Twenty percent of children in the United States are on food stamps, according to a recent Census Bureau report.
According to the government data, the number of children receiving food stamps is higher than it was at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007.
The information was released late last month in the bureau’s annual “Families and Living Arrangements” package.
“The rate of children living with married parents who receive food stamps has doubled since 2007,” the bureau detailed in a release. “In 2014, an estimated 16 million children, or about one in five, received food stamp assistance compared with the roughly 9 million children, or one in eight, that received this form of assistance prior to the recession.”
Another data-point of interest from the report shows that nearly 1 in 4 children (24 percent) live with at least one foreign-born parent and that 27 percent of children live in a single-parent household.
The Census Bureau re-released the statistics Friday to correct an erroneous data point about the number of children living with foreign-born parents.
Additional report highlights on children via the Census Bureau:
- Of the 73.7 million children under 18 in the United States:
- 10 percent live with a grandparent (7.4 million).
- 79 percent live with at least one sibling (58.5 million).
- 15 percent have a stay-at-home mother (10.8 million), and 0.6 percent have a stay-at-home father (420,000).
- 24 percent of children live with at least one foreign-born parent (18.1 million).
- The share of children who live with one parent only has tripled since 1960, from about 9 percent to 27 percent.