How are families navigating fragmented social support systems?

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The U.S. social safety net is intended to protect families from hardship and help them maintain a basic standard of living in the face of low wages, caregiving demands, and unexpected shocks. Yet for many households, accessing and maintaining support is itself labor-intensive, confusing, and destabilizing. Programs often operate through disconnected rules, administrative requirements, and policy assumptions that fail to reflect the realities of family life for many vulnerable or marginalized populations, including low-wage workers, single mothers, and individuals with developmental disabilities. 

Research on the burdens of navigating these fragmented systems is growing, but there remain important knowledge gaps around the measurement and impact of this fragmentation, and how the experience of these burdens varies across programs and groups. To that end, this panel examines how families navigate these systems and what those experiences reveal about the limits of current policy design.  

The first paper presents and validates a new survey scale measuring learning, compliance, and psychological burdens among a nationally representative sample of low-wage workers enrolled in SNAP and/or Medicaid. It documents the prevalence of administrative burdens, links those burdens to hardship, and shows that higher state agency workloads and poorer SNAP website performance are associated with greater burden. 

The second paper draws on interviews with Wisconsin mothers to examine the hidden labor of what the authors call “mom math.” It shows how mothers carefully track work hours, child support payments, benefit thresholds, and household expenses to preserve stability, and how even small shifts in one resource stream can destabilize the entire arrangement. 

The third paper examines how tax policies, especially the EITC and CTC, often assume children live in a single stable household, creating inequities for families in shared-parenting arrangements. Using CPS-CSS data and simulated earnings measures, the paper estimates the effects of alternative policy designs and shows that more flexible rules could substantially expand credit access, and highlights promising paths forward to increase the equity and antipoverty effects of these programs. 

The fourth paper examines how people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) navigate public services, community resources, healthcare options, and social stigma in the era following deinstitutionalization. This paper highlights key differences in the realities of these two groups, and highlights ways that states can address the challenge of building policies and infrastructure to support these individuals. 

Taken together, these papers demonstrate that the fragmentation of the social safety net is one of the defining elements of how families experience public support. Whether through complex and confusing enrollment systems, conflicting eligibility thresholds, limited institutional capacity, or outdated assumptions about family structure, our current social safety net requires families to do extensive work simply to access the benefits to which they are legally entitled. This panel documents emerging evidence on the impacts of this fragmentation using a diverse array of methods and settings, and points toward reforms that can make the social safety net more humane, more effective, and better aligned with the realities of contemporary life.

Policy Area

• Poverty and Income Policy

Chair

• Grace DeHorn, Washington University in St. Louis

Discussant

• Katherine Michelmore, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

Organizer

• Stephen Patrick Roll, Washington University in St. Louis

Individual Presentations

• Administrative Burdens in SNAP and Medicaid: Prevalence, Determinants, and Consequences - Presenting Author: Stephen Patrick Roll, Washington University in St. Louis

• "Mom Math": The Hidden Labor of Navigating Income, Benefits, and Work - Presenting Author: Molly A Costanzo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Tax Credits and Shared Parenthood: Improving Child Tax Benefits for Children when Parents Live Apart - Presenting Author: Maria Cancian, Georgetown University McCourt School

• A tale of two deinstutionalizations - Presenting Author: Harold Alexander Pollack, University of Chicago