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Single, with Children The Economic Plight of Single Mothers

Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly

It’s not just thinking about whether or not you can afford to go to a movie, but you have to think about can the kids and I stop and get a soda if we’ve been out running errands. It’s a big decision, ’cause we just don’t have much

spending money.

— , Living on the EdgeSingle mother of two in Wisconsin, cited in Mark Rank

As of 2000, 33 percent of single-mother families lived in poverty, as opposed to 7 percent of other families with children (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001). And while the people in single-mother families account for only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for close to 30 percent of all poor people. The high rate of poverty among single-mother families has been under intense scrutiny over the last two decades, and the policies intended to alleviate that poverty—usually referred to as “welfare” in the United States—have come under attack and been radically transformed by the states and the federal government. This chapter discusses the reasons why single mothers fare so poorly, dispels some of the powerful myths used to justify harsh welfare policies, and discusses what alternative policies might look like.

The Triple Whammy Poverty among single mothers is not new: women raising their children alone have always been poor. Four decades ago, in 1959, 60 percent of single-mother families were poor, compared to 16 percent of other families with children. Despite all the sound and fury around the issue since the early 1980s, the basic reasons why single mothers and their children are poor have not changed. We call them the “triple whammy.”

The Gender Wage Gap The first strike against single mothers is that the one working-age adult of the family is a woman, and women still earn only about two-thirds as much per hour as do men. While the vast majority of women who work could support themselves, only about half could support an entire family. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that, nationwide, 45 percent of all women would earn too little to bring a family of three up to the poverty threshold (including day care costs for one child) even if they worked full-time, year-round (Spalter-Roth, Hartmann and Andrews 1993).

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Cradles to Rock, Mouths to Feed Having children affects families’ economic well-being. Young children add to the family’s needs without contributing to its earning power. Caring for them claims time, energy, and money. Child care imperatives limit many mothers to part-time work, workplaces close to home, and/or jobs that offer flexibility—usually at a cost in terms of compensation and promotion opportunities. In a recent survey of women in four cities, child care constraints prevented almost one-third of women from seeking a job, prompted one in eight to turn down a job, and caused one in ten job-holding women to quit or be fired (Moss and Tilly 2001). Recent research by Jane Waldfogel (1997) finds that mothers earn less than women who are not mothers, while lone mothers earn less than married mothers, after adjusting for age, experience, and educational levels.

Not Enough Hands The simple fact is that families with more adults can earn more. Single-mother families, by definition, have one adult to both earn income and take care of children. This completes the triple whammy.

Why Aren’t “They” Married? New Choices, Old Problems In 2000, one out of four families with children was a female-headed household, compared to one out of every ten in 1960 (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). The trend of a growing proportion of women who are single mothers—in-eluding those who were once married and those who were never married—holds for black, white, and Latino women; for middle-class as well as poor women; and in all parts of the country. In fact, the trend is growing in Europe as well—and the United States is far from the extreme case. In Denmark, for example, births out of wedlock increased from 8 percent of all births in 1960 to 45 percent in 1988! In fact, rates of out-of-wedlock births in France, Britain, Norway, and Sweden all exceeded U.S. rates (Lewis 1993). Of course, having a child out of wedlock is only one source of single motherhood; separation, divorce, and the death of a spouse are others. In the United States, only one-quarter of single parents have never been married.

Why are more women becoming single mothers? Women have more choices than they once did. Divorce has become easier, tolerance for domestic violence has decreased, and there is far more acceptance of a woman raising a child alone. Men have more choices, too, with fewer strictures against divorce or abandonment, and fewer pressures to marry the mothers of their children. Shifting patterns of labor force participation and wages have also influenced family structure. As more women become economically active in the paid labor force, their ability to be self-supporting increases, making marriage less of an economic necessity, even though earning enough to raise children as a single mother is far from easy. Men’s falling wages and employment rates have also contributed to diminishing marriage rates. Men are reluctant to get married when their incomes are low—although they are not hesitant about becoming fathers. Other reasons for women ending up single include high rates of incarceration and early death in the poor communities where single motherhood is most common, as well as the simple inability to find the right match.

Single Motherhood, Welfare, and Teen Motherhood: Debunking the Myths In the current political climate, many are prepared to brand single mothers as bad mothers. But is this fair? To be sure, single mothers face a formidable set of economic obstacles, and these economic disadvantages have costs for their children. But single mothers have their reasons for being single. Denouncing single mothers as a group implies that if only they could find a man—any man—they and their children would be better off. This preposterous claim potentially leads to a very distasteful set of policy proposals, including forced marriage or the forced removal of children from single mothers, regardless of their ability to parent. Instead, we should acknowledge that poverty, not single motherhood, is the problem.

