Urban Children's Living Arrangements and Their Economic Status: New York City, 1993

EMILY ROSENBAUM [*] ABSTRACT. This study uses survey data for New York City to describe children's detailed living arrangements, to explore the link between children's detailed living arrangements and their economic well-being (and the potential for racial/ethnic differences in this linkage), and to evaluate the relative importance of living arrangements as a predictor in the presence of controls for other correlates of children's economic well-being. Descriptive analyses showed that children's economic well-being generally was better predicted by household headship than by children's kinship ties to the householder, yet certain exceptions underscored the value of examining detailed living arrangements and their economic implications from the perspective of children. In particular, among black and white children in married-couple-headed households, those who were the own children of the householder were better off financially than children who were related to--but not the own child of--the householder, but no such difference exi sted among similar Hispanic children. While the results, in general, reiterated the conclusions of other studies that living arrangements and children's economic well-being are strongly related, the results of regression models revealed that the characteristics and activities of the adults with whom children live are far more important as determinants of children's economic well-being than are living arrangements. Furthermore, a regression standardization revealed that the householder's human capital characteristics constitute the most important factors underlying racial/ethnic differences in children's well-being. This finding indicates that family structure alone is not responsible for minority children's disproportionate level of economic disadvantage, but that greater emphasis needs to be placed on improving the earning power of the adults with whom black and Hispanic children live, and on providing better jobs and wages for these adults. I Introduction IT IS WELL RECOGNIZED that family living arrangements directly influence the economic resources available to children (Eggebeen and Lichter, 1991; Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1986; Hernandez, 1993; Hogan and Lichter, 1995). One-parent families are less well-off, on average, than two-parent families in part because they more often rely on a single income, which tends to be lower than that garnered by the head of a married-couple household because of gender and age differences in human capital and labor force activity (Hayghe, 1989; McLanahan and Booth, 1989). The lower economic status of one- relative to two-parent families contributes directly to the higher incidence of child poverty among black and Hispanic than white children (Eggebeen and Lichter, 1991; Hogan and Lichter, 1995; Lichter and Landale, 1995). Most studies focusing on the interrelationship between children's living arrangements and their economic status have tended to rely on traditional Census Bureau definitions of family households, i.e., those based on headship (headed by a married couple, a single male, or a single female). Such definitions, however, may obscure the complexity that actually describes living arrangements (Bianchi, 1995; McDaniel, 1994; Morgan, McDaniel, Miller and Preston, 1994). This may be especially true for minority or immigrant families whose living arrangements decisions may be influenced by cultural preferences for co-residence or the need for greater access to sources of social or economic support (Angel and Tienda, 1982; Hunter and Ensminger, 1992; Perez, 1994). Insofar as the economic resources available in extended or multi-generational households differ from those available in less-complex households, then a potential source of racial and ethnic variation in children's economic well-being has been overlooked. Evidence presented by Winkler (1993) on the variation in income available to single mothers in different living arrangements suggests that this may be so. …