The Single Mother, Child Poverty Myth

The truth is, many of the men available for marriage to poor women would just make things worse for the family.

http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth

Posted by Matt Bruenig on April 14, 2014

I see it often claimed that the high rate of child poverty in the US is a function of family composition.

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One big problem with this claim is that family composition in the US is not that much different from family compositions in the famed low-poverty social democracies of Northern Europe, but they don't have anywhere near the rates of child poverty we have.

A number of studies have tested this family composition theory using cross-country income data and found, again and again, that family composition differences account for very little of the child poverty differences between the US and other countries.

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Why the poverty rates differ so much is not mysterious: it's almost entirely about transfers (i.e. welfare programs). You can see this by looking at the poverty rate of children in single parent homes prior to taxes and transfers compared to the same poverty rate after taxes and transfers:

High poverty rates for children in single mother families is a policy choice. In the US, we decide in favor of it. In the Nordic social democracies, they decide against it.

Of course, it's not just children in single mother households that have elevated poverty rates in the US. The US has massively higher child poverty rates across all family types:

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We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation's children into poverty because we choose to. It would be easy to dramatically cut that figure, but we'd rather not.