Recent research documents substantial declines in the United States’ poverty rate over the past several decades, including among children. This is very good news that showcases the success of many poverty prevention efforts. However, too many families continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, a challenge that may be exacerbated by increased costs of living, widening income inequality, and ongoing economic uncertainty. Moreover, upward economic mobility across generations remains limited: Children who grow up in the United States today are much less likely than children born in the 1940s to earn more income than their parents. As a broad prescription, it is critical that we continue anti-poverty efforts to ensure that poverty rates for families continue to decline and that opportunities for economic mobility improve.
A broad set of economic and social conditions are linked to a family’s ability to achieve economic security and mobility. In the United States, employment, most often achieved through education and training, is key to many families’ economic well-being.i However, families with low incomes are overrepresented in communities that offer fewer well-paying, stable jobs and in which high-quality education is less available. And some populations—for example, certain racial and ethnic groups and people with disabilities—face additional barriers to economic stability that result from both structural-level discrimination (e.g., inequitable policies and practices in housing, education, hiring, and the criminal justice system) and individual-level discrimination (e.g., harassment).
Research suggests that two-generation (2Gen) approaches can help interrupt the economic and social barriers to many families’ economic mobility and increased well-being and carry long-term benefits. (For more information on 2Gen approaches, see the dropdown feature below the key findings.) Child Trends conducted new analyses for this report, which provides a current data snapshot of some of the families in the United States who may be eligible for and benefit from 2Gen supports and services. Policymakers, researchers, and program evaluators should pay attention to these same data points in efforts to assess families’ needs and identify supports to help them thrive.
10 Key Findings
1. Fewer families with children lived in poverty or in low-income households in 2021 than in 2011. The percentage of families living in households with low incomes declined from 2011 to 2021, from 36 percent to 29 percent.
- These declines occurred for all family types examined in this report—families with a single parent, families with young children, families with young parents, and multigenerational families.
2. In 2021, families with a single parent (51%) and a young parent (45%) were the most likely family types examined to live in households with low incomes.
3. Gender gaps remain in families headed by single parents. Families headed by a single mother were much more likely to have low household incomes (55%) than those headed by single fathers (34%).
4. Families in households with low incomes are diverse. In 2021, among these families:
- Just over half (51%) were two-parent families, either married (43%) or cohabiting (8%).
- Most (80%) lived on their own. However, 12 percent lived with a grandparent and 8 percent with someone other than a grandparent.
- White families made up 34 percent of the total but were underrepresented relative to their overall population size. Hispanic and Black families, and families of other racial and ethnic identities, were overrepresented.
5. Families living in low-income households continue to face barriers to economic mobility. In 2021, among these families:
- Most (60%) lived in rented housing, and renting was particularly common among young parents (76%). Home ownership is an important vehicle for economic mobility in the United States because of its ability to generate wealth for families.
- More than half (53%) had obtained only a high school diploma, or fewer years of formal education.
- 71 percent had at least one employed parent. Although employment can help provide economic security, it does not ensure that families have incomes that meet their basic needs.
- Eighteen percent of parents who had not worked in the previous year did not work due to illness or a disability, while two thirds did not work to care for their home or a family member.
- Seventeen percent had at least one parent reporting fair or poor health (as opposed to good, very good, or excellent).
- One in five (21%) reported that no parent had health insurance.
6. More than half of families with low incomes reported not receiving support from some of the most common safety net programs. Roughly one fifth of families reported receiving a housing subsidy and support from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in the prior year. A substantial minority (44%) reported receiving support from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
7. The economic challenges faced by families in households with low incomes are particularly pronounced for families headed by a single parent, families with young children, families with young parents, and multigenerational families.
8. Family households with low incomes tend to live in counties that have worse scores across several of the community health indicators we examined—such as higher child poverty rates, higher violent crime rates, worse air quality, and less access to healthy food.
