Myth or Reality? Examining Parent-Child Income Assistance Use in Ontario, Canada

Tracy Smith-Carrier was awarded funding through a SSHRC grant to explore intergenerational transfer of ‘welfare dependency’ in income assisted households in Ontario, Canada.

Is there an intergenerational transfer of ‘welfare dependency’? Or, simply put, do welfare participants have children that eventually go on welfare? There is a dearth of research addressing this question in Canada. And yet, the discourse of ‘welfare dependency’ (Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Misra, Moller, & Karides, 2003), which positions people in low income outside the social relations of waged labour and as ‘dependent on the state’ (Herd, Lightman, & Mitchell, 2009; Scott, London, & Meyers, 2002), is hegemonic (Smith-Carrier, 2011). Not only is the nature of welfare dependency socially constructed to be long-lasting within the individual’s life course, it is also thought to be generational in nature; the lone mother on welfare is believed to set the course for her ‘feebleminded’ children (Piven & Cloward, 1971), fueling an endless cycle of dependency (Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Kittay, 1998; Solinger, 1998). Employed by researchers, decision-makers and broadly in society, this discourse has a tendency to denigrate income assistance (IA; also called social assistance) participants (Smith-Carrier, 2013) and contribute to a policy climate in which it overshadows the more socially inclusive goal of poverty reduction. The limited research that does attempt to tease out a causal link in intergenerational IA participation—that IA receipt is transmitted from parents to their children—remains equivocal. This research constitutes the second phase of a sequential exploratory mixed methods study that investigates the nature of an intergenerational link, if any, between parental and child receipt of IA in Ontario, Canada. The first phase of our study explored intergenerational IA use utilizing qualitative research methods (see Baker Collins, Smith-Carrier, Gazso, & Smith, under revision; Baker Collins, Smith- Carrier, & Smith, 2019; Gazso, Baker Collins, Smith-Carrier, & Smith, in press; Smith, Smith-Carrier, Gazso, Baker Collins, & Saxby, 2019; Smith-Carrier, Gazso, Baker Collins, & Smith, 2019). Findings from this first stage of research will inform our next phase, involving quantitative research methods. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine whether an intergenerational IA link exists in Ontario, and to understand whether such a link, if any, is correlational or causal in nature.