One source of confusion is that discussions often tangle single motherhood with welfare recipiency, teen pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But although there are overlaps, these are all the same thing,notCo

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nor the same group of people. Prior to the elimination of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in 1996 (the federal program was replaced by state programs funded by a federal block grant called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF), only one-third of single mothers received AFDC. Only one AFDC household in twelve was headed by a teen mother; only one-quarter of single mothers had never been married. Out-of-wedlock births have increased among women, not just amongall those eligible for welfare. Women of income groups are less likely to marry and stay married. While theall childbearing rates of single women have changed very little, single women are now a larger percentage of all women, so births to single women are a larger percentage of all births (Blank 1995). Despite a large volume of research, the myths persist, holding that teen pregnancy is an epidemic (actually, teen birth rates are declining) and that overly generous welfare benefits encourage unwed motherhood (in fact, research shows no connection).

Even divorced mothers are under attack. But the claims that divorce is bad for children do not take into account that they might have fared worse if their parents had remained together in a loveless, angry, or even violent marriage (Stacey 1994; Hetherington 2001). Poverty and the public stigma that has always been attached to receiving public assistance are far more harmful to children than their mother’s marital status. The most important factor accounting for the difficulties experienced by children from mother-only families, divorced or otherwise, is low income (McLanahan 1994). Just as poverty and unemployment make providing for basic needs more difficult, they put strains on marriages and family life.

Differences Among Single Mothers While single mothers as a group face formidable economic disadvantages, single mothers are all thenot same. Close to two-thirds of single mothers were white in 2000, and 88 percent did receive welfarenot during that year. Comparing welfare recipients with nonrecipients gives some clues about why those who opt for welfare have little alternative. Single mothers who receive cash assistance look very different from those who do not. They are less educated and younger—both factors leading to lower wage potential. Recipient mothers are more likely to be Latino or black, which also depresses earnings due to discrimination. They more commonly live in a large city or rural area—again, locations associated with reduced earnings.

Furthermore, welfare recipients face more constraints on their working time than do single mothers not receiving aid. Recipient mothers are much more likely to have young children—a factor that makes it difficult to do large amounts of paid labor without reliable child care. Over half of women receiving welfare have never been married. The great majority of nonrecipient single mothers were once married, giving them better prospects of collecting child support or alimony.

By comparison, married mothers are more educated, older, and more likely to be white, non-Latino, and suburban, than single mothers, especially single mothers on welfare. In short, the single mothers who resort to public assistance do so because of a whole series of limitations on their earnings opportunities.

Struggling to Survive Public assistance to single mothers and their children has become far less generous. The inflation adjusted (in 1996 dollars) AFDC benefits for a typical family of four in a typical state plummeted from $910 [per month] in 1970 to $403 in 1998 (U.S. House of Representatives 2000, pp. 381–82). Over 80 percent of the states went on to overhaul their welfare policies during the 1990s. The new state reforms are a mixed bag. In some cases they incorporate sensible changes that work in the direction of reducing poverty, such as allowing welfare recipients to keep more of the money they earn. But on the whole, such positive initiatives are being overwhelmed by an avalanche of misguided, punitive policies [including] time-limited benefits and workfare. The federal reform, passed in 1996, is as bad or worse. It emphasizes compelling recipients to work for pay or else lose assistance. The new law gives states full authority with virtually no accountability, eliminating any federal guarantee of assistance for those in need. And it imposes a lifetime five-year limit on welfare receipt. Overall, it signals a low point in U.S. poverty policy. Neither the federal nor state approaches hold promise for significantly diminishing poverty; they amount to new ways to punish welfare recipients and bully them off the welfare rolls.Co

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But being on welfare is punishment enough. The benefits are remarkably low. The median benefit in 1998 was $388 a month for a family of three. Women scrape through by piecing together a variety of income sources in a precarious patchwork. They scrimp and go without things that many of us would consider necessities. And an unexpected expense—for example, for a medical problem—or a delay in any income source can precipitate a household financial crisis.

