Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

American children experience instability across key domains of family life, including who they live with, where they live, and how much money is available to the household. Studies in a range of disciplines indicate that high levels of instability exist for many families and this uncertainty can have negative effects on child development and adult wellbeing. Researchers generally recognize the complexity and interconnections among dimensions of family instability. For example, employment loss can lead to the loss of a home, or the departure of a family member can affect household income. However, most empirical research addresses only one or two dimensions of instability, such as income volatility or changes in family composition. This siloed approach may insufficiently recognize the cumulative nature of family instability as a whole and understate its prevalence for many children and the households in which they live.

This study explores the nature and extent of instability for children and their families, using up to 64 months of data from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This paper complements existing family instability research by documenting the nature and extent of “shocks,” or incidents of negative and substantial change for children, across interconnected domains of family life. By exploring instability across multiple domains—including employment, income, children’s health-insurance status and residential moves, and changes in family and household composition—we quantify the scope of shocks affecting children across the socioeconomic spectrum, by race-ethnicity, and by geography.

Our work is descriptive and cannot untangle the causal relationships among multiple instability shocks, such as how they may “cascade” or interconnect in other ways; nor do we address the ultimate impact of instability on child and family wellbeing. Instead, we provide a snapshot of the type, prevalence, and cumulative nature of instability among a nationally representative sample of children and their households over a five-year period. These descriptive efforts can help foster future research exploring interconnections among types of instability, the timing of instability, as well as how cumulative instability affects the wellbeing of children and families, and implications for self-sufficiency programs that serve them. By more accurately quantifying the scope of challenges facing children in unstable households, we contribute to the literature providing better data to policymakers.

Consistent with other research, we find significant differences in the incidence of instability across domains by the socioeconomic status (SES) of children and their households. While children at all SES levels experienced instability across the key domains of family life—especially during the Great Recession—lower SES children experienced the most instability. However, these groups varied in ways that did not strictly track SES level. This was primarily driven by the third-highest SES group—households with “some college”—which was much more similar to the bottom two SES groups than to the top. Moreover, this SES group had the most instability in two of the six broad domains we explored and the highest levels of cumulative instability across domains. All of these findings are consistent across race-ethnicity and geography.