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One of the four principal goals of the welfare reform of 1996 was to increase married two-parent families. The current welfare reform proposals advanced by President George W. Bush and recently enacted by the House of Representatives (H.R. 4737) include specific policies aimed at encouraging healthy marriages. Supporters of this approach contend that an increase in healthy marriages will improve child well-being and reduce child poverty. Opponents argue that there is little or no link between increasing marriage and reducing poverty. They argue that the government should ignore the issue of marriage and should focus instead on increasing maternal education as the primary means of combating child poverty.

Given this policy context, this Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report examines two questions: Is marriage effective in reducing child poverty? What is the comparative effect of marriage and maternal education in combating child poverty? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the CDA analysis produced the following findings:

• Marriage plays a powerful role in lifting children out of poverty.
• While both marriage and maternal education play a positive role in alleviating child poverty, in general, stable marriage has a far stronger effect than does maternal schooling.

Maternal education without marriage is generally ineffective in reducing child poverty. The poverty levels of children raised by never-married mothers remain high even if the mother has a high-school or college degree.

This CDA Report attempts to identify the primary causes of child poverty in the United States, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a representative sample of Americans produced by the U.S. Department of Labor.2 We also examine the differences in black and white child poverty and seek to uncover the causes of those differences.