Getting a Job is Only Half the Battle: Maternal Job Loss and Child Classroom Behavior in Low-Income Families.

Since the passage of federal welfare reforms, job loss has become increasingly prevalent among less-educated single mothers. Parents who previously relied on cash assistance are now required to work and often enter the labor force by way of low-wage, short-tenure jobs, amplifying the odds of forced or voluntary job loss (Boushey, 2001). Even in the tight labor market of the late 1990s, single mothers commonly experienced unstable employment and long periods of unemployment between jobs (Johnson & Corcoran, 2003; Pavetti & Acs, 2001; Wood, Moore, & Rangarajan, 2008), patterns associated with job instability rather than mobility and earnings growth (Johnson, 2007; Royalty, 1998; Topel & Ward, 1992). The recent recessionary economy has only exacerbated these patterns of employment instability. The services that most job seekers encounter at welfare offices or Workforce Investment Act centers focus primarily on promoting job entry, not stability. The now conventional “work-first” model proliferated in the 1990s partially in response to the perceived success at increasing short-term employment and earnings of experimental welfare programs that emphasized job search assistance over training or education (Greenberg, Mandell, & Onstott, 2000; Haskins, 2006). It has since been argued widely that long-term employment stability and advancement is better promoted by some combination of job-specific training, careful job matching, and “post-employment” services (e.g., Haskins, 2006; Holzer, 2004; Strawn, Greenberg, & Savner, 2001). A few proven models of such services exist, and more are being tested, but none has been widely adopted, leaving job loss as a critical and largely unaddressed concern for low-wage workers. The implications of job instability extend beyond workers to their children. Developmental theory and research suggest that parental job loss can be detrimental to low-income children’s well-being through both economic circumstances and family processes. Job loss and related economic hardships are associated with increased behavior problems, decreased emotional well-being, and reduced educational attainment among low-income teenagers (Conger et al., 1994; Kalil & Ziol-Guest, 2005, 2008; McLoyd et al., 1994; Randolph et al., 2004). The few studies of job loss and younger children’s behavior find effects ranging from neutral (Chase-Lansdale et al., 2003) to moderately large and adverse (Johnson, Kalil, & Dunifon, 2010). These studies offer important insights into the influence of job loss on children’s socio-emotional development, but even with careful statistical controls, these effects may be confounded with unmeasured characteristics of children and families or the contemporaneous timing of events. This is the first study to use experimental data to examine relations between maternal job loss and child behavior in school. We use exogenous variation in maternal employment patterns produced by an experimental welfare-to-work program to reduce sources of bias present in other studies. The combination of experimental data and instrumental variables (IV) estimation has been used in several prior studies (Duncan, Morris, & Rodrigues, in press; Gennetian et al., 2010; Gennetian, Magnuson, & Morris, 2008; Kling, Liebman, & Katz, 2007; Ludwig & Kling, 2007; Mamum, 2008) and is recognized as a promising approach to understanding the causal pathways of experimental impacts (Angrist, Imbens, & Rubin, 1996; Robins & Greenland, 1992). The experiment in this case, the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS), was implemented during the recession of the early 1990s. It provided a model for the eventual adoption of work-first policies across the country and offers insight into the potential effects of programs designed to promote employment among less-educated workers.