How Much Would Marriage Improve the Financial Well-being of Young Children in Shelby County?

Dear Friends,

For many years, social scientists have examined the benefits of marriage for young children and families. The principal finding of that research is clear: strong and secure marriages bring real advantages to young children and families, certainly including higher incomes and greater family stability. The research also indicates that among single-parented families, first-time, unmarried parents have the best capacity to form stable marriages that provide both financial and emotional security to their children. To what extent would marriage improve the financial well-being of families in Shelby County, where the majority of children are born to unmarried parents?

Our most recent policy brief addresses this question by examining the cohort of unmarried mothers in Shelby County who gave birth for the first time in 2006. You can access the brief at http://www.theurbanchildinstitute.org/PublicPolicy .

Some highlights of the brief:

In 2006, the largest cohort of newborns were born to single-mothers with older children at home. More than half of these families lived in poverty.

The second largest cohort of newborns were born to first-time single-mothers.

If we combine the incomes of first-time single-mothers and their partners it is possible to estimate the number of families that would be lifted out of poverty by marriage.

Sixty percent of first-time single-mothers and their children would be lifted out of poverty through marriage to their child's father. At the same time, most of these same families would remain financially vulnerable, with a median annual income of $27,040 (163% of the federal poverty line).

We welcome your suggestions, comments and questions.

Sincerely,

Doug Imig, Ph.D.
Frances Breland, M.A.
Katie Devlin, M.S.

For more information on the well-being of children in Memphis and Shelby County, visit The Urban Child Institute at http://www.theurbanchildinstitute.org; and The State of Children in Memphis and Shelby County, available at http://www.theurbanchildinstitute.org/DatabookProcessor.php.

The (Lack of) Marriage Phenomenon

Emily Yoffe, the snarky writer who does the "Dear Prudence" column at Slate, has written today about the increasing phenomenon of births to single mothers. Two things I find quite interesting in this article: first is the ample anecdotal evidence that woman after woman expresses the desire to marry the father of their children, but it is the fathers who balk at marriage - preferring to sidle up to other women and sire other children without making a commitment to the (other) mother(s) of their children; second is that only 23% of single-mother births occur to teens - the growing number of single-mother births are to women aged 25-29. Twenty-three percent is nothing to sneeze at, but it seems like there is a distinctly different phenomenon happening here.

The cultural question - that in the post-modern age marriage is passe and single parenthood acceptable - is an interesting one. Having children outside of wedlock clearly does not have the stigma that it did fifty years ago, but the argument that children in fragile families increases social stratification and disparity between the poor and non-poor is one that could gain traction. In essence, how do we talk about the culture of non-marriage and the culture of inequality - and what's the right tack to take in alleviating child poverty, like creating structural conditions that make child-rearing (no matter what kind of family a child is born into) more friendly through policies informed by best practice that are sound investments and make sense in the short and long-term.

The moral of the story throughout all the various narratives - including the references below - is that children born to single parents face many more difficulties in life because of the precariousness that accompanies single parenthood, most importantly poverty.

Among the references included in the article are:

• Fragile Families @ Princeton University. They have been studying 5,000 families over 10 years, tracking the families - nearly 3/4 of whom are children born to single parents.
  
• Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by Kay Hymowitz who writes about the chief source of inequality in America being the marriage gap.
  
• Isabell Sawhill's Congressional testimony on non-marital births and child poverty.
  
• And this that we all read several weeks ago: Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain, the American Associationfor the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston heard on Friday.
• Finally - and this reference was not in the article but it's relevant - the State of Our Unions 2007.