9. Family households with low incomes also reside in counties with a slightly higher child care cost burden, relative to other families—in other words, they tend to live in counties in which a higher proportion of the average household income goes to child care.
10. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners building out two-generation supports for families should know that:
- Data from multiple sources are needed to gain a full accounting of what families look like across the six key domains highlighted in two-generation approaches.
- A deeper consideration of the life circumstances of some populations—including, for example, Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native families; families in rural areas; and families with a member who has a disability—can be limited by small sample sizes in many data sources or by a limited number of relevant measures.
- Attention to factors both inside and outside of households will improve our understanding of the challenges that families may face and of the resources to which they may have access, including their social connections.
What’s in this report
Using national data from 2011 and 2021, we first detail levels of household poverty and low-income status among families that include at least one parent and one child under age 18 and show how those rates changed over the last decade. We also look at these data separately for families headed by a single parent, families with young children, families with young parents, and multigenerational families. These family types, which can overlap (for example, many single-parent families live in multigenerational households), often face additional barriers to achieving economic security and stability, and thus represent a priority population for many human service programming efforts.
Using the 2021 data, we then look more closely at families in households with low incomes and document some of their demographic and family characteristics, including those typically prioritized in 2Gen approaches—for example, health status, education, employment, housing status, and economic supports from human service programs. These data do not allow us to look directly at two of the domains highlighted in 2Gen approaches—early care and education (ECE) and social capital. However, we can touch on these topics indirectly using community-level data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. These data allow us to describe aspects of community health for places where family households with low incomes1 live, and across a range of characteristics, including access to child care. Some of these measures of community health may help foster the important social connections between people that can support economic mobility.
We end the report with a brief discussion of our findings and a description of the data sources, analytic samples, and measures included in this analysis.
For more information on two-generation approaches, trends in U.S. marriages and family formation, and our definitions of poverty and low-income, see the dropdowns below.
Decades of rigorous, high-quality research demonstrates that growing up with economic hardship is linked to an increased risk of adverse outcomes for people across their life course, including outcomes related to their health, academic success, social-emotional functioning, and overall well-being. For children and their parents, the psychological toll of economic hardship can be heavy as well. For example, qualitative research finds that many children living in poverty spend substantial time and energy worrying about material deprivation, living in unsafe neighborhoods, and their parents’ well-being.ii They also feel stigma associated with being poor. Parents are weighed down by worry about meeting their children’s needs and often feel that poverty impacts their parenting abilities.
A key goal of many human service programs is to provide important supports to families with low incomes to help them on their path to economic security. Most programs, however, take a child- or parent/caregiver-focused approach rather than a family-based approach. A program providing workforce training for a parent, for example, may not provide the child care necessary to allow the parent to be able to attend the training or to work a job once the training is complete. This barrier—the need for child care—will limit the effectiveness of the workforce program in helping a parent secure employment. The desire to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of efforts to support families has brought increased interest in two-generation (2Gen) approaches to programming. A 2Gen approach explicitly recognizes the interlinked nature of parents’ and their children’s lives and that a family will be most likely to thrive when programs can simultaneously support the needs of both parents (or caregivers) and their children. Recent research suggests that 2Gen approaches to human service programming can have positive long-term benefits.
The 2Gen lens does not just apply to programming. It also provides a roadmap for the types of characteristics policymakers, researchers, and program evaluators should pay attention to if they want to assess whether families have what they need to thrive. Two-generation approaches generally focus on six domains that, combined, can help families achieve economic stability: (1) physical and mental health, (2) early childhood education, (3) postsecondary and employment pathways, (4) economic assets, (5) K-12 education, and (6) social capital.
The family unit is a core part of our society. But what U.S. families look like, and how and when they form, has changed substantially over the last several decades—alongside other large-scale economic, social, and cultural changes. These changes to families have occurred across all income categories, for all races and ethnicities, and in both rural and urban communities. Families are diverse: Currently, there is no single dominant family form in the United States. Policymakers and human service professionals need to be aware of this diversity as they design and implement programs intended to meet all families’ needs.
