As policymakers have sought to balance the goal of fostering poor children's well-being with that of encouraging adult's self-sufficiency, public assistance has become more predicated on custodial parents' involvement in work or mandatory welfare-to-work programs activities. This report examines the effects of welfare-to-work programs on the children of the adults mandated to participate. The report synthesizes the findings from two recently completed reports from the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS Evaluation), the 2-year effects of 11 welfare-to-work programs that operated in 7 sites in the early to mid 1990s. Section 1 of the report summarizes the findings. Section 2 presents a conceptual model of how mandatory welfare-to-work programs might affect children. Section 3 describes aspects of child well-being examined in the NEWWS evaluation. Section 4 discusses characteristics of the adults and children in the evaluation samples. Sections 5, 6, and 7 summarize program implementation and program effects on targeted and nontargeted outcomes, highlighting any situations where effects were different for mothers in a special Child Outcomes Study sample focusing on young children, compared to mothers with children of all ages. Section 8 presents effects on children. The report notes that, overall, effects on children were consistently favorable in the cognitive development area, consistently unfavorable in the health area, and both favorable and unfavorable in the behavioral and emotional adjustment area. Child effects were not systematically different for mothers subject to employment-focused programs than for those subject to education-focused programs. Few child effects were found for subgroups of young children identified as at high or low risk for poor development. The report concludes by asserting that mandatory welfare-to-work programs, with no services provided directly to children, can have spillover effects on children's well-being. The report's four appendices include definitions of the child outcome measures and a comparison of national samples of children and control group children. Contains 19 references. (KB)