A new U.S. Census study shows New Jersey is slowly crawling back after faltering dramatically during the Great Recession.

And families with children may have the highest climb.

The number of New Jersey families with children who have at least one unemployed parent has risen sharply since 2005, at nearly double the national rate.

The study, "America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2012," provides an updated picture of the composition and living arrangements of families and households in the United States. Among the findings, data show New Jersey has seen a 63 percent increase in unemployed parents from 2005 to 2012, the fifth highest rate in the country. Nationally, the number of families with children and an unemployed parent has risen by more than 32 percent.

"Believe it or not, the recession ended 50 months ago. We’ve just been through the worst downturn since the Great Depression and New Jersey is about 60 percent of the way back," said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. "The recovery period is unprecedented."

While Hughes noted there have been signs of progress, the authors of the Census report said data show recovery is coming at a painstakingly slow pace.

"During the recession, economic well-being worsened for families with children," said Jamie Lewis, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch and one of the report’s co-authors. "Home ownership among families declined, while food stamp receipt and parental unemployment increased. Even after the recession officially ended in 2009, these measures remained worse than before it began."

Research shows that having an unemployed parent in a family can cause tremendous emotional and physical strain, both for the individual and the family unit.

"People have documented the emotional, the physical, the social implications of this, which of course transcend the individual," said Deborah Belle, a professor and psychology department at Boston University. "It can cause problems in the marriage. And the last thing that a child wants is a stressed, anxious, depressed and demoralized parent."

Belle said such trauma is more ever-present in the United States because there is little in terms of a social safety net available for the unemployed.

"Society can do a lot about this," Belle said. "There’s research that shows in countries like the Netherlands, there is a very strong social support for people that are unemployed ... And people do not suffer these negative impacts."

While the Census report paints a grim picture, a Star-Ledger analysis of Census data from 2007 to 2011 shows some hopeful signs — the percentage of families with children where both parents are employed has increased in many of the state’s counties from 2009 to 2011.

However, the Census report is a sign New Jersey lags the nation in recovery from the recession and also shows the recession affected virtually every facet of the state’s economic structure, said Gordon MacInnes, president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, a left-leaning think tank.

"This is a real sharp warning, a loud bell, that we can no longer think of New Jersey’s problem as being limited to New Jersey’s inner cities," MacInnes said. "The numbers are more stunning than I would have thought, but it’s not a surprise. There have been all sorts of warning signs."

MacInnes’ group has been pushing policies that would invest in services and people, like increased funding to public schools and raising the minimum wage, as a means of accelerating recovery, while conservatives have advocated for cutting taxes and reducing services.

Hughes said New Jersey’s slow recovery is tied to several things. New Jersey has been growing at a slower rate than the nation for decades, which inhibits economic growth.

And while other parts of the country are getting substantial boosts in the manufacturing sector, such as the successful bailout of the auto industry, New Jersey has not.

What’s more, its white-collar service jobs that were decimated during the recession, in many cases, have not reappeared.

"In manufacturing, those job losses were temporary and were quickly filled when the recession ended. But those service jobs we lost may end up being permanent," he said. "It looks like 2014 to 2015 before New Jersey to get back where it was in 2007."

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