Work‐family challenges for low‐income parents and their children.

Abstract

Work-Family Challenges for Low-Income Parents and Their Children. Ann C. Crouter & Alan Booth (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2004. 304 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5077-5. $32.50 (paper). Based on the 10th national symposium in the Penn State University Family Issues Symposia Series, this volume follows the familiar format for this series: four major papers, each commented on by three discussants, with participants drawn from multiple disciplines. This time the symposium aims to illuminate how work and family affect one another among families with low incomes, and the four key chapters focus on the trends in the distribution of available jobs, by Jared Bernstein, an economist; nonstandard employment schedules, by Harriet B. Presser, a sociologist and demographer; nonparental child care, by Aletha Huston, a developmental psychologist; and problems in transitions from cash welfare to paid employment, by a team of sociologists headed by Susan Clampet-Lundquist. Overall, these lead chapters and discussants' comments provide interesting insights. There is some unevenness in maintaining a focus on families and even on how to define such families. For example, Bernstein discusses employed adults whose individual earnings are low, some of whom are not in families because of the presence of additional adult earners. He looks at those whose wage rates would bring individual earnings to the poverty threshold for a family of four if the worker worked 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year; in 2001, this threshold is $18,096, earned at $8.70 an hour. Of course, one problem is that many workers at that wage level do not work that many hours each week nor that many weeks, so that they do not actually reach this threshold. And Bernstein argues that in fact there is reasonable consensus that families' consumption needs require 200% of the poverty threshold for their family size. He notes that this does not all have to come from market earnings: tax policies such as the Earned Income Credit, food stamps, health insurance, and housing and child-care subsidies or credits can substantially increase available income. Obviously, our estimates of how many families with children are families, and what their characteristics are, will vary considerably if we look at hourly wage rates of individual workers, total family earnings below poverty thresholds or less than twice the poverty threshold, or total available income after considering earnings, credits, and subsidies (and, seldom mentioned, child support from nonresident parents). Thus, precisely who are low-income families across various authors is often unclear or inconsistent. And as Paula England as well as Lynne Casper and Rosalind King comment, total family earnings crucially depend not just on individual wages but on the sum of wages from a varying number of earners, as well as the number of children in these families, so that Bernstein needs to consider how family composition may combine with labor market characteristics to shape family income adequacy. Nevertheless, Bernstein's focus on jobs actually available, and how many relatively poorly paying jobs versus better paying jobs are out there, provides a needed downward estimate to ideas about how much changing the education or skills of workers can change the percent of workers in poorly paying jobs. …