Income Volatility and Parenting Styles during Hard Times

Parenting styles are often intervened upon to mitigate disparities in children’s well-being, with the focus of scholarly and public debates resting on lower-income mothers. Although differences in parenting across the income distribution are well-established, 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, in particular, 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, relying on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS, 2009-2022). Based on a variety of strategies to address measured and unmeasured confounding, I find that parenting styles are especially responsive to volatility among parents with household incomes above the median at baseline. For higher-income mothers, household and labour income instability are associated with lower warmth scores, whereas instability driven by household (benefit) income gains is associated with higher harshness and permissiveness scores. Differently, mothers with lower incomes score lower on harsh and permissive scales when experiencing benefit income gains. Fathers are especially affected by labour income volatility, with earnings losses leading to lower warmth scores among higher-income fathers, whereas the opposite is true for those with lower incomes. Findings shed light on how theories, public debates, and policies could be re-tailored to address the consequences of volatility on family life.