Calls to reform welfare are common. And, like many political hot-buttons, there is no shortage of opinions about how best to make Maine’s system better.

When people talk about welfare, they usually mean Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — TANF for short — or General Assistance, which is administered by towns and cities.

TANF pays eligible families a cash benefit every month to help cover the basic expenses of living. The benefits are small and they haven’t increased in more than a decade, while the cost of everything else — food, fuel, rent — has continued to rise.

But talk of Maine’s TANF program is often clouded by misconceptions. If we want to make TANF work better, we have to better understand who the program serves.

About a year ago, Maine Equal Justice Partners and the Maine Women’s Lobby joined with researchers from the University of New England and the University of Maine at Orono to conduct a thorough examination of the families that receive TANF benefits. The results of that comprehensive study, which surveyed more than 6,000 families who receive assistance from TANF, demonstrate the difference between the myth of welfare and the reality.

At MEJP, we are focused on issues that affect the daily lives of low-income families, including access to adequate health care, making sure they have enough food, providing support for working families and improving education and training opportunities. A lot of the people we work with receive TANF.

Here’s what our research found:

Most TANF families are headed by women raising very young children on their own, without any support from the fathers. According to our research, only about one in 10 receives regular child support for their children. The kids are typically very young, with a median age of 2 years old. And about 25 percent of these women report that they were victims of domestic abuse and violence, and that TANF helped them escape.

In many cases, these women are truly on their own, trying to recover from dangerous relationships while also trying to give their young children better lives.

Despite what is a common perception, these folks aren’t lazy. They want to work. They have worked and they do work. Ninety-seven percent of respondents to the TANF survey report work experience, having worked an average of three jobs in the past five years. But access to quality child care and transportation make it difficult. About half of the families on TANF can’t afford a car and, of those, 80 percent say that they have difficulty with transportation. And because they work low-paying jobs — on average making just $8.46 per hour — with irregular hours, finding affordable child care is nearly impossible.

Even with all of these challenges, most families receive assistance for just a short time. The median length of time families reported receiving TANF was 18 months, a far cry from the stereotype of a lifestyle of dependency. And for those families who do receive assistance for five years or more, 90 percent include a family member with a disability.

The maximum benefit for a family of three is only $485 per month, essentially enough to keep them from becoming homeless and not much else.

While a lot of the focus of TANF is on the adults, the folks who we all want to find good jobs and improve their lives, the program is really about children. More than 25,000 children receive help from the program. TANF helps to provide a temporary bridge as their parents work to make their lives better.

But jobs are scarce and too many families are falling through the cracks, which makes programs like TANF more important than ever.

There’s little question that TANF in Maine must change and improve, and that it’s time to re-evaluate and restructure programs to meet the challenges of today’s economy. We all want the same thing: common-sense solutions that work for families and all of our communities.

But we can’t find the right answers if we aren’t asking the right questions. And that begins with understanding the facts about TANF and the people it serves. And those facts show that TANF is about working moms left alone to raise young children or families struggling to overcome disability.

Rachel Lowe is the president of the board of directors for Maine Equal Justice Partners. She lives in Auburn.