Single Parents in High-Income Countries: What the United States Can Learn from Others

The prevalence of single-parent families has been growing in almost all advanced countries over the last half century (Biegert et al., this volume; Nieuwenhuis, this volume). That trend has been driven by changes in opportunities for women that enable them to survive without a male breadwinner; by dramatic changes in social norms that used to stigmatize childbearing outside of marriage and, to a lesser extent, divorce; by declining employment prospects among less-educated men; and, possibly and much more controversially, by the availability of public supports for such families.

The rise of single-parent families has, in turn, raised the salience of such questions as (1) what role this may have played in increasing or sustaining child poverty and income inequality; (2) how much, and what kind of, public assistance should be provided to such families; (3) whether that assistance discourages employment or marriage; (4) how single parenthood has affected children; and (5) how the public and the political system view these trends and their accompanying willingness to provide more generous supports to such families.

This volume addresses these questions, especially the first three. After commenting on what the volume has added to our knowledge of these issues, I will also add my own perspective on some of these questions. In the process, I hope to broaden the discussion of these issues to include not just empirical questions but also normative or political ones. I will also give special emphasis to what U.S. researchers can learn from this volume and how applicable this research is to U.S. policy-makers, given the differences between the United States and other countries.

By far the most valuable contribution of this volume is its comparative focus. By looking at the experiences of single-parent families across many countries, it enables us to see patterns and variations that are not apparent in a single country study. The American research community in particular has much to learn from this approach. Much of the available research on single parents has been based on the American experience, but the United States differs from other countries, even similarly advanced countries. It is larger, more racially and ethnically diverse, has higher rates of poverty and inequality, a stingier safety net, and a more conservative politics. By looking only at the United States, the research community has missed a readily available natural experiment: data from many other countries that can go a long way toward teasing out the effects of various policies on single-parent families, a point emphasized in the articles presented here by Biegert, Brady, and Hipp, but illustrated in many of the other articles as well.

Let us start with the greater demographic diversity in the United States. As the article by Baker shows, the prevalence of, and penalties for, single motherhood in the United States vary by race and ethnicity. Throughout the years 1995 to 2018, Latino children, and even more so Black children, are more likely to live in single-mother families than are their White counterparts. However, during that same time period, there is some evidence that the penalties, or poverty-inducing effects, of single motherhood are lower for Blacks than for other groups. These findings are consistent with that of Christina Cross, who finds that single parenthood does not disadvantage Black children educationally nearly as much as it does White children (Cross 2019). Baker discusses that, perhaps, this can be explained in part by the high prevalence of single parents in the Black community, the growing number of highly educated Black women, and the poor economic prospects of Black men. Black women are far more educated than Black men, and this appears to have created a shortage of same-race partners for them.

But whatever their race or ethnicity, single mothers in the United States receive less support than those in most other countries, with the result that the penalties for being a single mother are high. Indeed, the Baker paper suggested that, within the United States, the penalties varied only modestly by race or ethnicity.

While some scholars, including Baker, have investigated whether single parenting has different consequences depending on race and ethnicity, others find that migration status also matters. In her qualitative study of migrant single mothers in the UK, Shutes (this volume) finds that these migrant mothers face heightened risks and hardships, compared to their nonmigrant counterparts. On top of the usual challenges arising from having a single earner and a single caregiver, these single mothers have to grapple with additional pressures resulting from their legal status, including limited and/or conditional eligibility for many social protections and, in some cases, the risk of deportation.

Another difference between the United States and most other countries is a different conceptualization of poverty. In the United States, the poverty rate is based on an absolute measure (the proportion of the population living below a specific income threshold adjusted for inflation and family size), whereas in most of the other countries studied in this volume, it is a relative measure: the proportion at risk of poverty (AROP) because their incomes are below 60 percent of the median income in their country. The United States is the outlier here since a relative measure has been adopted by virtually all other OECD countries. Using a relative measure leads to the somewhat paradoxical finding that fewer single parents means higher poverty rates for that group, simply because the larger share of two-income families affects a country’s median income. In short, by using a relative measure of well-being, we may see a reduction in the well-being of single parents simply as the result of greater economic growth. This is the conclusion I take from the article by Nieuwenhuis (this volume). The United States now has a supplemental poverty measure that moves a bit in the European direction and is, I think, better than the official measure; but any metric is, of course, somewhat arbitrary (Fox and Burns 2021). The great advantage of any specific metric is that it allows comparisons over time and across countries, which can be revealing, and this volume does an excellent job of doing exactly that.

Whatever measure of poverty or well-being is used, one thing is clear: single parents in the United States fare poorly compared to those in other countries. On nearly every outcome, the United States is at the very bottom of the rankings. Even the temporary increase in the child tax credit included in the American Rescue Plan that was widely heralded for its poverty-reducing effects for children moved the United States up only three places from the bottom of the rankings, just above Bulgaria and Hungary, according to the article by Aerts et al. (this volume).

