1. Do you live with mommy and daddy? 
  2. Does mommy or daddy smoke?
  3. Do you eat a lot of fruit or nuts at home?

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently released data cubes on Household Expendituregiving an incite into how Australians use their money. What is of interest is that they provide a breakdown of average weekly expenditure for a variety of products, tabulated against the number of financial stressors. The ABS has defined financial stressors are events where a household is unable to pay bills, goes without meals,

The reason this is interesting is that there are very few factors with a striking correlation to the number of financial stresses within a household as those below:

Number of indicators of financial stress experienced
Risk factors 1 2 3 4+
Tobacco products ($/week) 8.89 13.01 14.63 18.02 21.45
Newspapers ($/week) 3.17 2.80 2.64 1.47 1.48
Fruit and nuts  ($/week) 14.06 12.81 11.41 10.62 7.98
One parent family with dependent children (%) 1.9 4.7 8.3 9.8 19.3
All Renters (%) 18.6 28.3 34.0 39.3 54.4
Main source of income – Government pensions and allowances (%) 17.8 22.1 25.2 28.3 52.1

Note, that for newspaper and fruit and nut weekly expenditure, there is a negative correlation.

The problem with some of these metrics though is while they are all strongly correlated with financial stress, they may not all be obvious to children. For example, a child may not know about their parents income or if they live in a rental property, or certain actions may not be hidden from the child, such as a parent buying a newspaper on the way to work.

Other metrics however, are more obvious for children to notice and report. Such who they live with, obvious activities of their parents,  (like smoking) and their own diets. This leads us to the three questions listed above:

  1. Do you live with mommy and daddy?
  2. Does mommy or daddy smoke?
  3. Do you eat a lot of fruit or nuts at home?
Now while these may not account for same-sex couples, a child in a two parent same sex household would, given sufficient prompting, probably indicate they had two parents. Furthermore, this is based on aggregate information, however there is a good chance unit records may back these correlations up. Lastly, this is looking at correlation for risk factors, and cannot be used to suggest causation. Together however, these three questions can quickly give a strong indication of the risk of financial stress within a child’s household.