The Poverty of Single Mothers is Persistent

The differences by family structure are substantial. Women who give birth out of wedlock suffer from pervasive disadvantage that cannot be explained by their basic social and demographic attributes. They work less. When they do work, they make less money. A high school or college education provides lower economic returns than it does for married or divorced mothers. Never-married mothers’ incomes increase more slowly with age. Even the impact of children, although modest for all mothers, is less strongly related to income than it is for married and divorced mothers.

This Institute for Family Studies resource uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth’s 1979 cohort to track whether specific individual mothers have bettered themselves economically over time, or instead, if different kinds of women are now becoming single mothers.