Who Lacks Support? An Examination of Mothers’ Personal Safety Nets

We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 12,140 person–waves) to identify characteristics associated with mothers’ having or lacking “personal safety net” support from family and friends. We focus on characteristics that are likely to increase the importance of having support available but may also interfere with the maintenance of supportive ties: poverty, poor physical and mental health, and challenging child rearing responsibilities. By capitalizing on distinctions among these types of personal disadvantages and among types of personal safety nets (financial, housing, child care, and emotional), we help to explain why personal disadvantages are associated with weaker support. Our paper contributes to the literature emphasizing the importance of reciprocity in support relationships and introduces the idea that families that are more difficult to help will have less support available. The high rates of nonmarital childbearing and marital instability that characterize the U.S. family system, coupled with a relatively meager social welfare system, mean that family and friend networks often play an important role in supporting mothers and young children (Swartz, 2009). Having a “personal safety net” of basic supports is important for buffering against adverse events and has been shown to have a robust correlation with measures of well-being. In the romanticized version of support networks, network members are altruistic and willing to help in response to need. In reality, not all mothers have support available, and we lack a good understanding of which mothers lack support and why support is not available to them. Previous research on support relationships has tended to fall into one of two categories. Some research focused on a particular community and used an ethnographic approach, illustrating the strong reciprocity norms that prevail in resource-scarce environments (Dominguez & Watkins, 2003; Menjivar, 2000; Nelson, 2000). In contrast, quantitative studies took a broader but less deep approach. These studies documented a correlation between personal disadvantages and lacking a safety net but did not explore the mechanisms linking the two (Harknett, 2006; Hogan, Eggebeen, & Clogg, 1993). Our paper aims to fill a gap at the intersection of these types of studies. Using national, longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we leverage distinctions among types of personal disadvantages and among types of support to test theories for why some mothers lack support. Our paper pursues two related aims. First, we examine which mothers have and which mothers lack various types of support from friends or family. We pay particular attention to how mothers’ personal disadvantages—which we define as poverty, health problems, having a large number of children, or having an unhealthy child—are associated with personal safety nets. These personal disadvantages are likely to increase the need for support but may also decrease support availability. In defining support, we focus on perceived supports that are important for mothers caring for young children: anticipated financial, housing, child-care, and emotional support. Understanding who lacks a personal safety net to provide support in times of need is important for identifying at-risk populations and informing public safety net programs. Second, our paper explores the reasons why some mothers lack support. Here, we take advantage of the conceptual distinctions among types of disadvantages and types of support. We use our pattern of results to make inferences about the underlying motivations and requirements for exchange relationships. We consider several theoretical pathways that may lead to a lack of support from personal networks: having a resource-poor network, having conditions that interfere with the formation and maintenance of social ties, and having characteristics that impose a greater burden on would-be support providers. Our research contributes to a literature on the limits of altruism and the importance of reciprocity in exchange relationships. Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses Having a personal safety net to draw on in times of need is correlated with well-being (Sarason, Sarason, & Pierce, 1990). A large body of research documented a robust relationship between personal safety nets (also referred to as perceived support) and better physical and mental health (Berkman, Glass, Brissette, & Seeman, 2000; House, Umberson, & Landis, 1988; Thoits, 1995). Prior research focused most often on the positive correlation between perceived emotional support and well-being, but recent research found that perceived financial and other instrumental supports were also positively related to material well-being and child well-being (Harknett, 2006; Henly, Danziger, & Offer, 2005; Ryan, Kalil, & Leininger, 2009). Personal safety nets may be of particular importance for mothers whose personal disadvantages place them at greater risk of needing support. In addition to poverty, we also consider mothers to be at higher risk of needing assistance if they reported physical or mental health problems, had a large number of children to care for, or had a child in poor health. In this paper, we focus for several reasons on perceived support rather than actual support received. First, measures of actual support received are conflated with need. Those who do not receive support are a mix of people who do not need any help and those who need help but have none available. Perceived support, in contrast, is unambiguously desirable. Second, prior research found that perceived support was more strongly correlated with psychological wellbeing than was received support (Thoits, 1995; Turner & Marino, 1994; Wethington & Kessler, 1986). Last, regular exchanges of support are relatively uncommon in the United States, so point-in-time measures of support received are not a good reflection of support availability (Swartz, 2009). <Figure 1 about here> Why and in what ways should we expect mothers’ personal disadvantages to be related to perceived support? There are several possible pathways, which we display in Figure 1. The mechanisms in the figure correspond to the hypotheses described below. Hypothesis 1. Poverty will be associated most strongly with lacking a financial safety net and less strongly with other, non-monetary forms of support. Personal disadvantages may be related to perceived support because of homophily of economic resources within social networks (Mechanism 1). Low-income mothers tend to be embedded in social networks that are also impoverished and, as a consequence, constrained in their ability to provide financial assistance (Lye, 1996; Swartz, 2009; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). For this reason, even poor mothers with close kin relationships and friendships may nevertheless lack financial assistance because their friends and families lack financial resources. Consistent with this idea, there is some evidence that poverty interferes with some types of support more than others. For instance, researchers found that neighborhood poverty did not diminish support that required time but was negatively related to support that required material resources (Turney & Harknett, 2010). Although providing housing support requires that one have housing resources, families can and do “double up” (Luo, 2010), so we consider the poverty of network members less of an impediment to housing support than it is to financial support. Hypothesis 2. Personal disadvantages will be negatively associated with all types of perceived support. Mothers in poverty, poor health, and with greater child-rearing burdens are likely to face a dilemma: These mothers may need more frequent support because of their disadvantaged circumstances but be constrained in their ability to reciprocate support. Consequently, these mothers may be especially prone to falling behind in reciprocal support relationships and alienating would-be support networks. Our second hypothesis, that personal disadvantages will be associated with lacking all forms of support, follows from the idea that mothers’ personal disadvantages will act as an impediment to relationships with potential support providers, relationships that are typically contingent on reciprocity (Mechanism 2). Quantitative studies found that poverty was associated with less support (Fischer, 1982; Harknett, 2006; Henly et al., 2005; Hogan et al., 1993; Lye 1996). One possible explanation is provided by ethnographic research, which found that where resources were scarce, norms of reciprocity were strong (Dominguez & Watkins, 2003; Nelson, 2000; Menjivar, 2000). This research highlighted the stress and stigma that mothers experienced when they accepted financial or instrumental assistance and were unable to reciprocate and also the deterioration in personal relationships that resulted from unreciprocated support. Poor health and depression were also linked to a lack of support in prior research (Dean & Ensel, 2006; House et al., 1988; Kawachi & Berkman, 2001; Thoits, 1995). Generally, this research focused on the lack of support as a cause of poor health or depression and has paid less attention to the possibility that depression or poor health may interfere with the maintenance of support relationships. Research on the stigma and social distance associated with mental illness suggests that depression may have a negative influence on personal safety nets (Link, Phelan, Bresnahan, Stueve, & Pescosolido, 1999). Researchers found that child health problems had a destabilizing effect on marriage (Mauldon, 1992; Reichman, Corman, & Noonan, 2004). By the same token, maternal care for children in poor health may interfere with the maintenance of mothers’ relationships with other supportive adults and result in a lower perception of all types of support. The time and energy demands on mothers caring for many children are