For single parents, every step on the climb up the income ladder can come with additional complications. Taking a job with a long commute can be impossible, because it leaves no back-up plan when a child gets sick. Working late can be similarly difficult.
Lampra Jones, one of the Atlanta residents I interviewed for Monday’s article on upward mobility, is a recently divorced mother of a baby boy, and she mentioned one more hurdle: the fact that many prospective employers think single motherhood presents even more challenges than it does. She thinks her search for a job as a chiropractor has been hindered by the worries of the people interviewing her.
“The biggest perception is, ‘If he gets sick, who’s going to take care of him?'” said Ms. Jones, who no longer mentions her son in job interviews.
On top of all these concrete difficulties are the psychological ones. Married parents trying to build a better life for themselves and their children can talk to each other every night about the difficulties. Single parents, notes Jamie Lackey, a program director at Catholic Charities Atlanta, which works with low- and middle-income families, are “doing it in isolation.”
It is hardly surprising that family structure was one of the four factors with a clear relationship to upward mobility in a large new study comparing mobility across metropolitan areas. In areas with a higher divorce rate and higher share of single-parent families, the odds of climbing into the middle class or beyond were lower.
For more details on earlier research about family structure, I recommend my colleague Jason DeParle’s in-depth article on the subject from last year. He wrote:
Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.
“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.
About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.
Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.
While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.
One thought-provoking finding from the new study on mobility: In metropolitan areas with large numbers of single-parent families, even children with two parents face longer odds of climbing the economic ladder.
That pattern suggests that a factor that the researchers were not able to measure is affecting both family structure and economic mobility — or that family-structure patterns have effects on an entire community. The researchers did not offer a hypothesis and instead encouraged future research to examine the question.