Decreasing Nonmarital Births and Strengthening Marriage to Reduce Poverty

Summary Since the 1970s, the share of U.S. children growing up in single-parent families has doubled, a trend that has disproportionately affected disadvantaged families. Paul Amato and Rebecca Maynard argue that reversing that trend would reduce poverty in the short term and, perhaps more important, improve children's growth and development over the long term, thus reducing the likelihood that they would be poor when they grew up. The authors propose school and community programs to help prevent nonmarital births. They also propose to lower divorce rates by offering more educational programs to couples before and during marriage. Amato and Maynard recommend that all school systems offer health and sex education whose primary message is that parenthood is highly problematic for unmarried youth. They also recommend educating young people about methods to prevent unintended pregnancies. Ideally, the federal government would provide tested curriculum models that emphasize both abstinence and use of contraception. All youth should understand that unintended pregnancies are preventable and have enormous costs for the mother, the father, the child, and society. Strengthening marriage, argue the authors, is also potentially an effective strategy for fighting poverty. Researchers consistently find that premarital education improves marital quality and lowers the risk of divorce. About 40 percent of couples about to marry now participate in premarital education. Amato and Maynard recommend doubling that figure to 80 percent and making similar programs available for married couples. Increasing the number of couples receiving services could mean roughly 72,000 fewer divorces each year, or around 65,000 fewer children entering a single-parent family every year because of marital dissolution. After seven or eight years, half a million fewer children would have entered single-parent families through divorce. Efforts to decrease the share of children in single-parent households, say the authors, would almost certainly be cost effective in the long run and could reduce child poverty by 20 to 29 percent. One key strategy for U.S. policymakers seeking to reduce childhood poverty would be to increase the share of children who grow up with continuously married parents. Married couples with children enjoy, on average, a higher standard of living and greater economic security than do single-parent families with children. In 2003 the median annual income of families with children was almost three times that of single-parent households--$67,670 compared with $24,408. (1) Correspondingly, the child poverty rate was more than four times higher in single-parent households than in married-couple households-34 percent compared with 8 percent. Moreover, the economic advantages of married couples are apparent across virtually all racial and ethnic groups. But over the past half--century those economic advantages have been denied to a growing share of America's children. In 2004, nearly 36 percent of U.S. children were born to unmarried mothers. Even when children are born to married couples, many will spend part of their childhood living with a single parent because of parental divorce. (2) Between 1960 and 2005, increases in nonmarital births, low marriage rates for women who have children out of wedlock, and rising divorce rates pushed the share of children living with a single parent (mostly the mother) from 8 percent to 28 percent. (3) And these sobering figures underestimate the share of children who will ever live with a single parent, because they refer to a single year. Overall, demographers project that only half of all children in the United States will grow up with two continuously married parents. (4) The clear correlation between family structure and economic resources has led researchers to conclude that a major cause of the rise in child poverty in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century is the decline in married-couple households. …