About _____ of African American Families Are Headed by Couples.
This brief is the starting time in a series examining timely topics that are relevant to Black families and children in the U.s.a.. It provides a brief summary of recent data and historical context on family structure, employment and income, and geography for Black people with immature children in the United States. The second brief sheds lite on the role of federal policies in creating, maintaining, and addressing these structural inequities, with a specific focus on access to early care and education for Black families. The 3rd brief uses national, state, and local data to examine housing access and other bachelor supports for Black families, particularly during the COVID-xix pandemic.
Blackness Americans' social standing in the United States has been shaped by a long history of racism in laws, policies, and practices that has congenital racist institutions and created and exacerbated inequality. This inequality is built into the infrastructure of our state and has formed the foundation for structural racism—a system that privileges White people and results in intentional disadvantage for Black Americans. These inequalities negatively bear upon the lives of Black people in a number of ways, including where they live;[1] the teaching they receive;[2] their employment and economic opportunities, admission to kid care, mental and physical wellness outcomes, and political standing and ability; and the mode they are treated in our systems of law and justice.[three] Well-nigh every facet of the lives of Black people in the U.s.a.—both adults and children—is shaped by race. America's racist laws and policies take long impacted Black Americans, regardless of their socioeconomic status or social continuing.
Population
Black Americans currently number about 42 million, making up nigh 13 percentage of the total population in the United States. As of 2019, there were 2.68 1000000 Black children from birth to age iv in the United States.
Definitions
Due to the pervasive nature of structural racism in the United States, no Black person in America (regardless of their country of origin or ancestry) is immune from the effects of racism. Withal, the historical context of an individual's country of origin or identification may vary; this, in turn, has the potential to differentially affect the experiences of Blackness people in the Us.
When referencing Blackness people throughout this issue brief series, we are referring to individuals who may identify as African American—those who were primarily born in America and are descended from enslaved Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave merchandise—as well as the smaller populations of people living in America who may place as Black African or Afro-Caribbean.
Black also includes individuals who reported being Blackness alone or in combination with one or more than races or ethnicities in their responses to the U.S. Demography—for example, an individual who identifies as Black just, every bit well as someone who identifies as Black and White combined or Afro-Latino.
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Family unit structure
Culturally, Black Americans have long highly valued romantic partnerships, wedlock, and children. However, institutional and structural barriers often prevent them from existence able to realize these values,[4],[5],[6] particularly for those who have low incomes.[7] From 1987 to 2017, the rates of cohabitation amongst Black women ages 19 to 44 increased from 36 percent to 62 percent, a rate similar to that seen amongst women from other racial groups. The pct of Black women ever married, still, is lower than those who have cohabitated, at 37 percent. While there are many explanations for lower levels of wedlock amidst Black women, an overwhelming number of theories focus on economics—specifically, the earning potential and availability of Black men.[eight],[9] For instance, a lack of employment opportunities for Black men, higher workforce participation amid Blackness women than among Black men, a lack of wage parity between Blackness women and Black men, and the disproportionate representation of Black men (particularly from depression-income backgrounds) in the criminal justice organization may result in a lack of marriageable partners (due east.thousand., men who are perceived by women as attractive spousal relationship prospects because of their financial or social continuing). Importantly, each of these theories—implicitly, and sometimes explicitly—acknowledges the potential role of systemic racism and its impact on the union rate of Black Americans.
Fertility rates for Black women accept declined slightly over the past 10 years, from 70.8 births per 1,000 women in 2008 to 62.0 per one,000 in 2018. Thirty-seven percentage of Blackness women have a first nascence between age xx and age 24, and birth rates for Blackness women are highest from ages 25 to 29. This indicates that Blackness women are having children at the same ages at which they may exist enrolled in schoolhouse or entering the workforce. At the end of their childbearing years (ages fifteen to 50), Blackness women have had an average of 2.1 children.
