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Abstract Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left‐behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place‐based framework, we utilise sequence analysis to identify dominant trajectories of change for more than 8000 rural communities. Our analysis reveals highly diverse community trajectories that connect deindustrialisation and racial inequality to elevated and rising poverty rates in certain places, while also documenting more favourable poverty trends elsewhere. These diverging local outcomes shed new light on the conflicting narratives surrounding rural America. We then demonstrate that, among children from poorer households, exposure to community poverty is predictive of adult economic mobility, patterns which are partly mediated by family stability and child poverty. Our finding that poorchildrenface additional disadvantages when they also grow up in poorplacessuggests a potential role for place‐based policies and redistribution to help ameliorate these disparities.
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Daycare and the Great American Divide
The sociology of inequality expounds exclusion as a universal mechanism of poverty. In the case of child care, I find an alternative narrative. Extant research has reported divergent findings on the role of child care among poor families: that the poor are both surrounded by supportive child care centers and face difficulty in finding safe and high quality care. My work reconciles this conflict. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of the contemporary American child care system, one of the first to investigate the role of child care in social stratification, I find that government child care assistance programs are working for the poorest families. Poor mothers connected to the formal welfare system seamlessly access child care vouchers and child care centers populate poor neighborhoods at similar rates to wealthy neighborhoods. Yet institutional inclusion in theory differs from institutional inclusion in practice. Conflicting institutional logics and competing daily logistics related to their poverty complicate poor families’ ability to find and maintain care. These difficulties inhibit economic opportunities for poor mothers and have potential implications for their children’s wellbeing. If child care operates like a springboard for wealthy mothers’ economic progress, child care for poor mothers remains an anchor.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1702306
- PAR ID:
- 10056913
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Sociological Association annual meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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