The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the employment situation and financial well-being of families with children in Austria: Evidence from the first ten months of the crisis

Objective: This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the employment situation of parents and in turn on the subjective financial well-being of families with children in Austria. Background: The pandemic had strong repercussions on the Austrian labour market. The short-time work (STW) programme covered a third of employees in the first half of 2020 and helped to maintain employment levels. We provide evidence on how an unprecedented labour market crisis of this sort and in particular the exceptionally wide use of STW had affected the employment situation of parents and the financial well-being of different types of families. Method: The study draws on register data and representative panel survey data. The latter cover 905 families with minor children and include information on the employment situation of parents and the financial well-being of families before crisis onset, three months and ten months after its onset. Results: Register data show that mothers were not more strongly affected by the labour market crisis of 2020 than childless women or fathers. According to survey data, about a third of couples with minor children experienced income losses. Despite the wide use of STW and government support to families, the share of families in financial difficulties has substantially increased, especially among those with many children and single parents, many of whom were at risk of poverty already before the crisis. Conclusion: Substantial shares of dual-earner families that had low poverty risks before the crisis were in financial difficulties in 2020. Potential spill-over effects of financial shocks on children are discussed.

Precarious parental employment, economic hardship, and parenting and child happiness amidst a pandemic

As labor markets in recent decades have become increasingly volatile and precarious, more workers are susceptible to working conditions that threaten their economic security and thus their well-being and that of their families. We examined the associations between precarious parental employment, income and job loss, and aggravation in parenting and child happiness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our measure of precarity is more comprehensive than those used in prior studies using U.S. samples. We used an online cross-sectional dataset collected in May 2020 in the United States to examine parenting and child happiness, controlling for a rich set of sociodemographic characteristics. We found that aspects of job precarity related to feeling vulnerable at work and receiving low material reward and losing a job during the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly associated with higher aggravation in parenting and a lower degree of child happiness reported by parents. These results primarily were driven by parents with lower education (e.g., less than college). Our analysis underscores the vulnerability faced by working parents and how a public health crisis magnified the dire consequences of precarious employment on parenting and child happiness. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd