Do Mothers protect children from deprivation? Comparison of Mother and Child material deprivation within a household

Abstract Many prior studies suggest that parents, particularly mothers, sacrifice their own living standards to protect their children from suffering deprivation (Cantillon et al., 2016; Dunbar et al., 2013; Main & Bradshaw, 2016). This can result in an inaccurate estimation of child poverty. However, empirical evidence that the mothers engage in these ‘protecting’ behaviours is limited, mainly due to the difficulty of measuring the living standards of children and mothers individually. This study, using mother-child paired data of individual deprivations, advances prior literature by 1) improving the comparability of mother deprivation against child deprivation, 2) devising 2 methods to categorise mother-child deprivation combinations and 3) using both child- and mother-reported data for child deprivation. The results reveal that child-reported child deprivation is more prevalent than mother-reported child deprivation, and that mothers protect their children, i.e., provide items for children while they themselves go without, only when they believe that the item is necessary and not necessarily when their children believe that it is necessary. Further analysis showed that mothers increased their ‘protecting’ behaviour as economic strain increased, in both child-reported and mother-reported data. However, using mother-reported data, it was also shown that mothers’ ‘exposing (i.e. not providing items for children, while they themselves have them) also increased as the economic strain increased. Finally, examining the relationship between children’s psychological well-being and mother-child deprivation combinations showed that the psychological well-being of ‘protected’ children did not differ that of congruous non-deprived (neither mother nor child deprived) children.