Session: Income Support Policies and Family and Child Wellbeing (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

To offset economic hardships and help improve low-income families' well-being, the U.S. government provides a patchwork of income support policies - e.g., Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Research shows that income support policies not only reduce individual and family poverty but also support the health and wellbeing of parents and children (Hoynes, & Schanzenbach, 2018). However, there are important gaps in the literature. For instance, more research is needed that 1) attends to the complex nature of how multiple policies may interact with each other - considering the increasing trend of multiple program participation (Hardy et al., 2018) - 2) provides causal evidence on the impact of income support policies on family and child wellbeing, and 3) identifies the patterns of safety net use at critical life stages and transitions.

This panel includes four papers that contribute to these research gaps. In addition, all papers provide policy-relevant findings to the discussion of in what ways income support policies are beneficial to families and children, by focusing on diverse, but interrelated, outcomes: household economic wellbeing, household food insecurity, as well as child development. The first two papers examine multiple safety net programs, while the last two papers focus on a single program.

The first paper investigates the effects of SNAP and EITC benefits, respectively, on school-readiness skills, and whether SNAP and EITC benefits serve as complements or substitutes or neither in their effects on school-readiness. One advantage of this paper is its use of a novel identification strategy. Importantly, this paper finds that more generous SNAP and EITC benefits can improve cognitive and socioemotional development and provides first evidence that SNAP and EITC serve as complements for children's development. The second paper examines 1) the associations between child support regularity and custodial mother's strategies to avoid poverty, i.e., their decisions to participate in multiple safety net programs (e.g., TANF, SSI, SNAP); and 2) the effects of these associations on family's economic well-being, which are both understudied areas. This paper makes critical implications for social safety net programs and child support policy.

The third paper categorizes various state SNAP policies into distinct approaches and uses these approaches as an instrumental variables (IV) to estimate the effect of SNAP participation on household food insecurity. This paper makes a methodological contribution by showing that state SNAP policies can be grouped into distinct approaches and that these policy approaches can be used as the IV for SNAP participation. It also provides a timely contribution to ongoing policy debates about SNAP, by finding that SNAP largely reduces food insecurity. The fourth paper uses a population level linked administrative dataset from the state of Oregon to examine TANF participation before and after first-time births. The paper provides (1) a refined understanding of the timing and duration of TANF uptake among low-income mothers, and (2) identifies a portion TANF participants who are likely using TANF as a paid family leave substitute.