“Excess” Doubling Up During COVID: Changes in Children’s Shared Living Arrangements

Abstract

The proportion of U.S. children living in doubled-up households, in which a child lives with a parent plus adult kin or nonkin, has increased in the last 40 years. Although shared living arrangements are often understood as a strategy to cope with crises, no research to date has examined changes in children’s living arrangements dur­ing the first year of the COVID-19 pan­demic. We use the Amer­i­can Community Survey and the Current Population Survey to exam­ine chil­dren’s dou­bled-up liv­ing arrange ments dur ing 2020 and the extent to which chil dren may have expe ri enced “excess” dou­bling up rel­a­tive to ear­lier years. We con­sider trends by house­hold type (multigenerational, extended with other relatives, and nonrelative households) and differences by demographic characteristics (marital status, race and ethnicity, work status, edu­ca­tion, age, and num­ber of cores­i­dent chil­dren). We find evi­dence that more than half a mil­lion (509,600) chil­dren expe­ri­enced “excess” dou­bling up in 2020. Greater than expected increases in doubled-up arrangements were driven by increases in multigenerational households, in particular among Black and Hispanic children, young children (under age six), those whose mothers never married, and those whose mothers were not work­ing. Correlates of coresidence remained largely unchanged over time, although having a mother who had never married became a stronger correlate in 2020. Our find­ings sug­gest that both eco­nomic and instru­men­tal needs likely explained the rise in multigenerational coresidence in 2020.