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28 Hardships in America
SIPP results as well for comparison).
2.4.1 How common are hardships
Hardships, both critical and serious, are more common among families living
below 200% of poverty than among those above (Table 7 and Figure B). We
find that 29% of families below the poverty threshold and 25% of families
between 100% and 200% of poverty experience critical hardships. The similarity
of the results for poor and near-poor families substantiates the family budget
analysis. The family budgets reveal that the poverty threshold provides
insufficient income for families to meet basic needs, since most budgets were
approximately 200% of poverty. This is also the case for serious hardships.
Families living above poverty but still below the average family budget level
are unable to avoid hardships to the same extent as non-poor families.
Some hardships are more common than others, but families living below
200% of poverty are two to three times as likely as families living above 200%
of poverty to experience each of the specific critical and serious hardships (Table
8). There is an exception in our measure of child care: poor families do not
have consistently higher proportions of child care hardship relative to higherincome
families. Our measures of child care hardships are limited in that we are
unable to measure child outcomes, relative child care costs, or relative quality
of the child care environment. However, the fact that the child care hardships
that we are able to measure are similar across family income suggests that, of
all our measured hardships, child care hardships are the least likely to be affected
by family income. Overall, food insecurities are the most common hardships:
17.5% of families living below 200% of poverty missed meals, and over 40%
worried about food.
2.4.2 What kinds of families experience hardships
Single-parent families have more difficulties reaching family budget levels,
and these families are also more likely to experience the most hardships (Table
9). Again, food insecurities were the most common critical and serious hardships:
23% of families with only one adult missed meals and 57% worried about food.
Not all hardships were most prevalent among single-parent families, however,:
using the emergency room as the main source of care and not having a child in
activities were more prevalent among families with more than one adult. In
general, having two adults leads to lower rates of hardship relative to having
one adult, but having three adults does not necessarily do so.
Table 10 shows the results from an ordered logit regression that allows us
to calculate adjusted probabilities for the incidence of critical hardships. (See
Appendix E for a detailed description of our method and regression analysis.)
The regression takes into account differences across families, including family
income within poverty grouping; age, race, and education of the household
head; marital status; age of children; and geographic location. The variables
that are statistically significant in the regression are whether the family had