Single Mothers Apt to Be Poorest : Married Couples With Children Fare Better, Census Shows

Single mothers in Orange County are nearly four times more likely to be poor than married couples with children, according to figures released by the U.S. Census.

With a mean income of $27,723, single mothers earn $10,266 less annually than the $37,989 income of single fathers, and considerably less than half the $67,366 mean income of a married-couple family.

Experts cite many reasons including inadequate child support, loss of education due to childbearing, costs of child care and the continuing reality of lower pay for women in the workplace.

“Many studies show that even though they have made a lot of progress, women for the most part earn less than men. They are either stuck in traditionally female-dominated occupations, primarily clerical, which tend to pay lower. And there are some indicators that women doing comparable jobs to men are not being paid at a comparable level,” said Dianne Edwards, director of Adult and Employment Services for the Orange County Social Services Agency.

The numbers parallel national statistics showing that the growing number of families headed by single mothers are also the ones most prone to poverty. While 5.2% of all Orange County families fell below the poverty line in 1990, 20% of families headed by single mothers live in poverty, compared to 21% in 1980.

Across the country, the income disparity for single mothers is rising, said Nicholas Zill, executive director of Child Trends Inc. a nonprofit research organization in Washington.

“As a growing proportion of two-parent families have both mother and father in the labor force, their combined earnings are greater and the single mother is falling further behind,” he said.

In light of steady divorce rates and the increasing rate of unmarried childbearing, “the chances for children growing up at the bottom end are more bleak than in the past,” Zill said.

Nancy Burstein, 44, is a mother of four who has been separated for two years and is in the process of getting a divorce. With sporadic child support, Burstein has been squeaking by with inheritance money and a sewing business she’s developing in her Irvine home. Last year, she made some bad business decisions, and some of her clients could not pay because they had lost their own jobs. She made $14,000, just slightly more than the poverty level of $12,674 for a family of four.

When she was married, her sewing augmented the family income. “Then all of a sudden, things changed,” she said. “I had to put myself in a completely different role.

“Now I’m trying to turn my business into more of a business so that I can bring in more substantial income. That’s a real struggle in itself.”

To Burstein, the future looks “tough” but she is hopeful. “I’ve been down so far, I don’t see anything else but up.”

Not all Orange County children growing up in poverty are living in single-parent homes. The largest group, which numbers more than 22,000 children, are age 6 years or older and living in a married-couple family.

The fastest-growing segment of the poor, however, is children under age 5. Demographers attribute the increase to poverty among Hispanic and Asian groups in which both parents tend to stay married.

“The growth of poverty in families with young children is very real,” said John Webb, manager of research and planning for the Orange County Social Services Agency. “It ties in with the increased birthrates, and a number of those births are to poor populations.”

There are more poor families than the census shows, Webb said, citing the skyrocketing numbers of welfare cases over the past two years since the census was taken.

Poor families headed by single mothers are the hardest to help, Webb said. “Often the single mother hasn’t had the opportunity to complete her education. There are child-care needs and needs for training. It’s a complicated problem to assist these persons to achieve economic self-sufficiency,” Webb said.

Millie Burgos, a 28-year-old mother of four girls under age 9, has been on welfare for a year. She receives no child support from her husband, who she said abused alcohol, cocaine and marijuana and has left the state. For a while, she worked in a convalescent hospital and rented an apartment in Anaheim but had so many problems with her domestic life that she had to take a leave of absence. The past two weeks she has been living in a shelter in Orange.

“One night we didn’t know where we were going,” she said. “We had used the last $30, $40 in a motel. We spent the whole day on the bus riding. Me and the girls. We had no money for food. We had no place to go. All my so-called friends turned on me. Most of the shelters were full.

“So then there was this lady cop, policewoman. She put us up in a motel. From that motel we came over here.”

Soon, she says, she will go back to school and her mother will move in to help her with child care.

What bothers her the most is whether the girls will have shelter, clothes and food. But she is hopeful about their future.

“They are smart girls, very bright. We all love each other,” Burgos said. “I tell them I want them to do the opposite in life. Go to school. Get a good education. Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up.”

The 52,490 single-parent households in Orange County represent 18% of the 283,737 family households with children under 18. Single mothers have increased 6% since 1980.

Although poverty cuts across all races, the relative size of single-parent households varies for racial and ethnic groups. Single-parent households made up 34% of black family households; 21% of Hispanic; 19% of white and 12% of Asian and Pacific Islander.

The figures echoed the findings of the national 1989 American Housing Survey, a biennial survey conducted by the Census Bureau for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That study found 43% of single parents were divorced. For black single parents, 45% had never married. For Hispanics, about a third of single parents had never married and 51% were divorced. Among whites, 19% had never married and 51% were divorced.

While the picture is bleak for many single parents, Zill said it is easier for divorced middle-class mothers with some education. They “go through a period of poverty and often bounce back. Not that life is easy, but the prospects there are better. There seems to be a trend toward a greater collection of child support from fathers.”

On the other hand, the prospects appear more grim for mothers who were never married as well as those without education or job experience. “Their collections from fathers tend to be much lower from divorced, middle-class women,” Zill said. “They are the group we need to be most concerned about.”

David Himelson, chief of the Family Support Division of the Orange County district attorney’s office said the economy has made once-forgiving single mothers more willing to try to collect child support.

“Now she might lose her job, and it’s time now to make this person pay what he owes,” Himelson said. “That child support payment could be the difference between her having to resort to welfare and her being self-sufficient.”

Like others involved in child welfare, Himelson views the situation as “a financial problem caused by a social problem.”

“It’s a lack of acceptance of responsibility that is very basic to this whole area. People who are not paying, in most cases, tend to be irresponsible. It’s not a matter of can’t. It’s a matter of chooses not to.”

While most solutions tend to focus on increasing support and finding work for single mothers, others hope to change attitudes to stem the tide of fathers fleeing family life.

“We do need programs that help people, but we also need to point out self-defeating behavior,” Zill said. “It’s important for black and Hispanic political leaders to really face up to this.”

Zill observed that the shotgun wedding is unlikely to reappear but that there are now programs to get fathers to voluntarily admit to paternity at the child’s birth and keep him involved in his child’s life. A similar proposal is under consideration in California.

“The issue is not money absence, the issue is father absence,” said David Blankenhorn, president of Institute for American Values, a New York think tank dealing with family issues.

“If you take a father out of a family, or never get him in there in the first place, one of the things that happens is the family has less money,” Blankenhorn said.

In addition, he cited the absence of a father figure as a root cause of other social problems such as unwed teen-age pregnancy, crime and domestic violence.

“Linking manhood to family life has been the ultimate challenge of human societies,” he said.