Now, for some good news on two family fronts.
Today’s Census Bureau report indicates that the family poverty rate fell from 11.8 to 11.2 percent from 2012 to 2013. This decline was driven in part by declines in the share and number of married-couple families in poverty, where “both the poverty rate and the number in poverty decreased to 5.8 percent and 3.5 million in 2013, down from 6.3 percent and 3.7 million in 2012.”
The report also found that the percentage in family poverty was about five times higher in single-female-headed households and almost three times higher in single-male-headed households, compared to households headed by married couples. The marriage divide in family poverty indicated by today’s Census Report underlines a point I made recently in Family Studies about the connection between money and marriage in America:
“When it comes to money, marriage enables two parents to pool income and assets and, specifically, to capture the income of a child’s (married) father; indeed, married fathers usually earn significantly more than single mothers or single fathers, even similarly credentialed ones. All this translates into a lot more money for the ordinary American families headed by married parents.”
The other good news from the federal government is that non-marital childbearing has remained steady at 41 percent of all births since 2007. This is the first time in decades that the United States has not witnessed a sustained increase in the share of childbearing outside of wedlock. It’s also important because married-parent families are much more stable than are cohabiting families for children.
If the United States can sustain or even reduce the share of children being born outside of marriage, we may see even better news emerging on the family-poverty front.
— W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.