The Social Safety Net and Economic Hardship Around Childbirth: Differences By Household Structure, Race, and Ethnicity

The transition to parenthood—the time spanning pregnancy through the postpartum—poses a unique challenge to household economic well-being. Many families see significant decreases in household income adequacy and increased rates of poverty around childbirth. This is especially true among households headed by single mothers and parents of color, who experience larger declines in household income around childbirth. Means-tested benefits have been shown to improve families’ economic security. However, data limitations have restricted scholars’ abilities to disaggregate public income sources and examine differences by household composition and parents’ racial and ethnic identities. This study asks two research questions: 1) To what extent do means-tested social safety net programs mitigate economic hardship around childbirth? 2) How do these associations differ across families’ racial and ethnic identities and household structures?

We use data from 2017-2023 Wisconsin birth records merged to the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core. We identified 200,582 births to biological mothers who were covered by a means-tested medical assistance program during pregnancy or postpartum; this restriction excludes higher-income households who were unlikely to be eligible for means-tested programs. The analytic sample included 162,648 parents with complete data on our outcomes of interest. We identified households as headed by married parents, unmarried cohabitating parents, or unmarried non-cohabitating parents. We also created a 6-category measure of race and ethnicity: Hispanic of any race or non-Hispanic: White, Black, Asian or Pacific Islander, Native American, or mixed-race and other racial identities. To answer the first question, we estimated within-person changes in the likelihood of experiencing income poverty, relative to the year before pregnancy, with and without including income from four means-tested programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and estimated tax benefits including tax credits. We included year and quarter fixed effects to eliminate bias from time and place-invariant confounders. We repeated these analyses after stratifying the sample by race and ethnicity and household composition.

Preliminary findings suggest that family income adequacy decreases in the months preceding and directly following childbirth, with differences across household composition and race/ethnicity. SNAP and tax credits reduce the likelihood that families fall under 100% of the federal poverty line after childbirth and, to a lesser extent, during pregnancy. Unmarried non-cohabitating parents and Native American, Black, and Hispanic parents were especially economically disadvantaged. Benefits were most protective among Black parents and unmarried non-cohabitating parents, and least protective among Hispanic parents.

These findings present novel evidence of the importance of means-tested economic support programs during the perinatal period, especially among single-parent families and those whose hardship is compounded by structural racism. We discuss avenues for social work practice with low-income families, such as interpersonal or community practice to address institutional distrust and reduce barriers to seeking economic support. We also discuss the implications of changes to the social safety net to families’ economic well-being, such as the growing importance of in-kind support relative to cash. We conclude with recommendations for policy and practice to reduce inequality and economic hardship around childbirth.