Safety Net Policies and Income Inadequacy at the Transition to Parenthood

• In Event: 20852 - Poverty

Abstract

The transition to parenthood is a time of particular economic vulnerability for many families, given sharp demands on time and money that come with a first child. The U.S. welfare reform of the mid-1990s put an end to most cash welfare and ushered in a largely employment-based safety net—without federal-level paid family leave and other supports for new parents that are common elsewhere. It also opened the door to greater disparities in state-level spending on safety net programs. We leverage this state variation to better understand how disparities in public spending buffer the economic vulnerability of new parents, particularly those without a college degree. Our analysis relies on five panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 1997-2018 (N = 3,588 new mothers without a college degree and 87,346 person-months), merged to publicly available annual data from the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset from 1997-2016. We differentiate between three kinds of public expenditures at the state level: 1) employment support in the form of tax credits and child care; 2) cash, nutrition, and housing support; and 3) health care. We further assess limited data on paid family leave programs, and address differences between partnered and unpartnered parents. Preliminary findings provide mixed evidence on the extent to which public spending buffers economic vulnerability at the critical juncture of parenthood. We discuss these findings in terms of the mismatch between employment-based support and the demands of new parenthood, and we suggest implications for policy and research.

Authors

• Kelly Musick, Cornell University

• Pilar Gonalons-Pons, University of Pennsylvania

• Chae Kim, Cornell University

• Meiying Li, Cornell University