Helen Zivar
Single mothers and children poverty rates skyrocketed in the U.S. in 2022 as a result of the expiration of pandemic-era public assistance, combined with the economic crisis which was partly and temporarily covered up by this aid. As newly released Census Bureau data show, about 15.5 million single mothers lived with their children in 2022 and a quarter of them or 11,720,000 people (when adding all people in those families) lived below the government-defined poverty line.
Single-mother families have historically faced greater economic uncertainty relative to other family types. The COVID-19 pandemic brought about greater challenges, such as increased unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity for single-mother families. The expansion of income transfers (such as child tax credits) provided some short-term relief for this population but were quickly expired. As National Women’s Law Center reports, this “fueled the country’s largest ever recorded single-year increase in SPM [Supplemental Poverty Measure] in more than 50 years. Between 2021 and 2022, the SPM poverty rate increased…for children overall (from 5.2% to 12.4%), and for family units with children headed by a single woman (from 11.9% to 26.7%)” (NWLC.org, Nov. 8, 2023). SPM is calculated based on an extended definition of income, compared to the standard poverty measure, by including several government benefits (e.g., Supplemental Nutrition Assistance -SNAP-, refundable tax credits, etc.) minus some expenses (e.g., federal and state taxes, work, and medical expenses).
In a capitalist economic system, poverty is seen by the dominant ideology as a consequence of laziness and lack of responsibility rather than an inherent condition of a system in which production takes place for the profits of the few rather than to meet the needs of society. In this system, capitalists try to maximize profit by the stratification of the working class, keeping wages of one group of workers down and thus exploiting them at a higher rate while also driving down the societal average wage. For example, women get paid less than men even when they have the same qualifications as their men counterparts. On average, women get paid about 83¢ on the dollar for the same job compared to men. In addition, women and especially mothers are exploited more, in part because they are less flexible workers than men due to family responsibilities.
Mother’s Day is celebrated but motherhood is devalued as millions of mothers struggle with poverty and have to choose between paying rent or buying food for their children. The puny financial support that the government provided in the past has been eroded over the years by politicians such as Reagan and Clinton, and so the single mothers are forced to leave their children home alone to go to work. In the 1950s one income was enough to support a middle-class family, but with the drop in the real value of wages, now two wage earners are necessary to maintain a family in the bourgeois sense of the term. The capitalists try to overcome their deepening crises in part by stripping away government support to increase exploitation more and more ruthlessly, and this falls heavily on single mothers and their families.
image: Single mother supplemental poverty rate chart, Axios
