The growth of female-headed families has also contributed to the growth of the welfare rolls. According to the Congressional Budget Office, welfare caseloads would have declined considerably throughout most of the 1980s if it had not been for the fact that the growth of single parent families continued to push them upwards. Moreover, this factor was more than twice as important as the economy in accounting for the roughly one million increase in the basic caseload between 1989 and 1993. It is not just the growth of female-headed families but also shifts in the composition of the group that have contributed to greater poverty and welfare dependency. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the growth of single parent families was caused by increases in divorce or separation.
Unmarried mothers tend to be younger and more disadvantaged than their divorced counterparts.
A large fraction of babies born outside of marriage have mothers who are not teenagers. So if we want to reduce such births and the welfare dependency that usually ensues, the adolescent years are a good place to start. One is to encourage marriage. The other is to discourage sex, pregnancy, and births among teens. This latter strategy has the advantage of being more consistent with the growing requirements of the economy for workers with higher levels of education and with evidence that teenage marriages are highly unstable.