Children’s Shared Households, Poverty, and Material Hardship

• In Event: Children, Poverty, and the Safety Net

Abstract

Shared households are increasingly common for families with children, and prior research suggests that families use these households to weather economic and housing challenges (Harvey 2025; Pilkauskas et al. 2014). However, we know little about the effect of shared households on families’ material wellbeing and how this relationship may differ between “host” families, who share their home with extended family members or nonrelatives, and “guest’ families, who live in a home rented/owned by an extended family member or nonrelative. In this paper, we estimate the effect of shared household residence on poverty status and housing, utility, and food hardship in children’s households. Differentiating between experiences of poverty and material hardship is particularly important in shared households; in many shared households, resources are not fully pooled, so an increase in household income may not reduce  material hardship for all household members (Heflin and Patnaik 2022).

We use data from the 2014-2023 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The SIPP provides a full household roster, an indicator for the householder, and measures of income, whether the household was unable to pay their rent/mortgage, whether the household was unable to pay their utility bills, and whether the household experienced food insecurity. We limit our sample to children ages 17 and younger in wave 1 of each panel who are living with their parent(s). We employ inverse probability treatment weights (IPTW) to adjust for selection into shared households and examine the relationship between shared household status and poverty and material hardship. Additionally, we examine variation by the family’s host/guest status and race and ethnicity. We use fixed effects models, which control for families’ fixed characteristics, to assess the robustness of our findings.

We find that children in shared households, including hosts but especially guests, have dramatically lower poverty rates than children in nonshared households, adjusting for selection into these households. Guest children also have lower rates of housing and utility hardship compared to children in nonshared households, though we find no protective effect against food insecurity. On the other hand, we find no evidence that hosting a shared household is protective against housing or utility hardship, and host children are more likely to live in food insecure households than children in nonshared households, after adjusting for family characteristics. Overall, our findings suggest that looking at poverty levels alone dramatically overstates the safety net function of shared households, especially for children whose families are hosts. Additionally, our finding that shared households differentially impact poverty and material hardship outcomes highlights the limits of relying on income alone to evaluate wellbeing.

Author

• Hope Harvey, University of Kentucky
  Presenting Author