When Family Ideals Meet Financial Reality

Abstract

Single-parent households in Australia experience higher rates of financial hardship than two-parent households, with the gap persisting across two decades of HILDA waves after controlling for income, employment, and education. The behavioural-finance literature has begun to attribute part of the residual to **work-family conflict** — the structural and psychological friction between paid-employment responsibilities and parenting obligations — but the heterogeneity in this attribution across attitudinal profiles has not been mapped.

Single parents reporting progressive life attitudes may experience the work-family-conflict friction differently from those holding traditional life attitudes, and the difference may interact with the single-parent labour-market constraint in ways that the additive parametric model suppresses. The construct of interest is the joint operation of work-family conflict and life-attitude profile as a behavioural-constraint bundle shaping how sole-parent households adjust to labour-market demands.

The empirical setting is the HILDA panel, restricted to working-age adults with non-missing items in the Life and Work-Family Balance module and the seven-item financial-hardship battery. The existing analysis applies OLS regression, probit estimation, and difference-in-differences around the timing of family-work-conflict-eligible labour-market events. The existing evidence indicates that single parents reporting progressive life attitudes are more likely to also report family-work conflicts (turning down job opportunities, thinking about children at work), and the combination of single-parent status with family-work conflicts amplifies financial-hardship risk beyond the additive sum of the two components.

We propose extending the existing analysis with a Causal Forest CATE estimator that would recover the heterogeneous interaction of work-family-conflict items with single-parent status across employment, care-responsibility, and household-structure subgroups. The proposed extension is positioned to distinguish whether work-family attitudes change hardship exposure directly, or whether they matter through employment, care responsibilities, and household structure — and to identify the specific single-parent worker profile for whom employer-side family-friendly interventions promise the largest financial-hardship reduction.

Data & Methods