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Between 1972 and 2006, general happiness levels among American adults remained quite steady, though a minor drop can be detected. This chapter tries to account for this stability, given the growth in real family incomes and standards of living that occurred during the era. Several factors—better health, being married, greater education, and higher income—made people happier at any given point in time. However, assessments of well-being in societies like the contemporary United States reflect not only absolute levels of living but also comparisons of one's income to that typical in a reference group of peers. The analysis finds higher happiness among adults whose family incomes are higher than average for their age group at the time, implying that happiness rises only when income increases more rapidly than average.

This chapter examines the implications of global transformations on family income, the ability of children and parents to exit poverty, and the degree of equality between girls and boys, men and women. At times, the goal of having both men and women in the family in the formal labor force was to increase economic security. At other times, the goal was to increase gender equality. As parents have moved from trading their labor in kind to being paid in cash, from controlling their own hours to answering to an employer, from working with their children right by their sides to working far from home, what has happened to their economic security? The chapter also examines whether parents are able to succeed in formal and informal workplaces, in cities and towns transformed by the global economy, at the same time as rearing their children.

This chapter examines the changes in the expenditure patterns and access to specific goods and services from 1997 to 2001, as incomes rose in response to benefit changes and employment shocks. The data used in this chapter is from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) which was conducted from 1996/97 to 2000/01. The overall aim of the chapter is to illustrate where the increased income goes in terms of patterns of household consumption and ownership of goods. Particular attention is given to specific items that are consumed by the children or that promote their learning and development. Based on the notion that deprived families often lag behind others in their spending on these items, this chapter aims to discover whether these low-income families increase their spending and narrow the gaps between them and other families as their income rises. From a comparative perspective, the chapter presents the spending patterns for low-income families with children and the spending patterns of higher-income families with children before and after the policy reforms of the Labour government. Comparisons of families with children who were less likely to be affected by the policy reforms are also tackled. In addition to discussing spending patterns of families in the UK, the chapter also examines how measures of material deprivation change as incomes rise. Specifically, the chapter probes into durable goods owned by low-income families such as cars, washing machines, tumble dryers, telephones, and computers. Understanding how measures of material deprivation change is crucial to the government's decision to include an indicator of consistent poverty. Results show that as incomes rise within low-income families, their expenditure patterns also change and become more akin to affluent families. The difference lies in their spending emphases: low-income families tend to prioritise spending on goods for children more than affluent families.

This chapter examines the effects of the minimum wage on the distribution of family incomes. It first considers the relationship between low-wage workers and low-income families, and then discusses updated evidence on the extent to which minimum-wage workers are concentrated in low-income families. The chapter considers evidence that parallels much of the minimum wage employment literature in terms of empirical methods, but focuses instead on how minimum wages affect family incomes. This analysis considers the question of whether higher minimum wages reduce poverty.

This chapter examines the relationship between employment of black and white youth and their family income and poverty status. It utilizes the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the question of racial differences in youth employment in a historical context. The chapter describes the trends of youth employment and family poverty by race nationwide from 1955 to 1995 between blacks and whites.

This chapter explores the implications of the transformations on family income, the ability of children and parents to exit poverty, and the degree of equality between girls and boys, men and women. It attempts to answer the following: First, as parents have moved from trading their labor in kind to being paid in cash, from controlling their own hours to answering to an employer, from working with their children right by their sides to working far from home, what has happened to their economic security? Are parents able to succeed in formal and informal workplaces, in cities and towns transformed by the global economy, at the same time as rearing their children? Do low- and middle-income families have the same chance of succeeding? What about women and men? In general, adults living in poverty absolutely need work to survive, let alone prosper, and children dearly need adults to raise them.

Chapter three takes a critically informed look at the role of families, and children’s position within families, in understanding child poverty and disadvantage. It looks at the role of social support and gendered relationships and examines how families are not value-free environments. Family life under conditions of disadvantage tends to be pathologised and denigrated: parents who are ‘poor’ are frequently situated as ‘poor parents’. Low income families are particularly vulnerable to categorisation as ‘troubled families’ or troublesome families (Ribbens McCarthy et al 2013). This chapter looks at the myths and realities of family life at the bottom of the income structure, how children understand, negotiate and mediate poverty in family life and their experiences and agency within the family. It also considers how wealthier families, who are held up as the benchmark of the ideal family, reinforce and perpetuate the disadvantage of poor children and families by employing their superior resources to confer (further) advantage onto their own children.

