at risk,” she said to a round of applause.