Not only does the United States offer lower benefits to such families but, when they go to work, they face a minimum wage that is very low by international standards. As Alerts et al. note in this volume, the highest minimum wage in their sample of twenty-eight countries is four times as high as the lowest. Of course, a majority of U.S. states have now raised their minimums well above the federal level, and that should be taken into account when doing such comparisons. ¹

It is still the case that in all high-income countries, not just the United States, single-parent families have low incomes and high rates of poverty. Why is this? It could be because single parents have characteristics like low levels of education that put them at a disadvantage; it could be because women (especially mothers) earn less than men, whatever their characteristics; or it could be because these families lack a second earner. While all three play some role, as the article by Harkness (this volume) shows, it is the lack of a second adult in the family that is the primary reason for their low incomes. In my view, we cannot stress this fact too much. Two adults have twice as much time as one—time that can be spent either in earning income or in taking care of children and performing other domestic tasks. Moreover, a larger extended family (four grandparents instead of two, for example) creates more opportunity for intergenerational transfers and means more wealth accumulation as discussed in the article by Morelli et al. (this volume) A single parent, by contrast, has to be both a breadwinner and a caregiver and has no way of manufacturing a second income; cannot fill in for the other parent when one of them is ill, unemployed, or needed at home; and cannot pool resources with another individual to buy a car or a home, or to save for a child’s education or retirement.

The lack of a second adult in the family has led to a focus on the need for policies that can reconcile the work and family roles of single parents. So the volume usefully looks at how different countries handle this problem with paid leave, childcare, early education, and flexible schedules. The article on paid leave by Bartova et al. (this volume) finds that eligibility for relatively generous paid leave is associated with a modest increase in hours worked by mothers but also that extending the duration of such leave beyond a certain point (say, nine months) can have negative effects. But virtually all U.S. proposals have called for paid leave to be offered for much shorter periods, such as 12 weeks; and while states and private employers have been expanding paid leave, there is still no national policy. So, once again, the United States stands out because it is the only advanced nation without a paid leave policy.

While paid leave is important, I would have liked to see a similar article focusing on childcare, which is an even greater problem for single parents. Childcare is now as expensive as college in the United States; and although the Biden administration has promised to bring down its costs, Congress has failed to act. The United States would benefit from knowing more about what other countries do in the childcare area and how they think about the relative advantages of a child benefit that can be used for this or any other purpose versus a system in which more resources are devoted to direct investments in high-quality early education and care. The Nieuwenhuis article reports an intriguing finding: overall, single-parent families are more likely to be poor countries where dual-parent families are more prevalent, but that gap is mitigated by higher levels of spending on childcare. Still, I would have liked to see more research focused specifically on childcare.

The Parolin and Lee article on the impact of COVID-19 on single parents in the United States, compared to adults in two-parent households, does a nice job of highlighting the multiple hardships that COVID-19 created for these families. This study brings out not only the challenges related to a loss of earnings—mainly linked to employment disruptions, driven in part by school closures—but also difficulties such as food hardship and increased stress, anxiety, and worrying. Their results show that, especially during the first year of the pandemic, single parents reported rising hardship on multiple fronts; these authors also find that, throughout both years, single-parent families experienced greater levels of hardship than two-adult households with children. At the same time, government support played an important role during the 2020 to 2021 period, bolstering the income of families. With the expiration of the support provided by the American Rescue Plan—especially the Child Tax Credit—and the failure to expend such support as proposed in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, child poverty rates have increased again.

Of course, the lack of a second earner in the home does not mean that a second earner—typically the father of the children—does not exist. The issue is, how much can he, or should he, be expected to contribute to the family? Two of the articles in this volume address this issue: an article focused on the United States by Nepomnyaschy et al. and a cross-national study by Hakovirta et al. The cross-national article reports that nonreceipt of child support is endemic across high-income countries but that expectations of noncustodial parents vary widely in different countries and are complicated by how to treat families in which the parents share custody, what to do if the noncustodial parents have little or no income, and how to treat those who have fathered children with a number of different partners. Relative to other countries, the United States expects high levels of payments, which is helpful to those who actually receive them but also leads to a high proportion of noncustodial parents out of compliance with their awards. Hakovirta and colleagues conclude that lower awards in combination with more services for, and more voluntary engagement from, low-income dads might be more advantageous, especially if augmented by a guaranteed child support scheme.

