Fewer marriages, fewer jobs: what's contributing to poverty?

Print
E-mail

By Katie Leslie

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Losing a job is a quick and certain path to economic distress, as all too many Georgians have learned in recent years. But new census data highlight another, deeper-seated trend with profound implications for the long-term prosperity of middle-class families: the disappearance of marriage as a norm, especially among those who have children.

Enlarge photo

Patricia Procope with her daughter Alana, 3. Procope knows the struggles of being a single mom but hopes to change that once she completes her education.

Brant Sanderlin, bsanderlin@ajc.com Patricia Procope with her daughter Alana, 3. Procope knows the struggles of being a single mom but hopes to change that once she completes her education.

Biz Beat: Is the economy the reason?

More Atlanta area news »

In Georgia, from 2008 to 2010, the poverty rate was higher among single women raising children than among the unemployed -- 39 percent vs. 31 percent -- according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of 3-year census estimates released Thursday.

And single women raising kids are at the head of more than 312,000 Georgia households, or 28 percent of the state's families with children. (Single men raising kids are another 7 percent, but the census does not report the poverty rate for that group.)

The issue has emerged recently during Republican primary debates as presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said on Oct. 11 that the decline in marriage is the biggest problem with poverty in America.

The trend toward single parenthood, which emerged among the poor decades ago, is now affecting the working class, especially those who lack a college degree, analysts say. What they disagree on is which came first: fewer marriages or lower incomes.

"It's collapsing from the bottom up," said Robert Rector, a researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "The least educated families had the earliest incidents of high numbers of out of wedlock births. It's slowly moved up the socioeconomic scale."

Other analysts acknowledge the link but say financial forces drive marital decisions, rather than the other way around. The real problem, they say, is a decades-long collapse of economic opportunities for the less educated, which discourages people from marrying.

"What is happening is the kinds of jobs that used to allow people with a high school education to make marriage work are very hard to find," said Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. "They’ve either gone overseas or disappeared into computer chips. And the Great Recession has made matters worse."

According to the latest census estimates, the median family income for married couples raising children in Georgia is almost $75,000; for families headed by single men it's less than $36,000; for families headed by single women it's less than $24,000.

People like Patricia Procope, of Ellenwood, know just how powerful marriage can be for financial stability. More than a decade ago, Procope married at just 20 years old. Her husband worked as an electrician and she worked in an accounting firm. Together, they invested in real estate and managed properties in Atlanta before divorcing after six years of marriage.

"Money was not even a thought. People came to us to borrow money," said Procope, now 31.

A few years later, Procope -- who for medical reasons was told she couldn't have children -- became pregnant by her new fiance. But their engagement dissolved after he lost his job and her contract position in telecommunications ended at the height of the Recession.

She now knows the realities of single motherhood, and like many Americans in recent years, of joblessness. She receives some public support while she pursues a second masters degree, the latest in education, something she hopes can change her economic future.

"To go from [comfortably married] to this? I never thought I’d be here. I guess everything happens for a reason, but it's crazy to me," she said. "It was supposed to be the engagement, the marriage, and then the kid."

However, that expectation, which once was virtually universal, has been on the wane for half a century. The number of out-of-wedlock births increased from about 10 percent in Georgia during the 1950s to 45 percent by 2009, according to a Heritage Foundation study authored by Rector. By 2009, three-quarters of Georgia's poor families with children were led by single parents, he found.

"Being married is actually a stronger factor in reducing probability of poverty than graduating high school," Rector said.

As Cherlin has found, those with less education aren’t as likely to enjoy economic stability and successful marriage as their college-educated peers.

In a policy brief he recently co-authored for the liberal Brookings Institution, he notes that marriage is thriving among those with a four year degree or higher. Those same people now have the lowest divorce rates since the 1970s, and are only half as likely to divorce as people who have only a high school education.

"Marriage is alive and well among college educated Americans. It's because they can find the kinds of jobs that they are confident will make a marriage work," said Cherlin, who said that most young adults aspire to get married, but won't do so unless they think they can find work. "So instead they’ll have an alternative family where they’ll have a child with a partner. Fifty or 60 years ago that wasn't acceptable."

Bradford Wilcox, of the National Marriage Project, said that married couples are more likely to make long-term investments than cohabiting partners or singles, which can yield better returns down the road. And research has even found that married men earn more than their single counterparts.

Still, Cherlin resists the notion that marriage itself is a magic pill to prevent economic ills.

"If you took all those single parents and told them to marry their boyfriends or else, how much better off would we be?," he said. "I say we wouldn’t be much better off, because those boyfriends still would have to go to China to find a job."