Parental income and child outcomes: what can we learn from material deprivation?

Since the Government put reducing child poverty at the centre of its domestic policy agenda since 1999, it has introduced a programme of very big increases in benefits and tax credits for families with children. Although such increases almost by definition help the Government to meet its proximate policy aims, namely to reduce income-based measures of child poverty, by a quarter relative to a 1998-99 baseline by 2004-05, and by one half by 2010-11, it remains an open question whether, and how much these financial transfers will have affected other, possibly more meaningful, measures of well-being, besides income.

One measure of well-being, much favoured in social-policy circles, and recently introduced as part of the DWP's new official measure of child poverty is material deprivation. This note sets out what we learn about the relationship between family income and material deprivation from a panel of lone parents constructed from 5 waves of the Family and Children Survey (FACS). In addition we consider how material deprivation and family income are related to another aspect of well-being, again within lone-parent families, namely, parent and child health.