Benefit cutbacks have been prominent after the Great Recession. The Family Economic Stress Model (FESM) theorises how financial losses such as those spurred by cutbacks might adversely affect parental and child well-being, but linkages to policy have been few. We extend current knowledge by comprehensively assessing how benefits cutbacks may affect parents and their adolescent children. 

We rely on the first ten waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2019) and an event-study approach to examine the aftermath of an exceptional raft of benefit cutbacks. We find that lower-income mothers and single mothers accumulated losses equal to 20-30% of their household benefit income. Mothers could not fully compensate for such benefit income losses via their extra earnings, despite increased workforce participation. Financial worries and mental health worsened among lower-income and single mothers exposed to cutbacks, although parents averted increases in material hardship. Adolescent socio-emotional difficulties also increased in the period. We find little evidence, though, that cutbacks disrupted parenting. Parents thus display more agency than that accorded by the FESM. Nonetheless, evidence points to deepening socioeconomic divides in financial and mental well-being, questioning the rationale for cutbacks aimed at already disadvantaged families.

Parenting styles are often the focus of interventions aimed at mitigating disparities in children's well-being. Although research has sought to establish differences in parenting across income groups, the extent to which income itself might be one of the motors of such differences is disputed. Little attention has been paid to income volatility, despite its secular rise, recent salience, and the links between volatility and parenting drawn by theories across the social and developmental sciences.

I thus investigate if and how income volatility affects parenting styles by relying on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS, 2009-2022) and an empirical approach that addresses measured and unmeasured confounding. Self-reports of parenting styles are differently associated with income instability across income groups. Mothers with higher but more unstable household and labour incomes report lower warmth. When households accumulate benefit income, reports of harsh or more permissive practices become more frequent among mothers with higher incomes and less frequent among those with lower incomes. Fathers with lower incomes report higher warmth in their interactions with their children despite labour income losses, whereas the opposite is found for fathers with higher incomes. Findings shed light on how theories, public debates, and policies could be re-tailored to address the consequences of volatility on family life.