Opportunity Youth: Disenfranchised Young People

Disconnected Youth: A Look at 16 to 24 Year Olds Who Are Not Working or In School
disconnected youth tends to differ from that of their peers. 52 Figure 7 shows that disconnected
youth, overall, were more likely to live with only one parent or no parent at all, than connected
youth, who were more likely than their disconnected counterparts to live with both parents.
Among youth ages 16 through 18, disconnected youth are about equally likely to be living with
one parent (40.7%) than with two parents (41.8%), whereas connected youth are twice as likely to
be living with both parents (62.5%) than with just one (30.8%). Social science research indicates
that children who grow up in mother-only families (or with their mother and step-father) are more
likely than children raised with both biological parents to have certain negative outcomes,
including poverty-level incomes. 53 Moreover, within the 16-to-18 age group, nearly one in five
disconnected youth (17.5%) were living apart from parents all together, compared to about one in
fifteen connected youth (6.7%), reflecting a home environment absent direct parental support and
supervision.
Among the oldest youth, ages 22 through 24, a larger share of connected youth (56.7%) lived
apart from their parents in 2014 than disconnected youth (48.0%). Given that many disconnected
youth are not earning income and may not have strong social networks, they may have no other
choice but to live at home. Reciprocally, it appears that their connected, older peers are
“fledging,” and beginning to become financially independent from their families.
Figure 8 depicts youth poverty status by living arrangement. The figure shows that disconnected
youth are more likely to be poor than are their connected counterparts, even when accounting for
living arrangement. Among youth living with both parents, disconnected youth were almost three
times more likely than connected youth to be poor (15.7% versus 5.8%, respectively). Poverty
rates were higher for youth living in single-parent families than in dual-parent families, but the
poverty rate of disconnected youth in single-parent families (46.6%) was twice that of connected
youth living in such families (22.8%). Poverty rates were highest among youth living apart from
their parents; among disconnected youth 65.3% were poor, a rate over twice that of connected
youth (29.0%).
52 For further discussion of the influence of family structure on socioeconomic outcomes and financial well-being in
adulthood, see CRS Report RL34756, Nonmarital Childbearing: Trends, Reasons, and Public Policy Interventions.
53 For further information, see CRS Report R41431, Child Well-Being and Noncustodial Fathers.
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