“Invisible” Needs and Hypervisible Families

• In Event: Poverty, Policy, and Economic Supports in Early Childhood

Abstract

In the nearly three decades since welfare reform, most families with limited incomes have had to find ways to make ends meet with employment income and access to near-cash or in-kind income support program benefits (Tach & Edin, 2017). Income support programs today provide less fungible assistance to families through programs such as SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid. However, these programs do not assist families in meeting all their basic needs. Notably, SNAP and WIC do not permit the purchase of non-food items (USDA, 2025). These gaps in support indicate the “invisibility” of many basic needs in the social safety net. Yet, the inability to meet these needs may lead to hypervisibility of families, as the child welfare system has long criminalized poverty, conflating poverty and “neglect” (Cammett, 2016; Merritt, 2020). Among social workers, families having items such as cleaning products and personal hygiene products are viewed as fundamental, just as is shelter, food, and clothing (Myers et al. 2002). Such items are virtually required to be seen culturally and legally as a good parent, yet are outside what most public assistance programs will cover.

This study uses data from the Baby’s First Years: Mothers’ Voices (BFY:MV) study. BFY:MV is the qualitative companion study to Baby’s First Years, an RCT assessing the impacts of additional cash income – either $333 or $20 monthly for the first 76 months of a child’s life – on children’s development among families with limited incomes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mothers (N=77) in the New York City and Omaha BFY study sites. In these interviews, we asked mothers about their expenditures on personal care and hygiene products, laundry, cleaning supplies, and over-the-counter medications. None of these items can be purchased using SNAP dollars, and few mothers in our sample receive TANF benefits, the only government assistance program that provides monthly cash benefits. 

Preliminary analysis reveals that mothers incur relatively high and regular costs in fulfilling basic needs that are not subsidized by income support programs. Mothers deploy various strategies to afford these items. Several mothers use their BFY cash gift to cover these expenses. Some mothers report buying items in bulk using tax refund money. Without ready access to cash, other mothers report needing to forgo purchasing certain basic necessities. For example, Lena, a Latina mother in New York, described a time when her kids were sick, but she couldn’t afford to buy Tylenol. She ended up borrowing from a friend to be able to treat her children. As she explained, “They needed the medicine now.” Of these sorts of expenses – medicines, cleaning products, laundry – she said, “Sometimes it’s hard to cover.” Overall, findings highlight the importance of families' access to more fungible benefits in meeting their and children’s basic needs. Given the serious consequences – namely, family surveillance and criminalization – that families may face when they cannot access specific necessities, it is critical to expand income support programs to assist families in meeting these simultaneously overlooked and hypervisible basic needs.

Authors

• Grace Landrum-Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Carolyn Barnes, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Sarah Halpern-Meekin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jill Hoiting
  Non-Presenting Co-Author