Connecting Caregiver Wages and Distress: Felt Precarity, Parenting, and Child Behavior

In contemporary socioeconomic contexts, employed mothers may experience felt precarity, an emotional reaction to structurally generated vulnerability. This study links wages, a potential source of precarity, to well-being using a family stress model of economic hardship. Findings were generally consistent with those of previous family stress models but with several differences supporting the concept of felt precarity. Mothers' wages-independent of hardship-exerted direct effects on distress. Wages had a nonlinear effect on distress; while wage increases lessened distress, there was a wage "tipping point" beyond which distress again increased. While social workers should attend to the interconnected processes of family stress and parenting, their focus should also be directed to factors, like low wages, that are structurally embedded.