The Growth of Families Headed by Women: 1950 to 1980. CDE Working Paper 88-31 (original) (raw)
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Journal of Family History, 1987
l'hh stuCj, supporn the theorekal argument that hkrorkal aperknca of the marital cohorts, and the changes in the social and demographic composition of the cohorts, determine the pace of childkaring among white American women married during 1950-1 969. During the period 1965-1 969 environmental factors supported a d e b in the birth of the first chihi among working womea 7% may be the result of socioenvironmental responses to the threshold proporrion of workkg women in the 1965-1969 cohort. In the past compositional changes, such as an increase in the proportion of working women, have resulted from structural changes absorbing women into the labor market These trends might have brought about atrihcdinal and environmental changes during these years enabling many women to become more work committed Thus, both structural and environmental changes now support delayed childbearing. Perhaps the most interesting demographic phenomenon in the United States since World War Two has been the so-called baby boom and baby bust. Between 1946 and 1970 the level of fertility rose and declined for every socioeconomic group (Ryder 1973). An interesting feature of this phenomenon is that the sharp increase in fertility (baby boom) was not wholly caused by a Journal of Family History Volume 12, Number 4, pages 421-436 Copyright @ 1987 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Welfare and the Rise in Female‐Headed Families
American Journal of Sociology, 1997
The article provides a bridge between recent marriage market research and studies of welfare incentive effects on U.S. family formation. Estimates from state and county fixed-effects models indicate significant effects of changing state Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and Medicaid expenditure levels on countylevel changes in families headed by unmarried mothers. However, neither changing welfare benefit levels nor declining economic and marital opportunities could account for recent increases in female headship. The results imply that large additional cuts in welfare payment levels would lead to only small reductions in the percentage of female-headed families with children.
Research in Labor Economics, 2014
This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s-1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7 to 50 percent; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7 to 23 percent (by one measure).-These trends are addressed within a uni…ed framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother's involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.-Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased e¢ ciency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best …t of the model to the data also involves: 1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and, 2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.-Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.-One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.
Changes in Family Household Structures and Possible Societal Implications
Mississippi Urban Research Center, 2019
This research brief examined changes in family household structures occurring in the United States and Jackson, Mississippi since 1980. Some researchers have found household composition has important socio-economic consequences for members of those households, communities, and for public and private resources (Pilkauskas and Cross, 2018). As used in this study, family household structures consist of the following categories: family, non-family, married-couple, and single-mother. This study utilized a quantitative comparative research design to compare selected family household types in Jackson, MS and the U.S. from 1980 to 2017. Sources of secondary data utilized in this study included U.S. Census Summary Files for the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010; and American Community Survey (ACS) 2017 Five-year Estimates. This study found that two-thirds of all households in the United States and Jackson were family households verses non-family households. However, the percentage of family households in the U.S. and Jackson has consistently declined over the 37-year study period. Nationally and locally, married couple family rates have also been declining over this same period. While declines in family households and marriage couple households have occurred in both Black and White households, Black households experienced higher rates of decline than White households. Based upon this study’s findings, the notion of what constitutes a family is changing statistically both at the national and local levels. Less clear is the impact these changes are having on society today.
Review of Income and Wealth, 1981
Using data from the 1973 National Survey of Family Growth, the present study analyzes, for blacks and whites separately, the impact of female market activity on the inequality of the income distribution among households. The family life cycle is divided into three stages, according to the presence and age of children: (1) the interval between marriage and the birth of the first child, (2) the child-rearing interval, and (3) a final period which begins when all the children have reached school age. Using the coefficient of variation as an indicator of inequality, the empirical results show that in period 1, the contribution of white working wives has a large equalizing impact, while that of their black counterparts results in a slight increase in dispersion. In the child-rearing and post child-rearing stages, the labor supply of mothers decreases family income inequality by a small amount for both black and white households. A decomposition of the squared coefficient of variation of family income is presented to aid in the interpretation of these findings. *Support for this research was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under grant # H D 12037-02. We are indebted to an anonymous referee of this journal for many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Rachel Willis for skilful research assistance. '~l t h o u~h the coefficient of variation is convenient, for the reasons indicated in the text, it is by no means an ideal measure of inequality. For a good discussion of the advantages and shortcomings of this and other measures of inequality, see Cowell (1977). 2~h e empirical analysis excludes from the samples corresponding to period 1 childless couples who reported plans not to have children in the future.
