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Adopted within a context of high economic growth, the US welfare reform ended up transforming a system aiming at helping poor people into a system supporting the working poors. Numerous evaluation studies measured the effects of these reforms on the behaviour and the well being of single parent families, notably attempting to disentangle the impact of these policies from that of the business cycle. This article aims at presenting the main results of two generations of evaluations. The results of the first, which particularly focused on the impact of the new welfare on the changes in the number of AFDC/TANF recipients, the employment rate of single mothers as well as their poverty rate, identified the role of the reforms and notably those of the TANF and the EITC. Conversely, the results of the second generation of evaluations, which mainly focused on the impact of Welfare on the well being and the change in marital behaviours, are less conclusive. It seems, nevertheless, that the well being of single mothers, as revealed by the level and structure of their consumption, has progressed little. Furthermore, as it has been designed since 1996, welfare appears to play a lesser role in the stabilisation of economic cycles as well as being ill-adapted to the needs of those structurally distanced from the job market.