Tag Archives: employment

Food Insecurity and Marital Status

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So far, in our blog series on the Gunderson and Ziliak Future of Children research report, we’ve outlined how 1 in 5 children in America are food insecure and how there are more reasons for this besides low household income. For example, caregivers’ mental and physical health, as well as child care arrangements, are contributing factors. Another piece of the puzzle is family structure.

I’ll start with some basic statistics. This table from childstats.gov shows the differences in the percentage of food-insecure households with children by family structure in 2011. Without taking any other contributing factors into account, female-headed households with no spouse present are more than twice as likely to be food-insecure than households headed by married couples (40 vs. 15 percent). Households headed by a father with no spouse present have a 28% prevalence of food insecurity, in between married couples and single mothers.

These differences aren’t surprising. But there’s more to the story.

Gunderson and Ziliak summarize several studies that give us clues about how marital status is related to food insecurity. For example, Balistreri found that children living with a single parent or with an unmarried parent in a more complex family (such as when the mother is cohabiting with a partner and there’s also a grandparent in the household) are at greater risk of food insecurity than children living with two biological parents or in a stepfamily. Also, Neeraj Kaushal and colleagues found that children living with their biological parents, whether married or cohabiting, have a lower risk of food insecurity. In contrast, Miller and colleagues found no substantive differences across family types after controlling for socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics. Regarding unmarried families, Nepomnyaschy and colleagues have shown that nonresident fathers’ consistent support, whether in cash or in kind, is associated with lower food insecurity; interestingly, inconsistent support was worse than no support at all.

Based on these findings, it’s important not to jump to conclusions about marital status and food insecurity. While married-couple households seem to be at least risk, this doesn’t mean a marriage certificate solves food insecurity, and that we should rush people into marriage. Family complexity, socioeconomic status, and nonresident fathers’ support also play a contributing role.

The Fragile Families Study and the work of Sara McLanahan, editor-in-chief of the Future of Children offer potential policy implications. In a recent article about unmarried parents, McLanahan and Jencks concluded that to prevent the negative outcomes associated with having children outside of marriage, women with lower socioeconomic status can be encouraged to postpone having children, giving them time to mature and increase their education and earnings. By extension, since women aren’t likely to marry men with poor earning capacity, men need to increase their capacity to provide for a family. Initiatives such as the promotion of effective birth control and education access seem promising. For currently unmarried families, Nepomnyaschy’s article underscores the importance of consistent child support in reducing the risk of childhood food insecurity.

NYT Article about Extended Transition to Adulthood Misses Critical Issues about Disadvantaged Young People

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A recent New York Times Magazine article about today’s 20-something’s has gone viral, with countless electronically connected young people circulating the story about how their cohort is changing all the rules when it comes to transitioning to adulthood. They are in a sort of limbo, "forestalling the beginning of adult life," as they extend their schooling, jump between career paths, and delay marriage and childbearing. This article notes some of the cultural forces feeding this trend: a sluggish job market and the increasing need for post-secondary education in today’s workforce are two major reasons for the shift. But the article misses a critical part of the story: how have these changes affected low-income, disadvantaged young adults?

In fact, this elongated transition worsens already existing disparities between disadvantaged youth and their more educated, higher income counterparts.

Covered in detail in the latest volume of The Future of Children, the shift from childhood to full adulthood places great strain on both young people and their families. Although governmental programs provide some support for disadvantaged children, the burden falls primarily on private institutions or interpersonal networks for those 18 and older. Across the income spectrum, parents are spending about ten percent of their income to support young adult children, but ten percent of a lower or middle class income provides fewer opportunities than a comparable portion of an upper-middle or upper class family salary. Moreover, for a family already struggling financially, providing for an adult child can be very stressful.

More affluent parents may help children by offering them rent-free housing, monetary support, or a potential safety net while the children experiment with low-paying jobs or unpaid internships. In addition, they can help emerging adults establish themselves by providing loans or assistance towards buying a car or house. Such assets help young adults build up capital and transition more smoothly into stable careers and family life. Less wealthy parents may not be able to provide their children with the same advantages without incurring major costs. Their resources are more limited and available money may be less reliable from year-to-year. As a result, these more disadvantaged children may fall even further behind their peers.

In addition, parents assist their children by connecting them to other networks of support, including people who may help them advance their careers and institutions that facilitate transitions. One such institution is college. Private colleges, more heavily populated by more affluent youth, tend to offer extensive support to help students develop at least partial autonomy, such as on-campus housing, extensive activities and entertainment, adult and peer support, health care, and counseling or other resources to guide students into jobs and post-college life. Community colleges, which are more in reach for many lower-income families, offer their students far less support and far fewer opportunities, thus deepening disadvantages.

