Income Volatility and Parenting Styles During Hard Times

Parenting styles are often the focus of interventions aimed at mitigating disparities in children's well-being. Although research has sought to establish parenting differences across income groups, the extent to which income itself drives such differences is disputed. Little attention has focused on income volatility, despite its secular rise and recent salience and the links between volatility and parenting drawn by theories across the social and developmental sciences. I investigate whether and how income volatility affects parenting styles using data from the 2009–2022 UK Household Longitudinal Study and an empirical approach that addresses measured and unmeasured common causes of volatility and parenting. Self-reports of parenting styles are differently associated with income instability across income groups. Mothers with higher but more unstable household and labor incomes report lower warmth. When households accumulate benefit income, reports of harsh or more permissive practices become more frequent among mothers with higher incomes and less frequent among those with lower incomes. Despite instability due to labor income losses, fathers with lower incomes report higher warmth in their interactions with their children, whereas fathers with higher incomes report the opposite. These findings suggest that theories, public debates, and policies could be retailored to address the role of income changes in family life.