Black children live in a variety of family unit structures, including married, cohabiting, coparenting, and single-parenting households. Threescore-four percent of Black children live in single-parent families, which may include unmarried parents living with an unmarried partner or with another family. Amidst Black women ages 15 to 50, approximately 60 percent were married or living with an unmarried partner at the time of their first nativity, and roughly 40 percent were neither married nor living with an unmarried partner. The distinction betwixt "single" and unmarried but living with a partner or co-parent is important because information technology indicates that, despite declines in formal marriage rates, close to lx percent of Black fathers (shut to 2.five meg of 4.ii million) live with their children, a fact often in contrast with public perceptions of Black men with children.[10] Within these households, Black couples generally subscribe to egalitarian and flexible gender roles.[11],[12] While American fathers of all races and ethnicities are mostly more involved with the care of their young children than in decades past, Black fathers—both those who live with and live autonomously from their children—are more probable than White or Hispanic fathers to feed or eat meals with, bathe, diaper or wearing apparel, and play or read to their children on a daily basis.[thirteen]
Extended family and kin networks, a source of social support and an enduring legacy of African cultures and heritage, accept besides played a key role in childrearing within Black communities. For example, amongst children living in a grandparent'due south home and being cared for primarily by a grandparent, with no parents involved, more than one quarter are Blackness. Black grandparents play instrumental roles in childrearing and child care even when children live with their parents.[14] Family unit and kin networks also serve equally an important buffer for some of the negative impacts of structural and institutional racism experienced by Black families,[15] and frequently provide emotional support and instrumental assistance such as assistance with transportation and finances.
Employment and income
As with family construction, families' economic standing tin bear on their admission to services and resources that can impact the quality and stability of their relationships with their children, also every bit their children'southward social-emotional and cognitive evolution.[16] For example, higher parental earnings (more than common in married and/or 2-parent households) accept been associated with increased stimulation and response amid infants and young children; this, in turn, has direct links to encephalon evolution. In addition, children from families of middle and lower socioeconomic condition take shown reduced levels of language development from every bit early as 18 months, compared with their more affluent peers.[17] Hypotheses suggest that upper-income parents who generally have college levels of instruction may take more than free time and/or ability to invest time and resource in their children than middle- and lower-income families.[18] In addition, higher incomes facilitate meliorate access to stable and rubber housing, which is a determining gene for a number of child outcomes.
While employment indicators are important, earnings and workforce participation are not a panacea for facilitating Black children'due south positive development. Blackness parents participate in the U.Due south. workforce in high numbers, with three in four Black children under age 6 having all residential parents actively engaged in employment. Half of Black female person workers are mothers and more than two thirds of working Blackness mothers are single. These high rates of workforce participation, however, do not translate to college earnings. Among all full-time workforce participants in 2018, Black men earned 70.2 cents for every dollar earned by White men and Blackness women earned 61.9 cents; in contrast, White women earned 78.6 cents for every dollar earned by White men. In addition, Black men and women are overrepresented in jobs that have nonstandard hours of employment. Thirty-four percent of young Black children living in a unmarried-parent, depression-income household—and 70 percentage of young Black children living in a 2-parent, low-income household—have parents who work a combination of standard and nonstandard hours. Xix percent of Black children living with ii parents had one parent who worked overnight hours, and 6 pct had both parents working overnight hours. Furthermore, 23 percentage of those living in a single-parent household had a parent working weekend hours.
In addition to working nonstandard hours, Black men and women have less secure employment. Due to difficulties entering and staying in the labor market, Black men tend to work fewer hours than White and Hispanic men, while Black women work equally many hours as White women merely experience higher reductions in work hours when the economic system slows. In fact, despite loftier rates of workforce participation, Black workers had the highest unemployment charge per unit nationally in the commencement quarter of 2020, at 6.3 per centum. This disparity increased as the COVID-xix pandemic slowed the economy and led to task loss for thousands of Americans. In plow, greater task insecurity may result in higher rates of poverty for Blackness Americans. In 2019, the poverty rate for Black Americans was 18.8 percent, in comparison to 15.7 pct for Hispanics and 7.three percentage for both Asians and Whites, and Black female-headed households had a poverty rate of 31.7 pct. Furthermore, 34 per centum of Black children from nativity to age 5 live in households with incomes below the federal poverty line.
In sum, Black Americans have experienced employment-related challenges and structural barriers that make it difficult to maintain adequate income or accumulate wealth despite active participation in the workforce. Between the last recession (which began in 2007) and 2016, the wealth gap between Black families with children under historic period 18 and both White and Hispanic families with children under historic period 18 widened, despite the income gap remaining relatively abiding. In 2019, median household income for Blackness households was $45,438, compared to $56,113 for Hispanic households, $76,057 for non-Hispanic White households, and $98,174 for Asian households.