This chapter considers how our early experience determines our emotional well-being as a child and how it affects the other key dimensions of our development as children. To answer these questions, the chapter turns to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This survey attempted to cover all children born in and around Bristol (a city of nearly half a million people) and Bath, between April 1991 and December 1992. Through this, the chapter embarks on a study of how children are affected if their parents are poor. Here, the ALSPAC data confirms the well-known fact that income affects children's academic performance. But ALSPAC also shows that the effect on children's emotional well-being and behavior is much less.

This chapter addresses important behavioral changes in low-income families in the 1990s and investigates the role of both the macroeconomy and policy in producing these outcomes. The chapter concludes by discussing how changes in poverty rates and income may be translated into measures of well-being.

Child care and early education subsidies for low-income families make up a relatively small but growing share of the portfolio of government means-tested transfer programs in the United States. The federal and state governments are estimated to have spent at least 18 billion dollars on such subsidies in fiscal year 1999. This chapter describes child care and early education subsidy programs in the United States; discusses the rationale for such programs and the economic issues raised by their existence and structure; reviews evidence on the effects of the programs on the behavior and outcomes of low-income families; and discusses proposals for the reform of such programs.

This chapter is focused on measuring the income situation of children and provides a more differentiated picture than the one taken from traditional research designs. It presents an analysis that uses the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (GSOEP), taking a subsample of 14-year-old children. This is done in order to test whether, at this stage of young adolescence in West Germany, a correlation can be verified between different educational prospects and family income.

In a world where meeting the twin responsibilities of making money and discharging domestic duties has become considerably more complex than in the past, community-based organizations (CBOs) form a key piece of the survival system for low-income families. For one thing, they serve as important sources of employment for neighborhood residents. From Los Sures in Williamsburg to the New Life Child Development Center in Bushwick, CBOs create jobs and provide an environment that eases residents with limited employment histories into paid work. Although many CBO jobs are low paying or part time, they often are appropriate for the skill levels of local residents. CBOs also organize the provision of several critical domestic-sphere services that make it possible for adult family members to engage in paid work in the first place; taking care of children and assisting elderly relatives with daily living tasks are the most important of these. This chapter details some of the ways that they connect local residents to paid work, both by creating opportunities to earn money and by helping to fulfill domestic responsibilities.

This chapter presents data from a study on women who are seeking to move into training, education and employment after a period of parenting or unemployment. The women in this study kept care diaries over a three-week period and participated in a focus group at the start and end of data collection. The discussion notes the existence of a ‘gender culture’ in which women are perceived as primary carers, and a ‘worker culture’ in which engagement in employment or training is seen as paramount to active and useful notions of the citizen. Familial, friendship and social networks were crucial to managing the needs of balancing care responsibilities, training, education and employment. Support in transitions for women in low income households must recognise care roles and responsibilities and fully consider the range of social and familial resources that low income families depend on.

This chapter reviews the complex mix of housing programs for low-income families in the United States. The objectives of the study are to (a) consider the arguments that have been offered for housing subsidies to low-income households and the implications of valid arguments for the evaluation and design of housing programs; (b) describe the most important features of the largest rental housing programs for low-income households in the United States; (c) summarize the empirical evidence on the major effects of these programs; and (d) analyze the most important options for reform of the system of housing subsidies to low-income households. The effects of these programs to be considered include: effects on the housing occupied by recipients of the subsidy and their consumption of other goods; effects on labor supply of recipients, the participation rates of different types of households, the distribution of benefits among recipients and all eligible households; effects on the types of neighborhoods in which subsidized households live, and of subsidized housing and households on their neighbors; and effects on the rents of unsubsidized units and the cost-effectiveness of alternative methods for delivering housing assistance.

