Examining Low-Income Single-Mother Families’ Experiences with Family Benefit Packages during and after the Great Recession in the United States

Abstract

The recent economic recession triggered by the global pandemic has renewed scholarly interest in the role of social welfare systems in supporting economically vulnerable families when they experience employment instability. This article unpacks the patterns of the cash and in-kind components of the monthly family benefit packages that US low-income single mothers accessed during and after the Great Recession. We used the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation and an innovative analytic procedure involving family benefit package plots, group-based trajectory modeling, and logistic regression modeling. We found that low-income single mothers more often used in-kind basic-needs packages and less often used packages that bundle a cash benefit or a childcare subsidy, regardless of their dynamic employment status. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of the US work-based welfare system in ensuring the economic security of economically vulnerable families and contribute to the policy discussions on unconditional basic income and President Biden’s American Families Plan.

Ethnoracial differences in income and safety net patterns among low‐income postpartum families before and during the Great Recession

“…Though various public programs provided economic relief during the GR, wage income was still the largest share of total monthly income for women in our sample. At the same time, our results also align with prior research-low-income unmarried women with children often patch together several sources of income and other resources to make ends meet, including during recessions (Chang & Wu, 2021;Eamon & Wu, 2013;Edin & Lein, 1997;Green, 2013;Hardy et al, 2018;Slack et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2022) and the perinatal period. Importantly, while TANF could be a particularly useful income support program for postpartum women, we find that average participation rates were lower during the GR.…”

How do low-income single-mothers get by when unemployment strikes: Patterns of multiple program participation after transition from employment to unemployment

“…Finally, Chang and Wu [ 17 ] studied monthly program participation in seven programs (i.e., UI, SSI, TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, and childcare subsidies) from 2008 to 2013. Specifically, they analyzed patterns of seven types of monthly program participation by employment trajectory group.…”

“…Some programs (e.g., TANF) require work participation, while other programs (e.g., UI) require unemployment status. Further, research has shown that a change from employment to unemployment increased the likelihood of receiving a family benefit package, including UI, among low-income single mothers [ 17 ]. Thus, the months immediately following job loss are important transitional periods for studying access to cash benefits and how they are combined with in-kind supports.…”

“…Most studies of multiple program participation among low-income families have focused broadly on all household types (e.g., [ 32 , 39 , 47 ]), despite the fact that single-mother families face the highest risk of long-term unemployment and economic instability. To date, Chang and Wu’s [ 17 ] study is the only one to examine multiple program participation among single-mother families during the Great Recession. However, the methods used in that study could not provide insights into the sequences of multiple program participation and their heterogeneous clustering patterns.…”

“…Unemployment rates for single mothers increased substantially during that time, as did their participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) [ 13 , 14 ] and an array of other social safety net programs [ 10 , 11 , 13 , 17 – 21 ].…”