Two-parent households give rural boys in poverty ‘advantage’ over urban peers

Boys who grow up in rural poverty achieve higher levels of success than their urban peers because of the “predominance of two-parent households,” a new study found.

“Why do kids born into poverty in rural areas climb the income ladder at higher rates than their urban peers? Answer: rural boys, who benefit from life in small places with more two-parent households,” principal author Dylan Connor, professor of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University, wrote. “Given the greater availability of economic opportunity in cities, the ‘rural advantage’ in income mobility seems paradoxical. Earlier proposed explanations include migration to urban areas, high rural social capital, and racial and ethnic homogeneity.”

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Connor told the Washington Examiner that the broader context of the study is that upward mobility in the United States is trending less favorably than in the past, sometimes referred to as the “Death of the American Dream,” and his team sought to find community conditions that portended greater success on a generational scale.

“The findings show overwhelmingly that kids do better in communities with more two-parent households,” Connor said. “In fact, the single strongest community indicator of whether a child will be upwardly mobile is whether they grew up in a community with more two-parent households.”

The study also notes that rural males are more likely to be married and less likely to be incarcerated than their urban peers.

On the other hand, girls who were born into rural poverty do worse in personal income into adulthood, which the study says is related to the cultural understanding of traditional gender roles in rural communities, including marrying at a younger age on average, having children, and less college attendance.

The success levels of girls and women diverge based on personal income versus household income. While the study finds benefits for rural girls in household income, personal income looks more like a “rural disadvantage.”

According to the study, the prior consensus on rural economic mobility was based on the idea that achievement for those in rural poverty came with migration to wealthier areas of the country, especially cities.

However, the new evidence suggests that “rural income mobility is principally driven by boys of rural-origin, who are more likely than their urban peers to grow up in communities with a predominance of two-parent households.”

“What about rural out-migration and ‘brain drain’? Migration matters, but childhood conditions come first,” Connor wrote. “The effects hold for movers and stayers. The most upwardly mobile groups grow up in rural areas and later move to cities.”

The study states that boys in particular are sensitive to the economic insecurity of single-parent households, which corresponds higher-level financial and academic achievement found among all persons who grow up in two-parent households, as the Washington Examiner reported.

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While the “rural advantage” is most predominant among white and Hispanic Americans, Connor says that the effects are not primarily seen along racial lines and that the largest differences between urban and rural populations are among white Americans themselves. The effects of the “advantage” hold across races.

“This suggests that we should be thinking hard about how we can strengthen modern families and communities for young children, without going back to the 1950s,” Connor said.