Exploring Cross-Domain Instability in Families with Children

Background/Purpose: Many households with children experience substantial instability that inhibits adult and child wellbeing, according to research across disciplines.  However, most empirical studies address only one or two dimensions of instability, such as income volatility or changes in family composition, which may underestimate the cumulative nature of family instability and understate its prevalence among children and the households in which they live.  This descriptive study complements existing family instability research by documenting the nature and extent of “shocks,” or incidents of negative and substantial change for children, within and across interconnected key domains of family life.

We investigate two primary research questions:

1. How are instability shocks distributed by domain among children and their households across socioeconomic status (household education levels)?

1. What does an index of cumulative instability—similar to the index used in the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study—indicate about the extent of cross-domain instability for children across household education levels?

Methods: We used the 2008 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which provides up to 64 months of data over five years, to document the scope of instability shocks among children and their households.  In estimating a series of descriptive statistics, we explored the type, extent, and cumulative nature of instability by four household education levels, as a proxy for socioeconomic status. The instability domains were: household employment, income, and earnings, child residence, child health insurance, and household and family composition. 

Our sample included 14,767 children under age 13 and their households, representing 75 percent of those who completed the SIPP panel at baseline and over 800,000 monthly observations.   

Results: We found significant differences in the prevalence of instability among domains by household education. Although children at all education levels experienced substantial instability, children in the less-educated groups experienced it with much greater regularity. However, trends did not strictly track with education. Households with “some college” were most similar to the two lowest-education groups (“less than high school” and “high school only”) rather than to the highest (“college plus”).  Moreover, the “some college” group had the most instability in two of the seven domains and was disproportionately represented in the highest levels of the cumulative instability index.

Conclusion and Implications: The study’s findings help us to understand the magnitude of instability that U.S. children face, both within key areas of family life and in the aggregate. Federal and state family-support policies and programs can help alleviate this instability or, in contrast, may exacerbate it.  A better understanding of the nature and scale of family instability is an important step toward ensuring that social welfare programs work as effectively as possible to support—rather than challenge— family stability and encourage well-being and opportunity among all Americans. This study lays the groundwork for further research exploring instability among subgroups, interconnections among types of instability, and implications of cumulative instability for family well-being, and for the design of social welfare programs.