Abstract
More than one in ten U.S. families lives in poverty, including 30% of single-mother families and 20% of
children. Extensive research has detailed poverty’s negative consequences for low-income families across
several life domains including education, employment, health, and parenting skills. To combat poverty and its
effects, scholars have long recognized the importance of social capital for parenting and child outcomes. Little
research, however, has measured social capital longitudinally or considered the potential detriment of unstable
support on parenting and child wellbeing. Moreover, limited social capital in disadvantaged environments can
create, rather than alleviate, stress and burden. However, no known study considers the potential contribution
of informal burden and its influence on informal support, parenting, and child outcomes. The overall goal of the
proposed project is to determine how social safety nets, defined as perceptions of informal support and
burden, evolve over the course of early childhood and the influence of safety nets on parenting and child
outcomes. Specifically, the study aims to: (1) Identify the functionality of, and changes in, informal support,
informal burden, and a combined measure of both, termed informal safety nets, (2) Test the role of informal
safety nets in predicting parenting stress over time, and (3) Determine the extent to which informal safety net
trajectories and parenting practices interact to influence children’s cognitive and behavioral outcome
trajectories. The study will use a longitudinal dataset of low-income, urban mothers with young children (i.e.,
the Welfare, Children, Families dataset), ideal given its design to examine how low-income mothers and their
children survive without a public cash safety net. Analyses will utilize advanced statistical longitudinal modeling
(e.g., multilevel models of change with reversed, time-lagged, time-varying covariates) to provide stronger
evidence of causal pathways not determined in current research. Innovation and Impact: This project is
significant because findings may provide impetus to prioritize effective peer social support interventions and
promote policies that prioritize community building while providing need-based, welfare services to low-income
mothers and families. This is important because current practice and policy often ignores informal support and
its consequences. The project offers conceptual innovation by quantifying the consequences of both informal
support and burden. It is methodologically innovative by utilizing advanced modeling to improve the
accuracy and precision of the results to significantly advance knowledge by overcoming the limitations of
extant cross-sectional research. Results have the capacity to provide evidence to significantly inform welfare
policy and practice with low-income families. By identifying ways in which informal support changes over time
and influences parenting and child outcomes, findings can provide empirical evidence for stronger public safety
net programs in order to buffer the effects of poverty when self-reliant families have nowhere else to turn.