Justice
It's Time to Stop Blaming Poverty on the Decline in Marriage
In reality, it's the other way around.
Nearly half of all children who live in America with a single mother also live in poverty. This is a particularly troubling statistic when paired alongside the demographic trend that the number of single mothers in America has been rising. This same seismic population shift also goes by another name: the much-discussed decline in marriage.
Taken together, these patterns have yielded a logic that underpins much of how we think about aiding the poor 50 years into America's "war on poverty:" Children are worse off and more likely to be poor when their parents aren't married. Therefore, if we encourage more low-income adults to wed, families will be economically stronger and more emotionally stable. Best of all, poverty will decline.