Families, They Are A-Changin' (1994)

Divorce, children born to single and a growing elderly population are threatening the economic well-being of many American Meeting their needs will require dramatic changes in public policy. The American family is changing. Divorce and children born to women without partners have made the single-parent family more prevalent than ever. Our elderly population is growing in size and living longer. The well-being of many of these people and their families is threatened by inadequate finances, and for some, poverty is a way of life. Michael Rendall, an assistant professor of consumer economics and housing, has been a co-investigator in studies of the demographics and economic well-being of both female-headed families and the elderly. The findings from his research are helping paint a clearer picture of the economic status of both groups and may be useful in the creation of public policies designed to meet their needs. From 1970 to 1991 the number of female-headed families in the United States increased from 3.4 million, or 11.5 percent of all families, to 8.7 million, or 25 percent of all increase has caused great concern. Female-headed families are more likely to be in poverty than other families, and some feel that such families may have a harmful effect on There have been distinct patterns to the increase in female-headed families over the last twenty years, Rendall says. There was a greater increase in the 1970s than in the 1980s, and that increase was due largely to an increase in the number of women getting divorced. in the 1980s, the increase was due largely to unpartnered women having children. Research shows that both groups are economically vulnerable. Jennifer Gerner, an associate professor of consumer economics and housing, has reported that divorced women and their children experience a 73 percent drop in their standard of living after a divorce. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and that affects 10 million children every year, 90 percent of whom continue to live with their mothers, Gerner says. Because females have lower-paying jobs and often are unable to collect child support, they frequently can't provide an adequate standard of living for their families. Unpartnered mothers may fare even worse. Rendall says that although the phenomenon of young women having children is nothing new, what has changed is that today they are invariably unmarried and have little hope of receiving any support from the father. only are they less likely than divorced women to receive support from the father, but the fact that they are of a younger age means that they will have less income, he says. This is illustrated by the fact that children under five have been shown to have higher poverty rates than children over five. Not surprisingly, the increase in female-headed families has been accompanied by an increase in the number of women who are welfare recipients. At the same time, the amount of benefits per family has declined by a huge amount. Rendall says that the value of aid to families since the mid-1970s has declined 50 percent. It's hard to say what that means from a policy viewpoint, he says. But what we do know is that the poverty rate among children has risen. So there's a question about how much money we're spending and how much public policy benefit we're getting for that money. There's certainly evidence that we're not getting as much benefit for the money as we were. If we care about childhood poverty, we're certainly not doing a very good job at alleviating it. Rendall also says that there is much debate among researchers about the real cause of poverty among female-headed Some argue that it's not the increase in single motherhood that is causing the problem, but the fact that there are not enough fathers with adequate income to support their They point out that, even if the fathers were living in the same household, the families would still live in poverty. …