There is a strong intergenerational correlation in welfare participation, but this does not imply that parental welfare receipt induces child receipt. While there are a few quasi-experimental studies that provide estimates of the causal effect of parental welfare participation on children from marginal welfare participants, we are ignorant about intergenerational spillovers of welfare programs on children from the average welfare participant. By combining rich administrative data from Norway with weak mean-monotonicity assumptions, we estimate nonparametric bounds, and find that the average causal effect of parental welfare participation for children growing up in welfare-dependent families is considerably lower than the intergenerational correlation in welfare participation. It is also substantially below available local average treatment effect estimates in the literature. We further find that effects also differ across types of welfare programs.