Although marriage remains a key aspiration for many men and women, marriages are happening later in life than they used to for more and more people. Five decades ago, people in the United States would often begin their adult lives with marriage; moving in together, becoming workers or homemakers, and having children were generally considered subsequent milestones. Today, if a legal marriage does occur, it is less likely to happen until couples feel economically secure—often after many of those other life events have occurred.
The average age at first marriage is now nearly age 28 for women and age 30 for men.
Cohabitation—the act of living together with an unmarried romantic partner—has also increased. Roughly three quarters of marriages began as a cohabiting union, and the percentage of adults who live in a cohabiting union is now actually greater than the percentage who are married.
The U.S. has seen important shifts in childbearing as well. The mean age at first birth for women has increased by over 4 years in just the past four decades, from 22.7 in 1980 to 27.1 in 2020. Currently, roughly 40 percent of births occur to unmarried parents; however, many of these births occur to cohabiting couples, who are in unmarried but otherwise committed relationships.
In 2017, one quarter of all parents of children from birth to age 18 were unmarried. Of those, more than one third were cohabiting, while the remainder were single parents. Notably, almost 60 percent of surveyed adults say that cohabiting couples can raise children as well as married couples.
The official poverty measure (OPM) was developed in the mid-1960s and set the poverty threshold (also referred to as the poverty line) at “the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three to account for other family expenses," and where “family” is defined as all individuals living in a household together related by birth, marriage, or adoption. The OPM considers families to be living in poverty when their total income is below the official poverty threshold, which is adjusted for family size and composition.
Since the OPM’s development, the original dollar amount has been adjusted every year for inflation, but it has not been adjusted to account for large-scale changes in the types and costs of family expenses needed to meet basic needs that have outpaced inflation, such as those associated with housing, health care, child care, and where people live. While newer measures of poverty such as the Supplemental Poverty Measure do account for some of these factors, this report refers to the OPM and uses its thresholds because of the measure’s wide and longstanding use and familiarity as a benchmark for people’s economic well-being in the United States.
Research suggests that families need incomes of approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times the poverty threshold to meet their basic needs, depending on where they live. Thus, researchers studying families with low incomes often include those with earnings up to two times (i.e., 200%) the poverty threshold. We use this approach in this report, considering “low income” to be less than 200 percent of the official poverty threshold. Families with household incomes below the official poverty line are classified as in poverty. Those with incomes above the official poverty line but below two times the poverty line are classified as near poverty. For a family of three with one child under age 18 in 2020 (the year of income reported in the 2021 Current Population Survey; CPS), these classifications equate to incomes below roughly $41,600 (low income), of roughly $20,800-$41,600 (near poverty), and below $20,800 (poverty).
See the Data, Sample, and Measures section for more details on income and poverty measures used in this report and on how families were classified.
Footnote
1 Estimates based on Current Population Survey data presented in this report describe families (which may live with other families in the same household), but their income status is based on their total household income. In descriptions of community health measures from American Community Survey data, we use the term “householder families” or “family households” because income status is based on family income but the sample is restricted to the householder family (i.e., without additional families in the household).
References
i Haskins, R., Garfinkel, I., & Mclanahan, S.S. (2015). Introduction: Two-Generation Mechanisms of Child Development. The Future of Children, 24, 12 - 3.
ii Quint, J., Griffin, K. M., Kaufman, J., & Landers, P. (n.d.). Experiences of Parents and Children Living in Poverty A Review of the Qualitative Literature. Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Suggested citation
Wildsmith, E., & Alvira-Hammond, M. (2023). Data on families with low incomes across America can inform two-generation approaches. Child Trends https://doi.org/10.56417/1147h453i
This report was produced in partnership with Ascend at the Aspen Institute, a catalyst and convener for diverse leaders working across systems and sectors to build intergenerational family prosperity and well-being by intentionally focusing on children and the adults in their lives together.