Geography
The enduring legacy of slavery, in addition to subsequent discriminatory and racist housing policies, is axiomatic in the geography of where Blackness people alive beyond the country. During the Great Migration, from 1916 to 1970, millions of Black Americans left the rural South for Northern and Western cities to go away from the oppression of racism and White hostility and to search for meliorate employment opportunities. In the past 30 years, however, more than affluent Blackness Americans have participated in a "reverse migration," moving back to the Due south to settle in cities with lower costs of living and better economic and educational opportunities. As a event, Black American families and children across all economic strata are currently highly full-bodied in the Southern parts of the country and forth the East Coast.
The relative size of the population of immature Black children in the fifty states and the District of Columbia reflects this trend. In 2019, the District of Columbia had the highest percent of children from nativity to age 4 who were Black, followed by Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Maryland. The tabular array below shows the 10 states with the highest percentage of Black children in 2019, along with the total number of Black children from birth to age iv in that state.
Table 1: ten states (and DC) with the highest per centum of young children who are Black, 2019
While the 10 states with the largest percentages of Black children from nascence to age 4 were the same in 2019 as in 2010, the size and share of the Blackness kid population has shifted within states. For instance, the District of Columbia had the highest share of Black children in both 2010 and 2019, even though that share dropped from 54 percent to 44 percent. This is office of a broader demographic shift in the Commune, which is no longer majority Blackness. The number of Blackness children, all the same, actually increased by 8 percent in the aforementioned time. The other ix states saw petty change in their percentage of Black American children, only the number of Blackness American children decreased in eight states, ranging from 2 percentage (Delaware) to 17 percent (Mississippi). Changes in specific counties, metropolitan areas, and even neighborhoods may or may not exist reflected in state-level changes. For example, while Georgia saw a small-scale decrease overall (iii%) in the share of Black children from nativity to age iv, Atlanta's Black population grew by more than 20 percent from 2010 to 2018; in nearby Rockdale County, the share of the overall population that is Black grew from xviii per centum to 55 pct in the same period. In terms of newer migration flows amidst Black people, areas receiving more young couples or young single adults may see more changes in the child population in the years that follow.
Similarly, despite large concentrations of Blackness people living in the Southern and Eastern United states of america, several states in the Midwest and West experienced large increases in the number and share of Black American children from 2010 to 2019, including Washington, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nevada. The table below shows the x states with the largest growth in the number of Blackness children from birth to age 4 from 2010 to 2019.
Some states with small populations of Black children (less than 2,000 children in 2010) saw growth of 40 to 42 percentage (Montana, Wyoming, and Southward Dakota), and Northward Dakota'southward population of Black children from nativity to age 4 more doubled (181%). While changes in smaller populations will exist proportionally larger than like changes in big populations, such changes still stand for demographic shifts that—specially if concentrated in specific communities—may have implications for the infrastructure needed to support the provision of early care and education services for Blackness families.
Table ii: 10 states with the highest percent alter in the population of young children who are Blackness, 2010-2019
Looking Alee
Structural racism in the United States has negatively impacted the nation'south social and economic fabric and has been specially damaging to Black Americans. In addition, the COVID-nineteen pandemic is disproportionately affecting those who have historically experienced disadvantage in the country, including Black individuals and families. This brief has provided a demographic overview of Black families with young children in the United States, highlighting three areas of consideration for policymakers focused on family support services: family construction, employment and income, and geography. We sympathize that no single solution can undo the harm of hundreds of years of racist policies and practices, and that moving forward volition crave solutions from a broad range of places, organizations, and individuals across generations and with a variety of lived experiences. The residuum of this serial will use family structure, employment and income, and geography to shed light on how policies specific to early intendance and instruction and housing can address some of the historical wrongs perpetuated against Black individuals and families.
Additional Readings
Alexander, 1000., & West, C. (2012).The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the historic period of colorblindness. The New Printing.
