9 in 10 Hispanic Children in Households With Low Incomes Live With at Least One Employed Adult

Helping families with children achieve economic independence is a core goal of the Administration of Children & Families (ACF). To this end, many ACF programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), include efforts to support the paid employment of parents in economically vulnerable families. However, adult employment is already quite common in the households of Hispanic children in families with low incomes.

Most Hispanic children in families with low incomes^a —in other words, families whose incomes fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold (or the federal poverty level, FPL)—live with an employed adult, based on our analysis of the 2023 American Community Survey. As shown in Figure 1:

• Approximately 9 in 10 (89%) Hispanic children living in families with low incomes have at least one employed adult in the household. Most of this employment is full-time: Specifically, more than two thirds (68%) of Hispanic children in families with low incomes live with an adult who works full-time (at least 35 hours per week).
• Living with an employed adult is more common among Hispanic children in immigrant families (meaning at least one parent was born outside the United States) with low incomes: 93 percent of children in immigrant families live with at least one employed adult and 72 percent live with an adult employed full-time; comparable figures among Hispanic children who live with only U.S.-born parents are 84 percent and 63 percent, respectively.

Additionally, for all Hispanic children, regardless of family income or whether their parents were born in the United States, 95 percent have at least one employed adult in their household and 82 percent live with an adult employed full-time (see Table A in the Appendix).

Figure 1: Most Hispanic children in families with low incomes live with working adults
Percentage of Hispanic children in families with low incomes who live with an employed adult, by whether their parents were born in the United States

These data can inform efforts to make ACF programs most useful to Hispanic families. Despite their strong connections to the labor market, research finds that fewer than 1 in 5 Hispanic families with low incomes earn enough to cover a basic budget for a family. Hispanic families with low incomes may benefit from employment and job training opportunities that also support development of essential skills and make higher-wage jobs more attainable.

Methods

For this analysis, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 nationally representative American Community Survey (ACS) and Puerto Rican Community Survey (PRCS) 1-year samples, obtained from IPUMS USA. We define Hispanic children as children under age 18 for whom a Latino, Hispanic, or Spanish origin was reported, regardless of race. There are 136,816 Hispanic children in the unweighted sample. Hispanic children living in group quarters, with missing poverty data, or without any data on parental nativity were excluded from the analyses.

We defined “presence of an employed adult” in the household as whether there was any adult (i.e., age 18 or older) in the household who had worked any number of hours for pay in the previous week. Full-time employment is defined as whether, in the past 12 months, the adult had worked at least 50 weeks and usually at least 35 hours per week. We estimated adult employment in the household among Hispanic children with family incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold (families with “low incomes”). We created the category of families with low incomes using the IPUMS-constructed poverty variable, which calculates each person’s family income as a percentage of their family’s poverty threshold (see this summary of the poverty measure in IPUMS). We also show estimates according to whether children’s co-residential parents were born in the United States—i.e., their nativity—using two categories: 1) at least one parent in the household is non-U.S.-born or 2) all parents in the household are U.S.-born. For children with only one parent in the household, parental nativity was assigned based on the nativity of that parent alone.

Appendix

Table A. Percentage of Hispanic children with an employed adult in the household, by whether their parents were born in the United States, for all family incomes and in families with incomes below 200% FPL

Footnote

^a Data from 2022 show that 50 percent of Hispanic children live in families with incomes <200% of the federal poverty level.

Suggested Citation

Wildsmith, E., Alvira-Hammond, M. (2025). Most Hispanic children in families with low incomes live with an employed adult. National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families. https://doi.org/10.59377/687y4010s