This chapter presents a financial profile of low-income parents who have pre-school children. The families who participated in the study were facing a number of significant economic barriers at the beginning of a four-year college savings program designed to build assets for children. Earlier studies of the program have noted that while very few parents took advantage of financial education opportunities, more than half of the families who had the opportunity to open college savings accounts for their pre-school children did so and about one-third of the parents made deposits from personal resources into those accounts. Do these findings suggest that parents did not need financial education in the context of a progressive asset-building program for their children? It is not thought that the evidence supports this interpretation. As this chapter's analyses of pre-intervention data presented here demonstrate, there were many low-income families in this study who may well have benefitted from parental financial education. Further, the findings suggest the importance of real access to financial products that are appropriately structured and incentivized so that they are truly inclusive of low-income parents of young children.

This chapter explores how contemporary social practice art materialises interactions between regulatory regimes and low-income families with children and enables disruptions of regulatory regimes in ways not possible using traditional social science approaches. It focuses on a research team that included artists Close and Remote. Here, the chapter explains how the team co-produced, with community members and academics, a socially engaged artwork — Life Chances — that aimed to generate new knowledges about the regulatory regimes that low-income families with children experience. Aiming towards a form of improvisational empathy, Life Chances worked with Thomas More's (1516) Utopia and Ruth Levitas's (2013) Utopia as Method as ‘a form of speculative sociology of the future’. By staging and troubling contradictory notions of ‘life chances’ through art, the chapter specifically asks how the regulatory services that families encounter in two urban settings — the Easton area of Bristol and Butetown, Riverside and Grangetown in Cardiff — shape, constrain, and enable the life chances of individual families and communities.

This chapter, which examines child support policies, especially the activities of the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) Program, and how they interact with transfer policies and affect the low-income population, is organized as follows. Section 9.2 reviews the history of the CSE program, its rules, and objectives. Section 9.3 considers the economic rationale for government's role in child support. Section 9.4 describes trends in child support awards and payments. Section 9.5 discusses the importance of child support to low-income families. Section 9.6 examines the capacity of noncustodial parents to pay child support. Section 9.7 discusses the trends in costs and effectiveness of the child support program. Section 9.8 reviews the financing of this program. Section 9.9 examines the effects of child support incentives on behavior. Section 9.10 discusses remaining equity issues within child support. Section 9.11 considers several reform proposals. The final section draws conclusions about directions for the future of child support policies.

Chapter 3 covers the transition from the “era of easy finance” to the “era of permanent austerity,” when macroeconomic changes reinforced logics. The onset of stagflation across the developed world led to new and intense economic pressures on families. Most scholars of this period focus on the confusion policymakers faced as the Keynesian consensus broke down and they were forced to recalibrate monetary and fiscal policy. Policymakers also faced uncertainty in how to deal with inflation-induced erosion of tax and social benefits for families. In countries with family allowances, like Canada and the UK, policymakers and the public traced these pressures to the erosion of family allowances. Because the US had no family allowance, policymakers and the public instead traced these pressures to the erosion of dependent exemptions in the tax system. In doing so, they reinforced the dominant logic of appropriateness that lay behind policy responses to the problem of inflation in each country.

As their children enter young adulthood, parents may use their own financial advantages to support their children as they pursue higher education, to help their children establish independent households by helping them with down payments for their first homes, or to lessen the financial burden involved with having their own children. Further, other parental assets, such as home ownership or help caring for children, may be used to aid adult children in difficult life stages. This chapter examines direct material support received by young people from their parents during the transition to adulthood in the form of money, time, and shared housing. It explores how much familial assistance young adults receive during adult transitions; how much more assistance children in high-income families receive during these formative years; the pattern of familial support during the transition years, and whether the observed age pattern can be explained by life-course events such as getting married, buying a home, or attending school; and whether familial support has increased in the past few decades.

Free-market family policy puts most American families in a difficult position when it comes to the trade-off between earning income to support a family and making sure young children get the caretaking that suits them best, but it clearly puts poor and low-income families in the toughest positions. This chapter considers the extent to which poor and low-income US families can privately provide the conditions that help young children thrive: adequate material support, a parent at home for up to the first year, good daycare and prekindergarten after that, and time with a nurturing parent. It also compares the likelihood that young children will receive this support in the United States under free-market family policy and in countries with pro-family policy.