Another trend widening the gap between young people is the timing of having children. While young people spanning the socioeconomic range are marrying later, less affluent young people are forming families while still in their late teens and early twenties, often outside of marriage. The responsibilities that accompany parenthood – from medical needs to childcare – pose additional challenges to completing an education and maintaining a steady job. To make matters worse, many young, unmarried parents break up shortly after their child is born, and young mothers often turn to their own mothers for help. Middle and upper class youth that wait until married with a stable career to have children are much better equipped to handle these additional costs and demands without relying on overburdened families. Without parents or public programs that can assist them, more disadvantaged youth continue to struggle with the assumption of adult roles.

As this widely-experienced yet new phase of maturation becomes more studied and understood, effort needs to be made to make sure that those emerging adults who are already disadvantaged – from impoverished families, with weak family ties, exiting foster care, requiring special education, or leaving the juvenile justice system – do not fall further behind. Whether by expanding social services beyond age eighteen or increasing the counseling and lifestyle support aspects of community college, society must help provide 20-somethings the assistance they need to transition into healthy, productive adult lives.

New California Law Undermines Critical Employment Supports

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In the thirteen years since welfare reform was enacted, many people have moved off welfare and into jobs. Some have exited poverty altogether. Many remain on welfare, however, or have used up their time on welfare but continue to face significant challenges to steady employment. This population is disproportionally made up of single mothers, often dealing with obstacles to work such as low levels of education, substance abuse, mental illness, and poor health. States offer, to varying degrees, supports such as child care, transportation, and job training — assistance that is critical to these women’s employment prospects.
The current recession has forced states to reduce expenditures, so work support programs are vulnerable to being cut. For example, cash-strapped California has offered women on welfare with young children the option of foregoing work requirements in return for giving up child care and other work supports. Interestingly, few women have accepted this offer thus far, so California may even require some mothers to take the welfare check without work requirements or supplemental programs. While economically beneficial for California in the short term, this policy could counteract anti-poverty measures in the long run. California’s action also could influence other states, furthering a policy that works against providing single mothers critical support as they make their way off cash assistance and into work.
As an article in The Future of Children’s Anti-Poverty issue explains, child care assistance helps families stay in jobs and have more disposable income. Although low-income families purchase less expensive care than higher-income families, child care comprises a larger portion of their expenditures. Since child care is necessary for working parents, so also are the subsidies to low-income working mothers, who would otherwise not be able to afford to have someone watch their children. In addition, employment assistance is necessary for mothers facing barriers to work such as mental and physical health problems or substance abuse.
One benefit of welfare-to-work programs has been an increase in mothers’ take-home earnings, which can improve family circumstances in many ways. Work coupled with child care subsidies, transportation assistance, Medicaid, and other such programs offers low-income mothers an opportunity to meet their families’ basic needs.

For mothers encountering multiple barriers to work, leaving them able to work only in a limited capacity if at all, cash assistance and work supports are critical. Unfortunately, California’s short term need to cut support programs could hurt vulnerable women just starting to make their way into some level of self-sufficiency.

Recession Hard on Young Men — A Bad Problem Getting Worse

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The Boston Globe reported on Friday, December 5, 2008 that men are being hit by the current recession in much larger numbers than women. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the industries where men dominate – manufacturing, construction, and investment services – are the ones losing jobs the fastest. According to the Globe, there are 1.1 million fewer men working in the U.S. than a year ago at this time, but there are 12,000 more women working. “Losing Jobs in Unequal Numbers,” page A1.

While cuts are across industries, highly educated men are much more likely to bounce back, while lower-educated men will fare the worst. Wages and employment for lower-educated men have been declining for the past 30 years, and this current recession is expected to make an already bad problem much worse. Both family income and family structure are affected as low income men are left unable to support families they start – leaving more children vulnerable in single-mother, poor households.
A recent Future of Children journal and policy brief addressed this issue, arguing that many of society’s ills – delinquency and crime, school dropout, unemployment and nonwork, nonmarital births, and poverty are all associated disproportionately with young men – and offering two quite different approaches to helping poor men and their children.
Gordon Berlin proposes a carrot approach in his article – giving men an incentive to work by extending the earned income tax credit to supplement the earnings of all adult low-wage fulltime workers, regardless of whether they have children or are married, and based on individual income rather than joint or family income. The potential result is a system that actually rewards marriage of two low-income working partners, and thus encourages formation of two-parent, two-worker households – a boon for poor children.
Lawrence Mead goes in a different direction in his article and proposes a stick approach to employing low-income men. In particular, he looks to the child support and criminal justice systems as potential partners in a “help with hassle” approach. Essentially men with unpaid child support judgments and parolees leaving prison would be told to settle any debts they have to their children and get a job – or be required to join a work program where they would be closely supervised and, particularly in the case of prisoners, offered workplace instruction. If they failed to participate, they would face prison.
Neither of these proposals is inexpensive, and both could very well meet with resistance. Therefore the two authors suggest that rather than implementing nationwide, each should be tested in large-scale demonstrations – preferably using random assignment design – to see if in fact these interventions in the lives of low-income men make a difference and have a beneficial impact on their children.