If you imagine a single woman having a baby around 1980, what do you think her life has been like since? By the time that child became an adult, was the mother any better off than she had been when the child was born? In an article published late last month in Demography, Matthew Painter, Adrianne Frech, and Kristi Williams challenge what they say “is often an oversimplified picture of single mothers as more impoverished and less educated than women with a marital first birth.” The part that is oversimplified is assuming that single mothers necessarily stay poor: Painter and his co-authors show that women who have nonmarital first births gain assets (not debt) over time.
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