States and the federal government have been largely promoting jobs—any jobs—as the route out of welfare. However, this strategy without solid supports for going to work (such as child care, health care, and transportation), is [a] tenuous one at best. The dilemma of welfare versus paid work is most clearly seen in research done by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein (1996). They constructed average budgets based on multiple interviews with 450 low-income single mothers in Boston, Charleston, Chicago, and San Antonio. They found that these women were subsisting on extremely low incomes: $10,700 a year among welfare mothers, and $14,900 among working single mothers—including food stamps and the Earned Income [Tax] Credit, which supplements the income of very low-income families. While conservatives like to claim that welfare creates a cycle of dependency, Edin and Lein found that on average government aid (including AFDC and Supplemental Security Income grants as well as food stamps) does not cover even half of recipients’ expenses. The inadequate levels of benefits force mothers to find alternative forms of income, even if some of these sources are not legal under current welfare rules. Women do so in order to clothe, house, and feed their children. And here’s the rub: employment offers only a limited route out of poverty for single mothers. Compared to women on welfare, low-wage working mothers end up taking one step forward and two steps back. Edin and Lein found that the average wage-earning mother made an added $758 a month on her main job compared to the average welfare-reliant mother. But the wage-reliant mother lost $505 in government aid and took on $190 in added work-related expenses. What’s more, on average, the wage-earning mothers pay $128 more per month on housing, because they have less access to housing subsidies. Bottom line, the main job leaves these mothers $65 where they would have been onbehind welfare! It takes added earnings from a second job or overtime just to break even. Like welfare mothers, low-wage working mothers cannot meet all of their families’ needs with their own wages, continuing to depend on government aid (especially food stamps) and above all on aid from family and friends. It’s not surprising that while 86 percent of the AFDC recipients in this study planned to leave welfare for paid work at some point, 73 percent were deferring employment until they could lower the costs of work and improve their earning power.

Given the gender gap in wages and the rest of the “triple whammy,” economic survival is a constant struggle for most single mothers. This is true both for those trying to support a family on meager welfare benefits and for women trapped in the low-wage labor market. Unfortunately, the ongoing process of welfare “reform” that stresses getting a job—any job—threatens to remove much of the limited support that does exist.

An Alternative Future? The “triple whammy”—women’s lower wages, the demands of caring for children, and the limitation of having only one adult in the household—explains why single mothers and their children in the United States are so likely to be poor. But there is nothing about single motherhood that inevitably condemns lone moms to penury. Rather, it is the harsh market rules and impoverished public policies characterizing the U.S. economy that create this outcome.

Public policy changes could dramatically alter the economic plight of single mothers. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage, making it easier for workers to organize unions (which help equalize wages in the workforce), and paid family leaves (instead of the twelve-week unpaid leave mandated by current federal law) would improve jobs for single mothers, as well as many other women and men. Pay equity policies (i.e., equal pay for work requiring comparable skills) would help as well. A recent study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the AFL-CIO found that if employed single mothers earned as much as comparably skilled men, their income would be boosted by 17 percent and their poverty rates would be halved—from 25.3 percent to 12.6 percent (AFL-CIO 1999). But upgrading jobs is not enough. Lifting

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single mothers out of poverty requires rebuilding and extending the social safety net: guaranteeing universal, affordable child care, assuring health coverage for all, and, yes, providing cash assistance for the times and situations when parents must stay home to take care of their children rather than working for pay.

While this agenda seems ambitious in the current conservative policy context in the United States, most of our international counterparts have adopted many parts of it—and it shows. U.S. public policies are less effective in lifting single-parent families out of poverty than those in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, according to one study comparing the United States with these six countries (McFate, Smeeding, and Rainwater 1995). Closer to home, U.S. policies do far better at lifting elderly families than single mothers out of poverty, since Social Security benefits are considerably more generous than welfare (though continuing attacks on Social Security may undo this as well). In fact, while the federal government and the states have slashed aid for the poor, they have preserved and expanded government aid for the middle class and wealthy, including the mortgage interest tax deduction and ever-lower capital gains taxes. Why not shift some of the assistance to those most in need?

Importantly, a policy program to aid single mothers would not help them alone. By helping to level the labor market playing field and creating an income “floor,” the program would benefit all low-income families and all working people, especially women. We all deserve a better society: one where women and men receive equal treatment, where employers and the government recognize family needs, and where poverty is replaced by opportunity. Taking steps to help single mothers, the poorest of all families, would be a major stride in that direction.

