An examination of the latest data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that, from a purely economic standpoint, children do better if they are living with both their mother and father.
“The householders in married-couple families had higher proportions in the labor force, they owned their own home, and they were not living in poverty — all good signs for the children living in these families,” said Terry Lugaila, a statistician with the Census Bureau.
The study, titled “Children and the Households They Live In: 2000,” states that “children living in married-couple families had the lowest poverty rates,” far less than the children living in homes headed only by a father or only by a mother.
“Children in mother-only family groups were almost five times as likely to be in poverty as those in married-couple family groups [39 percent and 8 percent, respectively],” the Census Bureau report stated.
According to the study, one-third of the children in the nation's capital live in poverty. States with the highest proportions were Mississippi and Louisiana (27 percent each); New Hampshire had the lowest (9 percent). On a regional basis, the Midwest had the lowest proportion of children in poverty (14 percent), while the South had the highest (20 percent). The national average was 18 percent.
(This article appeared in the July 2004 issue of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association. This article courtesy of Agape Press).
