Kids with no parent in home at 13.7%

In past decade, more live apart

— More Arkansas children live with neither parent than did a decade ago, new 2010 Census numbers show.

Over the last decade, the number of children living in households headed by someone other than their parents g rew 23.7 percent from 78,658 in 2000 to 97,303 in 2010, the numbers released today show.

Statewide, those children living with grandparents, other relatives and “nonrelatives” — a census category that includes unrelated foster parents — accounted for 13.7 percent of the 711,475 children under 18 in 2010, up from 11.6 percent in 2000.

The numbers, released along with a wealth of demographic data for five other states, show that the Delta remains the area of the state with the highest proportion of children living apart from their parents.

But the proportion of the under-18 population living with someone other than a parent grew over the decade in all Arkansas counties but two — Dallas and Bradley.

Dee Ann Newell, founder and executive director of the not-for-profit advocacy group Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind, said the increase in children living with someone other than a parent underscores the growing impact of a number of factors, such as teen pregnancies, drug addiction and parental incarceration.

“This points to several things. One that mass incarceration has not been dying on the vine by any stretch. It looks, to our data, that about half of these families are dealing with criminal incarceration where one or both parent is incarcerated. ... But, if you made me pin it on anything, I’d pin it on poverty,” she said.

“I think what we’re dealing with is the overarching umbrella of what poverty does to families. It destroys them. It diminishes them. It breaks them up, and it’s hideous.”

In seven counties — Lee, Dallas, Chicot, Lafayette, Phillips, Monroe and Jefferson — more than 20 percent of children in each lived in homes without their parents. That was up from four counties a decade ago.

In Lee and Dallas counties one in four children lives apart from parents — the highest proportions among all counties.

Regarding grandparents in many of the state’s Delta counties, Newell said, “drugs have gotten their children, and that’s why they’ve gotten their grandchildren. Or the parents have run away — they’ve gotten out of Dodge — [because] there are not opportunities there.”

High unemployment and parents being forced to move for work partly explain the increases across the state, said Paul Kelly, a senior policy analyst at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is a Little Rock-based nonprofit whose mission is “to ensure that all children and their families have the resources and opportunities to lead healthy and productive lives and to realize their full potential,” according to its website.

“Families are really just struggling a whole lot more economically to make ends meet, and there may be parents that are just not working and are unable to take care of their children, and they’re putting them with relatives and friends who can better take care of them,” he said.

Census numbers show that most children living apart from their parents reside with a grandparent.

In 2010, 64,498 children were living in grandparentheaded households, up from 50,286 in 2000 — an increase of 28.3 percent over the decade.

Statewide, 16,769 children were living with other relatives in 2010 and 12,553 others were living with someone who wasn’t a relation.

The census numbers don’t specify whether children are housed in foster homes, but Amy Webb, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, said the agency’s latest figures show 4,223 children are in foster care.

Webb said the agency has seen an increase in children being placed in foster homes headed by relatives in the first three-quarters of the fiscal 2011, the only quarters for which numbers are available.

“We are making more of an effort to locate families first and trying to get the children in homes of relatives,” she said.

Newell, whose group works mostly with caregivers who are outside the state’s foster system, said it’s not surprising that many grandparents and other relatives want to keep their families together “at all cost.”

That’s how it was for Elizabeth Norman, and her husband, Ernest, who have raised their youngest daughter’s children, Jamie and Beth, for more than a decade in their home outside Des Arc in Prairie County.

“Circumstances just came that we had to step in, and my husband didn’t hesitate one bit. That was his grandson. ... Nobody else is going to raise him. It was as simple as that,” she said.

Elizabeth Norman, now 58, said that taking on raising the grandchildren did add some financial strain to the family over the years, and now, she said, it’s difficult keeping up with Jamie, 13, and, Beth, 11, who both play sports.

“It’s a busier lifestyle than I had before ... but the grandkids keep you young,” she said, laughing and noting the children have a good relationship with their mother but have chosen to stay with their grandparents.

“They don’t know any different,” she said.

However, she said, she remembers being surprised by the number of grandparents fighting for custody of their grandchildren when she and her husband obtained custody of their two more than a decade ago.

“It’s amazing and sad,” Norman said.

Newell said the increasing number of children who are living apart from their parents doesn’t bode well for the future.

“It’s happening everywhere and it’s serious. When we start losing our parents, that’s cause for alarm,” she said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/11/2011

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