The Nepomnyaschy et al. study looks in more detail at the different ways in which fathers stay involved with their children in the United States and finds that 70 percent of nonresident fathers were informally and voluntarily involved with their children, while only one-third had a formal child support award. While the amount of financial support is highly skewed (with lots of zeroes), overall, they find that it does not seem to be an important mechanism for reducing the economic precarity of single parent families in the United States. This leads the authors to favor more help for disadvantaged fathers so they will have greater ability to pay and to voluntarily engage with their children, in conjunction with more public support for the mothers. My own view is that, in addition to these policies, we need to establish a new norm around their responsibility to their children and not rely too much on their voluntary willingness to stay involved. There is a very high incidence of multipartner births in the United States, according to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. ² Parents who cannot afford to support their existing children should not be having more with a different set of partners. This cannot be in the best interest of the children, who must share time and resources with many half siblings. Despite my qualms, these two articles were full of good data and insights that will enable us to have a more informed discussion of these issues.

While public income transfers for single-parent families are desirable on the grounds that they reduce poverty and improve well-being, some fear that such supports will reduce employment or even encourage the formation of such families by making them more financially viable. The evidence here has been mixed, and the volume usefully extends what we know about employment effects, in particular, finding that unlike some past research done in the United States, there are no adverse effects on work (Biegert et al., this volume). ³ Yet another article in the volume by Harkness suggests that work-conditioned policies that end up encouraging work may be superior to unconditional benefits.

I think it is well known by now that the Earned Income Child Credit (EITC) in the United States has encouraged employment as well as reduced poverty, and my own view is that making that program more generous is preferable to new unconditional benefits for the kinds of reasons cited in the Harkness article. The employment-inducing effects, when added to the value of the benefit itself, raise incomes more than is possible with a child benefit alone. In short, it produces more bang for the buck. In addition, unconditional benefits are less popular in the United States than work-conditioned ones. I would add that most recipients prefer to be as self-sufficient as possible. When I was part of the welfare reform task force in the Clinton administration, we did field visits and talked to many moms on welfare, and they had quite different and more positive attitudes toward work than their advocates in the progressive community. And as I will argue below, taxpayers—at least in the United States—are not very enthusiastic about anything that looks like “welfare.”

But does generous support actually encourage single parenthood? Charles Murray (1993) famously argued that it enabled such families to form and should be limited for this reason. His view has not gone unchallenged, ⁴ and I am not convinced that any such effects are important at current levels of support for such families. But that does not mean that much higher levels would not have an effect.

When welfare was reformed on a bipartisan basis in 1996 (or earlier at the state level), the debate was all about work and family, with conservatives especially eager to restore marriage and reduce unwed births. Since that time, employment rates among single parents have varied with the business cycle but are significantly higher than in the pre–welfare reform era. In addition, since about 2000, unwed childbearing has levelled off and then declined a little, especially among women of color. (Divorce rates, the other driver of single parenthood, have been declining since the 1980s [Wang 2021].) The upshot has been less growth in single-parent families and more work among those that do exist. How much the shift in welfare policy affected these trends in employment and family formation remains debatable (Fang and Keane 2004). But I do not think we can ignore this history in thinking about what set of policies might work best for single parents. We have recently seen a replay of these debates around President Biden’s proposed increase in the Child Tax Credit, with some people believing it to be a high priority because of its poverty-reducing impact and its likely positive effects on children’s development and later success, while others have noted that it would cost $1.6 trillion over the coming decade. That is three times as much as the federal government spends on K–12 education. ⁵ In addition, it would not encourage work and self-sufficiency (Sawhill and Welch 2021). These concerns have so far prevented it from being enacted in the United States. Importantly, among the U.S. public, only a little over half are in favor of the policy (Prasad Philbrick 2022). A new volume from an American Enterprise Institute / Brookings Institution working group, on which I served, recommends a reallocation of resources in the United States from the affluent elderly to children and supports more de facto assistance for single parents in this context. However, it also calls for attempts to bring back marriage as the preferred way of raising children, although with limited ideas on how exactly that is to be accomplished (AEI-Brookings Working Group on Childhood in the United States 2022). I cite this chapter in our report not because I completely agree with it but because it underscores the fact that these debates are still alive and intense, at least in the United States.

This debate brings me to the two final questions I raised at the beginning of this commentary. In the main, they were not addressed in this volume of The ANNALS but, in my humble view, they have to be part of the conversation around single-parent families. The first is whether children are better off being raised in a two-parent family. The answer, based on a large body of research, is that, on average, they are (Sawhill 2014b; McLanahan and Sawhill 2015; Ribar 2015). Some of this effect is because two-parent families have more money or other resources, including wealth. But that is part of what a second parent brings to the table, and replicating it through a public program is likely to be infeasible. Even with the very low minimum wage in the United States, a second earner in a family with kids can conservatively bring in at least $15,000 a year on net. (I assume that work-related expenses and an EITC of about $5,000 would more or less offset each other.) A government program providing benefits to single parents that costs that much would not pass muster, in my view. Middle-class taxpayers are struggling as well and would likely resent having to pay higher taxes to support such families when they themselves are both working and limiting their own family size to what they think they can afford. To be sure, the very wealthy should be paying more, but even Democrat control of the executive and legislative branches of government in the United States have not been able to make that happen, suggesting that the political hurdles are very high.

