Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996 created by the Social Security Act and administered by the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provided financial assistance to children of single parents or whose families had low or no income.
This program grew from a minor part of the social security system to a significant system of welfare administered by the states with federal funding. However, it was criticized for offering incentives for women to have children, and for providing disincentives for women to join the workforce. In 1996, AFDC was replaced by the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
Read more about Aid To Families With Dependent Children: History, Criticism, Reform
Famous quotes containing the words aid to, aid, families, dependent and/or children:
“The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am willing to pledge myself that if the time should ever come that the voluntary agencies of the country together with the local and state governments are unable to find resources with which to prevent hunger and suffering ... I will ask the aid of every resource of the Federal Government.... I have the faith in the American people that such a day will not come.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)