Rising Community Poverty Reduces Social Mobility for Rural Children

Rural America is often portrayed as a distressed and left-behind place, where the outlook for rural children is stagnant. This view of rural hardship is supported by the fact that since 1980, almost one in three rural communities have seen increases in poverty of 50 percent or more. But are such worsening conditions a typical feature of rural communities? And what do these dynamics mean for the life chances of children? We address these questions through a framework that uses sequence analysis and multilevel modelling to determine how community changes are shaping the life chances of rural children. By revealing a series of highly distinctive community trajectories linking deindustrialization and long-term racial inequality to poverty, we confirm that the fortunes of rural America are far from monolithic. We then show particularly harmful effects of chronic or worsening community poverty on the life chances of rural children. These effects are evident for children from white and non-white households, and even among those who moved away from their home areas. We conclude that rural economic hardship is leaving a lasting mark on families and further fine-scale analysis is needed to understand the contribution of community change to social and spatial inequality