In addition to the extra income or care that a two-parent family can provide, such families may also have other advantages for children. Even after controlling for the different incomes of one- and two-parent families, studies still find advantages for children with two parents. Those advantages appear to be especially important for boys (Haskins and Sawhill 2016; Autor and Wasserman 2013; Edsall 2019).

This brings me to another issue: cohabitation. It is becoming far more common in the United States and, I assume, in all or most of the other countries studied in this volume (Wu 2017). My understanding is that the data used in most of these articles treats cohabiting couples as equivalent to couples that are married. But there is some evidence that cohabiting couples do not provide a family environment for children that is as stable and resource rich as marriage (Reeves and Krause 2017).

More generally, if we are concerned about either child or adult well-being, single parenthood has to be looked at in the context of the alternatives. That is not an argument for failing to help the single parents who now exist; it is an argument for thinking about the kind of family structures that will enhance the well-being of both children and adults in the future. The fact that single-parent families are more accepted and supported than in the past is a positive development. But a society in which most families are headed by a single parent might not be what we want.

I admit that my views are based on having spent my entire career in the United States. Attitudes towards social welfare in the United States are more conservative than in many other countries. That appears to be partially related to racial prejudice in the United States and the unfounded assumption in the public’s mind that Blacks account for much of the spending on safety net programs (Alesina, Bruce, and Glaeser 2001). Still, there remains an issue in my mind about the appropriate balance between helping the single parents that already exist and not encouraging future generations—today’s young adults—to adopt this way of raising children as normative. At a minimum, they need to understand that it will be difficult for all of the reasons cited in these articles (including financial penalties, psychological burden, and difficulties of being both a breadwinner and a lone parent). Whatever government supports exist, they will not likely make up for the lack of a second parent. If a young person understands the difficulties and still wants to be a single parent, of course, that should be their choice. My concern is that they do not always realize the challenges and drift into single parenthood not by choice but by accident.

But, some may ask, do young people really have a choice? Are there enough “marriageable men”? And what about unplanned pregnancies and births that are still very high in the United States and are the most typical precursor to the formation of a single-parent family?

These are the right questions. My reading of the evidence is that there are, with some important exceptions among Black Americans, enough “marriageable men” (Thomas and Sawhill 2005; Venator and Sawhill 2015). Yes, we should be doing more to help both young men and young women to improve their life chances, and especially to reduce the high rates of incarceration among Black men. However, I find it notable that efforts to improve the economic prospects of disadvantaged men have not, for the most part, increased marriage rates for this group. ⁶ The exception here is a U.S. program called Career Academies that provides a vocationally oriented secondary education to young people and has increased not only male earnings but also marriage (Kemple 2008).

A much more important issue, in my view, is unplanned pregnancies and births. The majority of births to unmarried women under the age of 30 in the United States are not planned births (Sawhill 2014b). They are the result of either unwanted or seriously mistimed pregnancies that are, once they occur, not aborted for reasons of religious belief or cost and access to abortion. One way to prevent these births and the single-parent families they so often create is to provide affordable access to the most effective forms of birth control such as long-acting reversible contraceptives (e.g., the IUD) (Sawhill 2014a, 2014b).

These newer forms of contraception are about twenty times more effective at preventing pregnancy than the birth control pill (Sawhill and Guyot 2019). Most European countries provide such access as a routine part of their health care system. The United States does not.

With the recent Supreme Court decision in the United States overturning Roe v. Wade, the availability and affordability of effective forms of contraception will be even more important. My research with Morgan Welch shows that the states planning on banning or restricting abortion are also the states that rank lowest in terms of child well-being and spending per child (Sawhill and Welch 2022). While many women will be able to travel out of state to obtain an abortion or will have access to the pills needed to end a pregnancy, the biggest adverse impacts will be on poor and minority women.

It would have been interesting to learn more about the large and very important cross-national differences in access to affordable and effective forms of contraception as well as to abortion. These differences are likely to affect the future prevalence of single-parent families in different countries. Whatever one’s moral or religious views on abortion, we should recognize that it has provided choices to young women that have major implications for whether, when, and with whom they form families.

Although I have suggested some issues that I think need more attention from the research and policy communities, in the end, I want to commend the authors of this volume. While they may not have addressed as many difficult issues as I might have liked, they have marshalled a lot of new data and evidence to illuminate the circumstances of single parent families in a comparative context and added a wealth of information to the scholarly literature on an important topic.