Despite improvements in poverty rates in the United States during the last
decade, U.S. child poverty in the 21st century remains high compared
with the general
population (See How
is Poverty Defined for more information). In
2000, 11.4 million U.S. children under 18 were poor, representing 36 percent of
the Nation's poverty population.
At the same time, poverty
rates for rural children are considerably higher than rates for urban
children; 19 percent of nonmetro children were poor compared with 15 percent
of metro children.
Rural areas are diverse and the extent and
nature of child poverty varies across nonmetro counties, differentiated
by population size and proximity to metropolitan centers. Also, nonmetro
child poverty rates differ by racial/ethnic group, family structure,
and parental characteristics. Assessing changes in the nature, extent,
and geography of child poverty in rural areas is an important tool
for evaluating the effectiveness of Federal assistance programs and
other strategies intended to improve the economic well-being of
rural residents and their communities. For purposes of this discussion,
nonmetro areas are defined according to
the 1993
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) definitions unless otherwise
noted.
Changing Trends
Poverty rates for children in nonmetro areas historically have been
higher than for children in metro areas. In 1970, the child poverty
rate was 12 percent in metro areas and 20 percent in nonmetro areas.
In the early 1970s, poverty rates for children by metro-nonmetro
residence began to converge, and the relative economic status of
nonmetro children improved. In the late 1970s, however, the residential
gap in poverty widened, as poverty rates increased in both metro
and nonmetro areas. The recessions of the early 1980s pushed poverty
rates up. After 1983, metro poverty rates declined somewhat, but
nonmetro rates remained high as the slower economic recovery in nonmetro
areas delayed improvement in poverty conditions.
Poverty rates increased in the early 1990s for children in both metro
and nonmetro areas, peaking in 1993 at 22 percent in metro areas and
24 percent in nonmetro areas. Beginning in 1994, the metro child
poverty rate dropped substantially, declining 7 percentage points to
15 percent in 2000. At the same time, the nonmetro child poverty rate
also dropped, ending up 5 percentage points lower at 19 percent in
2000. Metro and nonmetro child poverty rates have fallen to their lowest
levels since 1986, although the metro-nonmetro gap in child poverty
has increased.
Child poverty rates are higher in the South and West, and poverty is
especially a problem for the South, which has a higher percentage
of children in poverty than the rest of the country. Over half of
nonmetro poor children reside in the South, while metro poor children
are much more evenly spread among the four regions. In the South,
for example, 22 percent of nonmetro children were poor compared with
16 percent of metro children. The higher concentrations of Black
and Hispanic children in the South and West undoubtedly contribute
to the higher poverty rates.
Use of ERS’s 2003 Rural-Urban
Continuum Codes
categorizes metro counties by population size and nonmetro counties
by degree of urbanization and proximity to urban areas. These codes,
based on the 2003 OMB definitions of metro and nonmetro, allow a more
detailed regional assessment of changing child poverty rates from
1990 to 2000. In 2000, nonmetro child poverty rates increased as
areas became more rural. Poverty rates ranged from 17.8 percent in
the most
urbanized nonmetro counties of 20,000 population adjacent to a metro
area to 22.5 percent in completely rural counties not adjacent to a
metro area. For each of the three nonmetro population size classifications,
nonadjacent counties had higher child poverty rates than their adjacent
counterparts. Child poverty rates in all categories of the rural-urban
continuum showed improvement between 1990 and 2000, with the most dramatic
declines occurring in the completely rural counties. Child poverty
in these areas fell from 26.5 percent in 1990 to 22.5 percent in 2000.
Race and ethnicity are important factors in determining a child's
poverty status. In nonmetro areas, Black children were more than
twice as likely to be poor (37 percent) than White children (16
percent) in 2000. Nonmetro Hispanic children (31 percent) were almost
twice as likely to be poor as nonmetro White children. Nonmetro minority
children are more likely than nonmetro White children to face adverse
economic conditions, especially those in larger families, in families
with younger children, in mother-only families, and in families with
no earners.
An increase in the number of mother-only families was one of the
major changes in family composition during the 1970s, continuing
in the 1980s and 1990s, but at a much slower pace. More children today
can expect to live in a single-parent family at some point in
their lives due to both high rates of divorce and increased out-of-wedlock
childbearing. Children in mother-only families have a greater
chance of being poor than children living with two parents. Nearly 48 percent of nonmetro
children in mother-only families were poor in 2000, in contrast
to 10 percent of nonmetro children in two-parent families, who
were poor in 2000. Single parent families are often at an economic
disadvantage because there is only one parent to generate income and that effort may be
limited by difficulties in obtaining child care.
Parental characteristics, including educational attainment and employment
status, are associated with poverty status. Poverty rates for
nonmetro children whose parents had not completed high school were
38 percent in 2000, compared with 20 percent for nonmetro
children whose parents were high school graduates. A disproportionate
share of poor children have parents with less than a high school education
than do children in the general population. Parents of nonmetro children
are less educated than their metro counterparts, compounding the
effect of educational attainment on poverty status. Parental age (poverty
rates are highest for children whose parents are under age 30) and
educational attainment interact, because younger parents are more
likely to have interrupted their high school or college education
due to early childbearing. Educational attainment influences employment
prospects, with highly educated parents being more marketable in
the labor force and better able to provide an economically secure
environment for their children than their less educated counterparts.
Children of employed parents have a clear financial advantage. Poverty
rates are higher for children whose parents are unemployed or not in
the labor force. While 13 percent of nonmetro children with employed
parents were poor, 43 percent whose parents were unemployed were poor.
With higher unemployment and underemployment in nonmetro areas, some
workers and their families may experience periods of poverty. Being
temporarily poor in nonmetro areas often results from work-related
events, such as the loss of a job or lack of local employment opportunities.
Childhood poverty has both immediate and long-term negative effects.
Children in low-income families do not fare as well as children in
more affluent families on many indicators of economic security, health,
and education. The growing gap between the number of rich and poor
children suggests that poor children may experience more relative
deprivation even if the percentage of poor children is holding steady.
Compared with children living in families above the poverty line,
children living below the poverty line are more likely:
to have difficulty in school,
to become teenage parents, and
as adults, to earn less and be unemployed more frequently.
The cost of child poverty to the Nation is high because child poverty may affect the future
productivity and competitiveness of the labor force. The poverty rates
for children under 18 continue to be higher in rural than in urban
areas,and in 2000, one in five rural children lived in poverty.
Data presented here show declining rural child poverty between 1990
and 2000. However, two trends may adversely affect child poverty rates
in nonmetro areas in the future. First, an increasing share of the
rural child population consists of minority children, and second, rising
proportions of children are being raised in one-parent (mostly mother-only)
families. Since both minority children and children in mother-only
families are more likely to be poor than other children in the general
population, child poverty rates could climb higher in the future unless
more targeted efforts aree made by Federal, State, and local agencies to reach
these groups, especially in more remote and very poor rural areas.
