“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 arrangements during 2020 and the extent to which children may have experienced “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.