Family structure is not destiny, but the evidence suggests it remains important

Sorry NYT: For child poverty, family structure still matters

An op-ed conveys the wrong impression.

W. Bradford Wilcox, Isabel Sawhill

National Review Online


“Single Mothers Are Not the Problem” read the headline of a New York Times op-ed by sociologists David Brady, Ryan Finnegan, and Sabine Hübgen over the weekend. The problem here being poverty in America. Brady and his colleagues were taking issue with a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, the “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty,” that stressed the value of putting marriage before childbearing in the fight against poverty here in the United States.

America should stop “obsessing” about single motherhood and poverty, according to Brady and colleagues, because “reducing single motherhood here would not substantially reduce poverty” for ordinary households and because, in a “majority of rich countries, single mothers are not more likely to be poor.” They went on to argue that unemployment, low education, and age are generally better predictors of poverty than is single motherhood. And they contended that generous welfare policies in many other wealthy democracies — such as Denmark — minimize the hazard of poverty for single mothers in these countries, and if replicated here in the U.S. would reduce poverty among single-mother families.

We have no argument with Brady and colleagues’ view that generous welfare policies in European social democracies dramatically reduce the risk of poverty among families headed by single mothers; they’re right about that. Of course, those countries also have far larger tax burdens. But the article, although well-done and instructive, ends up conveying the wrong impression about the actual links between single parenthood and poverty, especially for children. Here are four problems with the idea that reducing single motherhood has virtually nothing to do with the fight against poverty.

1. Overall poverty isn’t the same thing as child poverty.

The New York Times article focuses on the connection between single parenthood and poverty among individuals in all kinds of working-age households — including single-person households. Given the fact that only aminority of households in America have children, this focus diverts our gaze from what most concerns us when we’re looking at single mothers: child poverty. Nobody, after all, is claiming that reducing the number of single-mother households will lead to lower poverty rates among elderly or childless men and women. The concern among poverty scholars has always been that single motherhood leads to higher rates of child poverty. And there is no denying the close connection between single parenthood and child poverty in America.

To begin with, children living in single-mother families are about five times as likely to be poor, compared with children living in married, two-parent families. This is clear in a recent analysis of trends in the official poverty rate from our colleague Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institution.

Moreover, research done by one of us, Isabel Sawhill, indicates that if the share of children in single-parent families had remained steady at the 1970 level, then the current child-poverty rate would be cut by about one-fifth, even after adjusting for the fact that single mother have different characteristics from married mothers. In other words, dramatic increases in single parenthood — from about 12 percent of children in 1970 to about 27 percent now — more recently have played an important role in fueling child-poverty rates.

Single parenthood is not the factor driving child poverty in America, but it is afactor. One obvious reason is that a family with only one breadwinner has only one potential source of income. Replacing a second income with benefits from a government program is extremely expensive.

2. Two is greater than one — even in Europe.

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3. Poverty begins at home.


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The bottom line: It’s useful to point out that family structure is not destiny. But the evidence suggests it remains important and shouldn’t be dismissed as one important factor affecting children in particular.
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