Is Housing an Issue for Older Adults with No Children? What about Hunger?
A new report compares older adults who don’t have children with those who do
The Census Bureau just released their first-ever report on older people in the U.S. who do not have biological children. For those of us interested in single people, the report is relevant because 7 out of 10 older adults who have never married do not have any biological children. It is also important because single people with no kids are too often missing from policy discussions and legal protections, which so often focus on family instead, so this new attention is welcome.
For my “Living Single” blog at Psychology Today, I summarized what the report had to say about how older people with no biological children compare to biological parents in marital status, living arrangements, health, disability, wealth, poverty, and education. Some of the findings were quite striking — for example, the older women with no biological children had fewer disabilities, better health, and more wealth than all the other groups — biological mothers, biological fathers, and men with no biological children.
Although the women with no biological kids had the greatest net worth, the older people without biological children, including both the men and the women, were…
