We’re now between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day so it’s a good time to take a look at moms and dads in Vermont.
We’re now between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day so it’s a good time to take a look at moms and dads in Vermont. We don’t know exactly how many mothers and fathers there are in the state, but we do know a lot about mothers and fathers with children under 18. And raising children is one of mothers’ and fathers’ most important jobs.
According to the Census Bureau, there are almost 66,000 families in Vermont who have among them 115,000 children under the age of 18. Seventy percent of those children, 82,000 of them, live in married couple families where there’s both a mother and father at home.
Those kids live, on average, in a pretty good economic situation. They live with two parents and in a family with a median income of about $81,000 — half of these families earn more than $81,000 and half earn less.
The other 34,000 children live in single parent families, 25,000 of them in a family with only a mother present. Those single-mother families have a median income of only $24,000, less than a third of the income of married couple families.
The 9,000 children living with families with only a father present do somewhat better financially than single mother families. But their median family income is still only $38,000, less than half that of married couple families with young kids.
There’s a large literature in economics, sociology, and in the popular press dealing with single parent families and their impact on children’s growth and development, and their outcomes later in life. We don’t need to get into that literature to see that simple economics tells us that children growing up in a two-parent family have a lot more resources at their disposal than their friends in single-parent families.
It’s expensive and problematic for government to make up the difference in the economic resources available to these different family structures. And it’s very difficult for government, religious organizations, or any other institution to replace the intangibles that go along with a two parent family.