The Effects of Employment Instability on American Children, 1996 - 2016

Background:

Precarious employment has increasingly surfaced in low- and moderate-income Americans’ economic lives. In turn, some fall into poverty or have other unmet needs. Children from these families may become vulnerable in their growth and learning. Yet, for over two decades since welfare reform, there has been no research on the trends of employment instability from a child-centered lens. Using monthly survey data, this study is the first to provide a longitudinal profile of intra-year volatility on parental work hours and how this work precarity has evolved over time by a child’s poverty status, family configurations, and race/ethnicity.

Methods:

This study uses data from 1996–2016 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Adopting a child-focused perspective, I restrict sample households in which a child lives to those where (1) the head of household within the family was a working-age adult; (2) at least one member in the household was working during the 12-month period; and (3) non-working household members were not a result of going to school, taking vacation/family leave, or having disabilities or chronic health problems. The final sample contains 272,956 child-year observations. As the key predictor, work hour volatility is measured through the standard deviation of the arc percentage change of total weekly work hours across a 12-month period. I conceptualize the family structure by considering six mutually exclusive categories: married-parent family, single mother and partner, single mother, single father and partner, single father, and neither parents present.

Results:

Preliminary results are threefold. First, children who live in families with income under 100% of the poverty threshold or who live with single mothers without partners, appear to constantly face higher volatile parental employment over time, with a sign of rising volatility in more recent years. Second, children at the bottom end of the income spectrum experience roughly 10% more parental work hour volatility than their near-poor counterparts (p< .001), when controlling for time-variant child, parent characteristics and with year fixed effects. Third, despite a relative narrow gap between different family configurations, children living in single-mother families have a significantly greater variability of intra-year work hours, compared to those in families with a single mother and partner present (p< .001), net of all covariates.

Conclusions:

Given the pooling nature of economic resources and time spent within households, it is important to uncover the trends of parental employment instability on children’s lives by looking at the cumulative hours worked within the households. This study has implications for macro social welfare practice. It signals the double jeopardy a child may face: living in poverty, with a single mother without a partner present. As childcare subsidy receipt might be tied to the status of parental employment, it is critical to make access to childcare more flexible for low-income families, so as to ease the childcare burden under the precarious and uncertain labor market activities. It also emphasizes the importance of finding ways to better support families with children facing highly volatile labor market conditions through assistance for continuous benefit access.