In the Atlantic, Sharon Lerner says that single moms aren't the only group who has been traumatized by the crappy economy. Families, with married or unmarried parents, are especially vulnerable, because their expenses are so high.
But, according to Shawn Fremstad, author of the CEPR report, "Married couples with kids are even more recession-sensitive," having more expenses and less flexibility than people without kids and further to fall than single parents.
I'm not sure if married couples are really in a worse position than single parents. All parents have it tough in this economy.
Education is the biggest problem. Parents have to help support their college aged kids. They also have bought homes in communities to get access to good schools. Housing, in many cases, is an education and child related expense.
There are daycare expenses for younger kids.
If one parent has taken a career hit to cover the gaps in child coverage during the school year, then that person can't pick up the slack if the bigger earner loses his or her job.
COBRA to cover an entire family is crushing. When is Obamacare beginning? Not soon enough.
There's not enough of a safety net in this country.
Apt. 11d 
Before Arthur Miller, the rules of drama generally required that the lead character is a tragedy be a King or someone similarly well-born, because the fall from grace can go further.
In a similar way, I guess married middle class families have “further to fall than single parents,” but that’s not really relevant unless we are going to stand by the claim that Macbeth is better than Death of a Salesman by definition.
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It’s not about who is in a worse position in the end.
It’s about how things have changed such that even a bare bones middle class existence (safe neighborhood, decent schools, acceptable healthcare coverage) is no longer within the reach of the working poor. Hell, it’s out of reach of a lot of the middle class these days.
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“It’s about how things have changed such that even a bare bones middle class existence (safe neighborhood, decent schools, acceptable healthcare coverage) is no longer within the reach of the working poor. Hell, it’s out of reach of a lot of the middle class these days.”
Isn’t crime substantially down over the past several decades? It’s not necessarily that neighborhoods are more dangerous, it’s that our standards are higher and we are more conscious of danger. (We just got a postcard about a new sex offender from some Texas state entity–nobody was mass mailing those in 1972.)
I think “decent schools” is also iffy. The school I went to as a kid wasn’t that great then and is worse now, but that’s largely because the clientele has changed significantly. Thanks partly to factors like the growing importance of prisons in the local economy and the swelling numbers of illegal alien families in the area, the kids and the parents are much harder to work with.
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