Welfare benefits and family-size decisions of never-married women
1993
Since the 1970s, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been increasing rapidly in the United States and has prompted several states to propose (and in some cases, enact) legislation to deny access to higher AFDC benefits for families in which the mother gives birth while receiving AFDC. The authors investigate whether AFDC benefit levels are systematically related to the family-size decisions of never-married women. Using a Poisson regression model, applied to Current Population Survey data for the years 1980-1988, they find that the basic benefit level positively influences family size for white and Hispanic women, but not for black women. Incremental benefits for larger families, however, do not affect family-size decisions, suggesting that reducing (or eliminating) this differential will not necessarily reduce the number of illegitimate births. The basic benefit level positively affects the family-size decisions of high school dropouts, but not of high school graduates. This suggests that to discourage nonmarital births, policymakers should consider altering the AFDC benefit structure in such a way as to encourage single mothers to complete high school. However, being a high school dropout might be a proxy for some other underlying characteristic of the woman, and inducing women to complete high school who otherwise would not might have no effect whatsoever on nonmarital births. Welfare Benefits and Family-Size Decisions of Never-Married Women I. INTRODUCTION Over the entire post-World War II period, the birthrate among unmarried women has increased tremendously. In 1950, there were approximately fourteen live births per thousand unmarried women. By 1989, this figure had tripled, to forty-two live births per thousand (see Figure 1). Except for a slight decline between 1970 and 1975, the upward trend in the rate of illegitimate births has continued unabated, and has even accelerated since 1975. The rise in out-of-wedlock births is the result of two underlying phenomena. First, the birthrate among unmarried white women almost quintupled during this period, from six births per thousand in 1950 to twenty-nine births per thousand in 1989. Second, black women, who have a much higher birthrate than white women, have been constituting an ever increasing proportion of the total population of unmarried women. In 1970, black women constituted 15 percent of the population of unmarried women; by 1989, they constituted 20 percent. Interestingly, the birthrate among unmarried black women fell considerably between 1970 and 1984 (from ninety-six live births to seventy-seven), but since 1984, it has been increasing like the white rate and has almost returned to its 1970 level. 1 Many casual observers have asserted that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program encourages out-of-wedlock childbearing because AFDC guarantee levels increase with family size. As indicated in Table 1, the average (unweighted) monthly guarantee level in the United States in 1991 for a four-person family (parent and three children) was roughly 45 percent higher than the average guarantee level for a two-person family ($463 versus $320). 2 The average differential has fallen by more than 40 percent in real terms since the late 1960s, mirroring the decline in average guarantee levels. TABLE 1
America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2003, 2004
INTRODUCTION The decades-long decline in the proportion of family groups with children that were married-couple families leveled off during the mid-1990s, at about 68 percent from 1996 to 2003 (Figure 1). This change reflects declining divorce rates and reduced nonmarital fertility, especially among teens. Between 1970 and 1996, the median age at first marriage also increased but since 1996 has been fairly stable for both men and women. Basic trends in household and family composition, living arrangements and marital status of adults, and characteristics of unmarried-couple households are presented in this report. A new section is included that highlights married-couple families with a stay-at-home parent.
Rural Sociology, 2006
We examine race and residential variation in the prevalence of female-headed households with children and how household composition is associated with several key economic well-being outcomes using data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the U.S. Census. Special attention is paid to cohabiting female-headed households with children and those that are headed by a single grandmother caring for at least one grandchild, because these are becoming more common living arrangements among female-headed households with children. We find that in 2000: (1) cohabiting and grandmother female-headed households with children comprised over one-fourth of all female-headed households with children, (2) household poverty is highest for female-headed households with children that do not have other adult household earners, (3) earned income from other household members lifts many cohabiting and grandparental female-headed households out of poverty, as does retirement and Social Security income for grandmother headed households, and (4) poverty is highest among racial/ethnic minorities and for female-headed households with children in nonmetro compared to central cities and suburban areas.