Making Ends Meet Thirty Years Later: How Single Mothers Survive on Low Incomes

Natasha V. Pilkauskas; Kevin Bruey

doi:10.7758/RSF.2026.12.2.03

Article Information

vol. 12 no. 2 57-82

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.2.03

Published By

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Print ISSN

2377-8253

Online ISSN

2377-8261

History

Published online May 13, 2026.

© 2026 Russell Sage Foundation. Pilkauskas, Natasha V., and Kevin Bruey. 2026. “Making Ends Meet Thirty Years Later: How Single Mothers Survive on Low Incomes.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 12(2): 57–82. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.2.03. The authors thank Propel for access to their Providers data. We thank Samiul Jubaed for his assistance in preparing the data and Nicole Kovski and Katherine Michelmore for help with data comparisons. We thank Kathy Edin for her extensive feedback, as well as the editors of this double issue and the conference participants. Direct correspondence to: Natasha Pilkauskas, at npilkaus{at}umich.edu, 735 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States. Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Author Information

Natasha V. Pilkauskas^a and
Kevin Bruey^b

^aAssociate professor of public policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States
^bResearch assistant in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States