The Effects of Marriage and Maternal Education in Reducing Poverty

The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis in the USA examined two questions back in 2002: Is marriage effective in reducing child poverty? What is the comparative effect of marriage and maternal education in combating child poverty? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the CDA analysis produced the following findings:

• Marriage plays a powerful role in lifting children out of poverty.
• While both marriage and maternal education play a positive role in alleviating child poverty, in general, stable marriage has a far stronger effect than does maternal schooling.

Maternal education without marriage is generally ineffective in reducing child poverty. The poverty levels of children raised by never-married mothers remain high even if the mother has a high-school or college degree.

Specifically, the analysis reveals the following facts:

• On average, a child raised by a never-married mother is nine times more likely to live in poverty than a child born and raised by two parents in an intact marriage.
• Overall, nearly 80 percent of long-term child poverty occurs to children raised in some type of broken family or by a parent who never married.
• Raising a child in an intact marriage is roughly two and a half times more effective than adding four years to a mother's education in reducing child poverty.
• On average, a child raised by a never-married mother with a four-year college degree is three and a half times more likely to be poor than is a child born and raised in an intact married family by a mother who has only a high-school education.
• Children raised in intact married families whose mothers are high-school dropouts spend about the same amount of time in poverty as children raised by never-married mothers who have a four-year college degree.
• Marriage has a significant effect in reducing child poverty, even if the marriage does not last throughout a boy's or girl's entire childhood. Being raised in a married two-parent family for just half of one's childhood reduces poverty as much as adding four years to a mother's education does.