References AFL-CIO. 1999. . Washington,Equal Pay for Working Families: National and State Data on the Pay Gap and Its Costs

DC. Executive Summary available at www.aflcio.org/women/exec99.htm. Blank, Rebecca. 1995. “What Are the Trends in Nonmarital Births?” In Looking Before We Leap: Social Science and

, ed. R. Kent Weaver and William T. Dickens. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Welfare Reform Edin, Kathryn J., and Laura Lein. 1996. .Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work

New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Hetherington, Mavis. 2001. . New York: W.W. Norton.For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered Lewis, Jane. 1993. “Introduction.” In , ed. Jane Lewis.Women and Social Policies in Europe: Work, Family and the State

Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. McFate, Katherine, Timothy Smeeding, and Lee Rainwater. 1995. “Markets and States: Poverty Trends and Transfer

Effectiveness in the 1980s.” In Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States in the New World , ed. Katherine McFate, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson, pp. 29–66. New York: Russell SageOrder

Foundation. McLanahan, Sara. 1994. “The Consequences of Single Motherhood.” 18 (Summer) pp. 48–58.The American Prospect Moss, Philip, and Chris Tilly. 2001. “Hiring in Urban Labor Markets: Shifting Labor Demands, Persistent Racial

Differences.” In , ed. Ivar Berg and Arne Kalleberg.Sourcebook of Labor Markets: Evolving Structures and Processes New York: Plenum.

Rank, Mark. 1994. . New York: Columbia University Press.Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America Spalter-Roth, Roberta, Heidi Hartmann, and Linda Andrews. 1993. “Combining Work and Welfare.” In Sociology and

. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.the Public Agenda Stacey, Judith. 1994. “The New Family Values Crusaders.” , July 25/August 1, 119–21.The Nation U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2001. . P-60–214. Washington, DC: U.S. GovernmentPoverty in the United States 2000

Printing Office. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means. 2000. Background Material and Data on Major

. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Programs Waldfogel, Jane 1997. “The Effects of Children on Women’s Wages.” 62: 209–17.American Sociological Review Wilson, William J., and Kathryn M. Neckerman. 1986. “Poverty and Family Structure: The Widening Gap Between

Evidence and Policy Issues.” In , ed. Sheldon Danziger and DanielFighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t Weinberg, pp. 232–59. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

_______________ Updated by the authors from “Single, with Children: The Economic Plight of Single Mothers,” in Political Economy and

, ed. Ron Baiman, Heather Boushey, and Dawn Saunders. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000,Contemporary CapitalismCo py ri gh t @ 20 15 . Ro ut le dg e.

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pp. 124–29. Reprinted with permission.

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The Minimum Wage Increase A Working Woman’s Issue

Jared Bernstein, Heidi Hartmann and John Schmitt

As Congress considers raising the federal minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour to $6.15, it is important to understand who will benefit from this increase. An analysis of low-wage workers shows that the main beneficiaries of this one-dollar increase would be working women, almost one million of whom are single mothers. In fact, of the 11.8 million workers who would receive a pay increase as the result of this higher minimum wage, 58 percent would be women, simply because, as a group, they earn lower wages than men. As a result, a minimum wage increase would reduce the overall pay gap between women and men.

Since the minimum wage is not indexed to inflation, when Congress fails to raise the minimum wage, these workers’ purchasing power declines, as was the case over the 1980s. Even with the two increases thus far in the 1990s, the minimum wage remains 19 percent below its inflation-adjusted 1979 level. This decline in the minimum wage helps to explain the growth of wage inequality and the diminished earnings of low-wage female workers over the last two decades.

In 1979, a woman working at the minimum wage earned 70 percent of the hourly wage of the median female worker (the woman right in the middle of the female wage scale). By 1998, that ratio had fallen to 52 percent. Similarly, in 1979, a single mother working full-time at the minimum wage earned enough to lift a family of three (herself and two children) above the poverty line. By 1998, however, the same family would be 18 percent below the poverty line.

… About 7 million women nationally—12.6 percent of all working women—earn between $5.15 and $6.14, the wage range that would be directly affected by an increase in the federal minimum wage. In1 lower-wage states, the share of women that would benefit from the proposed increase is typically higher than the national average. For example, one-fifth or more of working women would receive a raise after a one-dollar increase in the federal minimum in the following states: West Virginia (22.5 percent), Arkansas (21.9 percent), Mississippi (21.1 percent), Montana (20.8 percent), Louisiana (20.2 percent), and Oklahoma (20.0 percent). The states with the largest numbers of working women who would benefit from the increase are Texas (669,000), California (572,000), Florida (414,000), New York (372,000), Ohio (345,000), and Pennsylvania (338,000).

Table 22.1

Characteristics of Female Workers by Wage Range, 1998

Characteristic Affected directly by increase

($5.15–$6.14) Other low-wage workers

($6.15–$7.14) $7.15 and

above All

Average wage (dollars)

5.64 6.70 14.65 12.18

Employment 6,976,792 5,668,877 40,076,797 55,497,227 Share of total 12.6 10.2 72.2 100.0Co

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