What role does Social Security fill in providing income for young survivor families?
About 1.9 million children receive Social Security survivor benefits. They include 1.4 million children under age 18 and about 0.45 million adults who have been disabled since childhood. The 1.9 million child-survivor beneficiaries reside in about 1.2 million families. Data from the 1990 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched with SSA’s administrative records provide estimates of living arrangements and total income for families with children under 18 receiving Social Security survivor benefits. Of the 889,400 such families, about 62 percent were headed by a an unmarried adult, and 38 percent were husband-wife families. The latter would include families where the widowed parent had remarried or where the child was living with a couple other than the original parents. The families’ economic status varied considerably by family type (table 9). Among families with an unmarried head, those receiving survivor benefits had higher mean income and were less likely to be poor
