In 2010, the declining birth rate among teenagers in the United States reached an historic low, and since 1991, the rate has declined 44 percent. Though this trend is promising, 372,252 teens nevertheless became mothers in 2010. That same year, 41 percent of all births were to unmarried women. Moreover, in 2010, 15 percent of the U.S. population…

More youth live in poverty and poor youth comprise a larger share of the youth population than was the case a decade ago. This article first provides a descriptive analysis of children in poverty; examining the incidence of poverty among children by selected demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics with a particular focus on…

This study examines physical and sexual revictimization in a random sample of incarcerated and poor, urban, nonincarcerated women using multiple measures of physical and sexual child abuse. Researchers used hierarchical logistic regression to compare rates of revictimization and the strength of the association between child abuse and adult…

Constructions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are largely influenced by the dominant discourses of sexuality and disease. Deeply embedded in positivistic frames of references that favour conceptions of a medicalised and/or moralised body which operates contextually and socially detached, these discourses remain those that, in the main, frame…

The promotion of marriage and two-parent families became an explicit public policy goal with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Marriage has the putative effect of reducing welfare dependency among single mothers, but only if they marry men with earnings sufficient to lift them and their children out of poverty. Newly released data from…

This study investigated how marriage, cohabitation, single parenthood, and the presence of biological parents affected the incomes and material hardships of children. Data from the 1997 and 1999 National Survey of America's Families were used to examine recent changes in the marital status and household structure of families with children, how…

Many U.S. policymakers support changing the "culture" of poor parents to encourage marriage, work, and religion as a means to end the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In this article Jens Ludwig and Susan Mayer review and evaluate research on how parental work, marriage, and religion affect children's socioeconomic status…

Social policy in the United States is inconsistent in its treatment of cohabiting-parent households. For example, although welfare policy generally assumes that marital status should not affect the extent to which children benefit from each adult's income, tax policy and the poverty classification assume income pooling among married but not…

This study examines the effects of changes in family structure on children's economic well-being. An initial shift-share analysis indicates that, had the proportion of children living in female-headed families remained constant since 1970, the 1998 child poverty rate would have been 4.4 percentage points lower than its actual 1998 level of 18.3…

This report previews the Self-Sufficiency Project's (SSP's) longer-term effects by looking at these four related issues: wage progression, job retention, marital status, and attitudes toward work. A companion report, available separately, examines SSP's effects on children. Chapter 1 discusses the SSP research and demonstration project that…