Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- Single motherhood has evolved over 40 years, but poverty rates remain unchanged.
- Most single mothers today have never married, face lower-education levels and lower-paying jobs.
- Marriage impacts family economics, but single mothers struggle to catch up in income.
SALT LAKE CITY — Despite significant changes in women's lives overall in the past 40 years that have provided economic benefits — more education, more workplace participation — the poverty rates for single mothers hasn't changed.
Single-mother families were five times more likely than two-parent families to be poor back in 1980. They still are.
What has changed is who single mothers are. In the 1980s, most single mothers were women who'd married, had children and subsequently divorced. These days, most single mothers have never married. And as a group they tend to have lower education levels, worse jobs and fewer work hours compared to divorced mothers, who actually work more than any other group of mothers.
Those are among the findings in the just-released book "Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980," co-written by University of Utah sociologist and professor of Family and Consumer Studies Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Matthew McKeever, professor of sociology and department chair at Haverford College.
Challenges of single motherhood
Divorced women who become single mothers actually look like married mothers but with a single income, while never-married single mothers have different challenges and often themselves grew up in low-income, single-mother-headed families. They tend to become mothers at a younger age. If they've gone to college or otherwise attained more education, it may not benefit them as much when they work. They get worse jobs at worse pay and the jobs themselves may be more unpredictable in terms of scheduling. Their lives are generally less stable, the two researchers told Deseret News.
Still, compared to 1980, "today all mothers have more education, delay having children, have smaller families and are more likely to work. All these developments reasonably lead to expectations of greater earning power. Single mothers have indeed made modest gains in median income but less so in the lower income percentiles," the authors write. ... Many of them "have found themselves in a labor market that fails to reward their human capital even as they've worked to improve it."
Never-married single mothers don't work as many hours as others. For one thing, they may not have support systems that allow it when they have child care needs. While they are more apt to get some kind of government aid than other mothers, "welfare is enormously tiny," as McKeever put it.
Not looking for welfare
The two men scoff at the notion that single mothers have children simply to get government largesse. Wolfinger adds that scholars completing an international comparison "have found no correlation between benefit levels in different countries and the proliferation of single-mother families. "I won't say it's nothing, but it's very small."
Notes McKeever, "All these women who are supposedly doing it to receive welfare are doing it in an era where we're just constantly cutting back welfare. So it's the most backwards logic anybody would use to go after increasingly small amounts of money with the hardest thing possible."
Among reasons never-married single mothers work less is they are younger, less educated and have less work experience; they're not getting big, well-paid jobs. "When you're older and your kids are older, you might have ways of watching them; it makes it possible to work and you're also more likely to be in better jobs," he said.
The book uses data from the nationally representative Current Population Survey of roughly 50,000 households, collected by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, followed through 2018, meaning over 28 waves. They didn't follow the group into the pandemic because their situation was "uniquely affected by COVID" and very few of the female respondents at that point still had minor children at home when they were between 55 and 63 years old.
Family matters
Here are five takeaways from the book and an interview with the authors:
- Any story of parenthood is a story about children. Wolfinger and McKeever write that "growing up in an impoverished family has myriad enduring consequences for children." Growing up poor can lead to poor academic performance and educational attainment, greater likelihood of dropping out, as well as worse physical and mental health and cognitive ability in adulthood. Children who grow up poor may have more emotional problems and lower self-esteem. And they are more apt to themselves be poor when they become adults.
McKeever said that any policy that punishes women for their family structure and economic choices ultimately punishes the children.
- Most single mothers don't remain single. Roughly two-thirds of divorced mothers remarry and nearly that many single mothers who weren't married do marry. "But once women become single mothers, they never catch up in income, even if they later got married," said Wolfinger, who added that as they tracked a cohort of women for 40 years, "we have good evidence that they just don't catch up."
- Marriage does matter to family economics, but recent research "makes it sound more like it's a case of selection," Wolfinger said. "That the kind of people who get married are more likely to prosper." He adds, "I'm not willing to 100% give up on the idea that there is some causal effect of marriage, but certainly increasingly the evidence is pointing the other way" to the difference more likely to be the type of person who marries.
