Household Composition and Poverty among Female- Headed Households with Children: Differences by Race and Residence*

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. The steady rise in female-headed households and in the number of children living in female-headed households (Casper and Bianchi 2002) has important life course implications for recent cohorts of women and children. About half of all women will experience single motherhood at some point in their lifetimes (Moffitt and Rendall 1995), and a majority of children will live in a female-headed household (Graefe and Lichter 1999). High poverty rates among female headed households with children, when compared with other household types, * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 Population Association of America annual meetings in Philadelphia. Support for this project was provided by Experiment Station Project 3865 of the College of Agricultural Sciences, and by Population Center Grant funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Population Research Institute (R24 HD 41025-01), The Pennsylvania State University. The authors would like to acknowledge Alisha Coleman and Mary Ann Demi for their research assistance, Tom Hirschl for his thoughtful feedback, and the programming assistance of Don Gensimore. Please direct all correspondence to: Anastasia R. Snyder, Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography, 111a Armsby Building, University Park, PA 16802, 814-865-6223, [email protected]. Rural Sociology 71(4), 2006, pp. 597–624 Copyright E 2006 by the Rural Sociological Society