In 1994, 14.5 percent of U.S. residents were officially poor, but the national average masks enormous variation among population groups and across geographic areas. States with a large share of people at a high risk of being poor, such as minorities and immigrants, tend to have higher rates. Although many people speak about the poor as if they were a monolithic group, the poverty population is quite diverse. It includes, for example, inner-city ghetto dwellers, American Indians living on reservations, rural poor families in Appalachia, African Americans in the deep South, displaced workers, teenage mothers, and elderly widows. The poverty rates for children, minorities, and people living in female-headed households are well above the average for all Americans.
Children born to teenage mothers also run an exceptionally high risk of living in poverty.
One reason for this is that teen mothers often cease their formal education when they become parents and cannot find well-paying jobs. Also, many teen mothers are not married. One study found that 79 percent of children born to unmarried teenage high school dropouts were poor, compared with only 8 percent of children born to married women over age 20 who were high school graduates. 3 People may conclude that most of the poor are black because poverty rates are highest among African Americans. But blacks make up just over one-quarter of the poverty population.