Frey, W. H. (2019). Six maps that reveal America's expanding racial diversity: A pre-2020 census look at the broad dispersal of the nation's Hispanic, Asian, and Black populations. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/enquiry/americas-racial-diverseness-in-vi-maps/
Hegewisch, A., Phil, M., & Hartmann, H. (2019). The gender wage gap: 2018 earnings differences by race and ethnicity. Institute for Women'due south Policy Research (IWPR). https://iwpr.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/03/C478_Gender-Wage-Gap-in-2018.pdf.
Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. WW Norton & Visitor.
Parolin, Z. (2019). Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Black–White child poverty gap in the United States,Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwz025
Percheski, C., & Gibson-Davis, C. (2020). A penny on the dollar: Racial inequalities in wealth among households with children.Socius, 6, i-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120916616
Perry, A. (2017). Recognizing bulk-blackness cities, when their existence is being questioned. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/10/04/recognizing-majority-black
-cities-when-their-existence-is-being-questioned/
Rothstein, R. (2017)The colour of constabulary: A forgotten history of how our regime segregated America. Liveright Publishing.
Solomon, D., Maxwell, C. & Castro, A. (2019). Systematic inequality and economic opportunity. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2019/08
/07/472910/systematic-inequality-economic-opportunity/
Tucker, M. B. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (Eds.). (1995). The decline in marriage among African Americans: Causes, consequences, and policy implications. Russell Sage Foundation.
Western, B. & Wildeman, C. (2009). The Black family unit and mass incarceration. The Register of the American University of Political and Social Science, 621(1), 221-242. doi: ten.1177/0002716208324850
Yeung, West. J., Linver, Chiliad. R., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2002). How coin matters for young children'due south development: Parental investment and family processes. Kid Development, 73(6), 1861-1879.
Footnotes
[1] Rothstein, R. (2017)The color of law: A forgotten history of how our authorities segregated America. Liveright Publishing.
[3] Alexander, One thousand. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
[4] Drake, Due south. C. & Cayton, H. R. (1945). Blackness urban center: A written report of negro life in a northern metropolis. University of Chicago Press.
[5] Franklin, D. L. & James, A. D. (1997). Ensuring inequality: The structural transformation of the African-American family. Oxford University Printing.
[6] Tucker, K. B. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (Eds.). (1995). The decline in marriage among African Americans: Causes, consequences, and policy implications. Russell Sage Foundation.
[vii] Edin, K. & Kefalas, One thousand. (2011). Promises I can keep: Why poor women put maternity before marriage. University of California Press.
[8] Wilson, West. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. The University of Chicago Press.
[nine] Darity, Due west. A. & Myers, S. L. (1995). Family construction and the marginalization of Blackness men: Policy implications. In Tucker, B. M. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (Eds.), The decline of marriage among African Americans: Causes, consequences, and policy implications (pp. 263-308). Russell Sage Foundation.
[10] Coles, R., & Green, C. (Eds.). (2010). The myth of the missing Black father. New York: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/cole14370
[11] Boyd-Franklin, N. (2006). Black families in therapy: Understanding the African American experience. Guilford Press.
[12] Pinderhughes, E. B. (2002). African American marriage in the xxth century. Family Process, 41(2), 269-282.
[13] Jones, J. & Mosher, W. D. (2013). Fathers' involvement with their children: United States, 2006-2010. National Center for Health Statistics. https://world wide web.cdc.gov/nchs/information/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf
[14] Taylor, R.J., Hernandez E., Nicklett, E.J., Taylor, H.O., & Chatters, L.M. (2014). Informal social support networks of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American older adults. In Whitfield, K.E., Baker, T.A. (Eds).Handbook of minority crumbling (pp.417-434). Springer.
[xvi] Shonkoff, J. P. & Phillips, D. A. (Eds.). (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood evolution. National Academies Press.
[17] Hart, B., & T.R. Risley (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Paul H Brookes Publishing.
[18] Kaushal, N., Magnuson, Thou., Waldfogel, J. (2011). How is family income related to investments in children'southward learning? In Duncan, M.R., & Duncan G. (Eds.) Whither opportunity: Ascent inequality, schools, and children'due south life chances (pp. 187-206). Russell Sage Foundation.
Source: https://www.childtrends.org/publications/family-economic-and-geographic-characteristics-of-black-families-with-children
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