For Immediate Release
March 23, 2005
Contact: Marianne E. Page, University of California, Davis, 530-752-1551, mepage@ucdavis.edu
Divorce’s Economic Toll Greater for Black Children than for White
(Washington, DC) The economic costs of growing up in a single-parent family are greater for black children than for white, according to a study published in the latest issue of the journal, Demography.
In the first two years after a divorce, white children’s family income falls by about 31 percent, while that of black children drops by about 53 percent, report Marianne E. Page and Ann Huff Stevens, economists at the University of California, Davis.
When their unwed mothers marry, white children’s family income increases by about 45 percent, compared with an 81 percent increase for similar black children, they find.
A variety of trends explain these differences, according to the researchers.
“White women were twice as likely to remarry following divorce than black women,” says Page. “And on average, white mothers received 10 times as much child support as black mothers. Single white mothers also were more likely to work for pay after divorce than black single mothers.
Page and Stevens’ analysis is based on data for about 9,000 children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which followed a nationally representative sample of households from 1968 through 1993.
“Although much of the rhetoric about poor single-parent families focuses on inner-city blacks, most children who live in such families are white,” Stevens notes.
“If the economic costs of living with only one parent are more severe for blacks,” she continues, “then policies aimed at reducing these costs that do not take into account this variation will not target resources efficiently.”
(Note: Data for this study were collected prior to the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996.)
The full article, “Understanding Racial Differences in the Economic Costs of Growing Up in a Single-Parent Family,” is available at www.prb.org/cpipr/demography/page.pdf. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939-5409. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.
Demography is the peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Association of America.