Income Dynamics and Income Inadequacy at the Transition to Parenthood, 1983–2019

Parenthood is an impoverishing life event for many families in America, with negative implications for healthy child development. Changes over the past four decades in public support, earnings prospects, and family arrangements of new parents have left open questions about trends in economic security and strategies for making ends meet after a first birth. Our study examined trends from 1983–2019 in the month-to-month dynamics of income and income inadequacy around the transition to parenthood. We used fifteen panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 10,988 individuals and 267,345 person-months), leveraging monthly measures of total income, varied sources of income, and the income-to-poverty ratio in the year before and two years after first birth. We find that family income around first birth has increased over time, but only among college-educated couples, and almost entirely due to changes in mothers’ and fathers’ earnings prior to birth. Parenthood income penalties have been largely persistent over time, and among those without a college degree, there has been little improvement in income either just before or after the transition to parenthood since the 1980s.