Professor’s New Book Explores the Economics of Single Motherhood

In 1980, single mothers were five times more likely to live in poverty compared to those in a traditional two-parent household. And while educational and workforce opportunities for women have multiplied across the past four decades, that fact remains true today. 

“Women’s lives have changed dramatically. Women’s rights have grown. Participation in the labor market has grown. Women are more educated than men now, and they’re more likely to get a college degree,” says Professor and Chair of Sociology Matthew McKeever. “So you would think that single mothers would see radical shifts in income given those factors.” 

Understanding why the outlook for single mothers has remained stagnant is the premise of McKeever’s new book, Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980, which he co-wrote with Nicholas Wolfinger, a family demographer and professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. The book explores single motherhood from 1980 to 2018 by interpreting nearly 40 years of data captured by the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, which tracked nearly 9,000 people born in the U.S. between 1980 and 1984. 

Wolfinger and McKeever, who says he first became interested in the structure of social inequality after witnessing the collapse of the Pittsburgh area’s industry as a young man, chose 1980 as their starting point as it marks a new chapter in the nation’s welfare system when President Ronald Reagan took office. Welfare recipients, particularly mothers, were a particular target of Reagan’s administration, and he often used his position to perpetuate the myth of women having children solely to collect government benefits. The authors say there’s little evidence of that being the case. 

“All these women who are supposedly doing it to receive welfare are doing it in an era where we’re just constantly cutting back welfare,” McKeever told the Deseret News in January. “So it’s the most backward logic anybody would use to go after increasingly small amounts of money with the hardest thing possible.”

The biggest revelation presented in Thanks for Nothing is the change in who today’s single mothers are. In the 1980s, the vast majority were women who married, had children, and later divorced. Today, they’re much more likely to have never married. This group of single mothers also tend to have lower education levels and work fewer hours at lower-paying jobs. “It used to be that divorce led to single motherhood,” McKeever says. “Now, it’s motherhood that’s leading to single motherhood.”

Though they lack the benefit of a second income, McKeever says today’s divorced single mothers look a lot like their married counterparts and have brighter economic prospects. Never-married single mothers continue to face a slew of challenges. They often become mothers younger, their lives are much less stable and unpredictable generally, and they often lack the necessary childcare support to work more. 

The pair also found that single mothers tend not to remain single. About 65% of divorced mothers will remarry, and the same percentage of never-married mothers do eventually marry. However, McKeever and Wolfinger note that data show that once women become single mothers, they never catch up in income. 

Ultimately, Thanks for Nothing explains that the children of single mothers pay a heavy price.. Growing up in poverty, McKeever and Wolfinger say, leads to poorer academic performance, a greater chance of dropping out of school, an increased likelihood of emotional problems, and continued poverty later in life. The authors argue that the best way to help them is by providing their parents with access to better jobs and initiatives that boost family income. McKeever points to the success of the COVID-era expanded child tax credit, which helped move millions of children out of poverty. Child poverty rose sharply once that credit expired at the end of 2021.

“Our last chapter argues that the state has an obligation to support, but our current politics are that the state has no obligation to do anything,” McKeever says. “It feels like the ultimate evolution of the message of the 1980s, and it has just become cruel at this point.”

McKeever and Wolfinger have been friends and collaborators since they met in graduate school and have explored the intersection of inequality and family demography together. Now, they’re setting their sights on a growing population in the U.S.: single fathers. Though their research is in the early stage, McKeever says, single fathers tend to mirror their single mother counterparts and are surrounded by similar myths.

“We’re not used to thinking about what it means to be a single father,” McKeever says. “The narrative has always been about the single mother while the father is off doing whatever it is he’s doing… buying the sports car or finding a younger girlfriend. But that’s not the reality anymore.”