Disparities in U.S. Parental Employment Insecurity and Child Well-Being Across Income Groups: Before, During, and After the Great Recession

Abstract

The Great Recession was the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This research focusses on children in five income-quintile groups before, during, and following the Great Recession by analyzing changing disparities across these groups using a new Index of Parental Employment Insecurity, nine additional well-being indicators, and the overall Child Well-Being Index. The new Index of Parental Employment Insecurity captures employment insecurity more fully than the official U.S. monthly unemployment rate by using a comprehensive approach spanning 15-month periods (combining January-to-December measures for a calendar year with measures for March of the following year), based not only on two traditional unemployment indicators, but also two indicators of “hidden unemployment” and two indicators of “underemployment”. The other nine well-being indicators, also with children or youth as the unit of analysis, are median family income, health insurance coverage, Prekindergarten enrollment, three health indicators – very good or excellent health, obesity, and activity limitations – two indicators reflecting family experience – one-parent families and residential mobility – and idle or disconnected youth. For each of the 10 indicators in 1994, children in the lowest-income, lower-middle-income, and middle-income families had lower levels of well-being, often much lower, than children in the highest-income families. These had gaps narrowed, as of 2014, for all three of the lowest-income groups by about two-thirds for health insurance coverage and by about two-fifths for Prekindergarten enrollment. Compared to the highest-income group, however, the gaps had widened for the middle-income group for most indicators, the direction of changes in gaps was mixed for the lower-middle-income group, and the gaps had narrowed, usually by about one-fourth, for the lowest-income group, leaving gaps for the lowest-income group for seven of the ten indicators in 2014 that were at least three-fourths as large as they had been in 1994. In addition, median family income for the highest-income group grew by $32,500 reaching $173,600 in 2014, and the corresponding disparities expanded for the middle-income, lower-middle-income, and lowest-income groups, respectively, to $113,300, $139,400, and $160,800.