The Single Mother, Child Poverty Myth

It's often said that the high child poverty figures in the U.S. are due to the high numbers of single mothers.  This analysis shoots that hypothesis full of holes.  Other countries with similar rates of single mothers have much lower rates of children in poverty.  That's mainly because they do something about it with better welfare programs.

...high child poverty in the US is not caused by some overwhelming crush of single mother parenting. The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine. Morever, relatively high child poverty rates are the rule in every single family type in the US, not just some single mother phenomenon. We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation's children into poverty because we choose to. It would be easy to dramatically cut that figure, but we'd rather not.