WASHINGTON — In studying how the economy has pushed young adults to move home with their parents, families with young children also rely on moving in with relatives (or nonrelatives) to make ends meet in times good and bad.
A study recently published in the journal Demography tracked 3,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large U.S. cities. It found that 49 percent of those kids have lived in doubled-up households at least once in their first nine years of life. Doing so saved their families more than $4,000 on average each year, a substantial sum, given that the mothers who were interviewed for the study earned $15,000 on average.
The mothers followed in the study were single, married or living with a person with whom they were romantically involved when their kids were born. They were most likely to double-up when the children were young and less likely to do so as they grew older. By far, single mothers doubled-up the most often in the early years (64 percent).
“I would never have expected that half would double-up during a nine-year period,” said Natasha Pilkauskas, a co-author of the study and a professor at Columbia University. “That’s surprisingly high.”
While the savings totaled roughly $4,000 a year on average, married moms reaped more ($5,300), followed by cohabiting mothers ($4,450) and then single mothers ($3,500). The first two groups probably had higher rents because they had more adults already in the home and therefore needed larger spaces.
