Children’s Economic Well-Being in Single-Parent Families: Gender and Lone Parent versus Multigenerational Households

Seth Williams, Bowling Green State University

I use the 2011 March Supplement of the Current Population Survey to examine poverty rates and public assistance usage among children to provide comparisons between children living with single mothers versus single fathers as well as in lone parent and multigenerational households. Results indicate important differences by gender and household type. Children in multigenerational households are more likely to have been born out of wedlock to young parents, to have a parent who is unemployed or not in the labor force, and to have a parent with lower educational attainment than those in lone parent households. Children of lone mothers continue to have the highest poverty rates. The results from this study show that the living arrangements of children have implications for their exposure to poverty and receipt of public assistance, highlighting the utility of differentiating by household type and parent's gender over broad classifications based on family structure alone.