2010 Data Show Surge in Poor Young Families - NYTimes.com
2010 Data Show Surge in Poor Young Families
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: September 19, 2011
WASHINGTON — More than one in three young families with children were living in poverty last year, according to an analysis of census data by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.
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At 37 percent, it was the highest level on record for the group, surpassing the previous peak of 36 percent in 1993, according to the analysis by Ishwar Khatiwada, an economist at the center. By comparison, the rate was about 25 percent in 2000.
The economic distress among the country’s youngest families — defined as under the age of 30 — is in contrast to the poverty rate for elderly families, which remained low in 2010, at 5.7 percent, according to the analysis. In the 1970s, poverty was only slightly higher for younger families than for families headed by someone age 65 or over.
The change is evidence of shifting policy priorities that are putting the next generation at risk at a time when competition in the labor market has never been tougher, said Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern and the director of the center.
“Young families with children are now six times as likely to be poor as elderly families,” Professor Sum said. “This is a major generational change. From a public policy standpoint, we should be very deeply troubled by this.”
Economists cited several reasons for the rise. First was the economy. College degrees hold greater value now, while opportunities for low-skilled workers have dwindled, as manufacturing and other industries have declined. That has pushed more young families into poverty.
The number of men in their 20s with only a high school degree who worked full time fell by 22 percent from 2007 to 2010, while those with a college degree dropped by just 1 percent, according to census data. Fewer than a third of high school dropouts in their 20s were working full time last year.
“Dropping out of high school in 1970 was much less costly than dropping out of high school now,” said Richard Murnane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “That’s purely a function of changes in the economy.”
At the same time, the fortunes of poorer Americans, especially those with children, are more closely tied to the labor market because welfare reform in the 1990s made cash assistance harder to obtain. It was hailed as a success for getting more mothers to work, but now that jobs are scarce, young families have little to fall back on.
Robert Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, said there had been a shift of resources from the young to the elderly that dates back to the 1980s.
In an analysis of government transfers over time, Professor Moffitt found that aid to the elderly living on less than half of poverty-level income rose by 13 percent from 1984 to 2004, while aid to single-parent families in the same situation dropped by about 38 percent.
“The worst-off families have been left behind,” Professor Moffitt said.
For Margaret Allstrom, a 27-year-old divorced mother of two in Atlanta, being a mother has made it harder to get hired. She lost her full-time job when the recession began and now supports her children with three part-time jobs, as a waitress, a teacher and a freelance print maker.
“Whenever I go to a job interview, that comes up — they’re not going to hire a mom,” Ms. Allstrom said. “Technically it’s not legal. But they ask questions like, ‘What’s important in your life?’ You’re going to mention your kids, and then they know.”
Children bear more than their share of the burden of poverty, accounting for 35 percent of people who were poor last year, but only 24 percent of the population, according to census data. That lopsided ratio handicaps the next generation of American workers, advocates for children say.
“The younger you are, the poorer you are, and that’s a disgrace,” said Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund. “We need an educated work force, and that starts in the early years.”
Some of the highest rates are among black and Hispanic children, who are close to becoming the majority of the child population in the country. About two in five black children were poor last year, according to census data. The ratio was slightly lower for Hispanics.
Greg Duncan, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, said young children living in poverty were less likely to succeed in school, in part because stressful and traumatic conditions impeded learning.
Vernae Jones, 22, moved with her three children back into her parents’ house in Atlanta after losing her job at Kroger. Almost all the children in her daughter’s preschool qualify for reduced price lunches, Ms. Jones said. Most have young parents.
“It’s just a hard time to be a parent,” she said.
Ms. Jones receives food stamps, a noncash assistance program the census poverty calculation does not count. But out-of-pocket medical and child care costs are not included in the official measure either. Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, estimated that poverty figures scheduled for release by the Census Bureau next month, which include all those adjustments, would probably be higher than those published last week.
2010 Data Show Surge in Poor Young Families - NYTimes.com
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