Jobs, poverty, and family breakup: the impacts of unemployment and poverty are contributing substantially to dissolution of American families

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1993 by Donald J. Hernandez

Taken together, these results suggest that economic stresses associated with poverty, job insecurity, and lack of work, as well as those related to full-time employment by both parents, contribute substantially to family breakup.

Families constantly are discontinuing and being replaced by new ones. About eight percent of two-parent families that existed at the beginning of a typical two-year period in the mid 1980s no longer did so two years later. Over-all discontinuation rates were much higher for black two-parent families than for whites (12% vs. seven percent).

Mother-child families (which have no father in the home) are even more transitory; 23% did not exist two years earlier. They usually disbanded in one of two ways: marriage (as a new two-parent family formed) or when the mother and her children joined a household that already existed, such as one maintained by her parents. White single mothers are more likely than their black counterparts to see their family discontinue (27% vs. 13%).

These discontinuation rates are large, but new families are formed at even higher rates, because of over-all growth in the U.S. population. Newly formed two-parent and mother-child families both slightly outnumbered those that discontinued. As a result, the number of two-parent families existing at the end of two years was one-two percent larger, on average, than those at the initial time, and the total of mother-child families at the end of two years averaged four percent larger.

The breakup of two-parent families and the rise of mother-child families often are cited as causing poverty. Since joblessness and poverty contribute to the breakup of two-parent families, many newly formed mother-child families that are poor already were so before the two-parent family broke up. For example, of those children who were poor in mother-child families newly formed through marital separation, 27% of whites and 37% of blacks also were impoverished before the marriages dissolved.

These results are important because of the increasing emphasis over the past decade or two on the rise of mother-child families as causing poverty. For a large minority of white mother-child families created through marital separation, however, and for a still larger minority of such black ones, poverty preceded the breakup, because the two-parent family did not earn enough income to lift it out of poverty.

The rise of mother-child families often is cited as the primary cause of poverty in the U.S. In 1991, the rate for children in mother-child families was about 56%, compared with 11% for those in two-parent families. About 59% of children in poverty in 1991 lived in such families. Over all, 47% of poor white and 83% of poor black youngsters lived in mother-child families.

Estimates such as these exaggerate the importance of fathers' absence as a cause of poverty. Many fathers may not have enough income to lift their mother-child families out of poverty, even if they were reunited to form a two-parent family. As a rough guide, based on statistics, it can be assumed that this is true for about one-fourth of poor white and nearly two-fifths of poor black youngsters in mother-child families.