BY GRETCHEN LIVINGSTON, PEW RESEARCH CENTER
APRIL 25, 2018
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Excerpts:
One-in-four parents living with a child in the United States today are unmarried. Driven by declines in marriage overall, as well as increases in births outside of marriage, this marks a dramatic change from a half-century ago, when fewer than one-in-ten parents living with their children were unmarried (7%).
At the same time, the profile of unmarried parents has shifted markedly, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.1 Solo mothers – those who are raising at least one child with no spouse or partner in the home – no longer dominate the ranks of unmarried parents as they once did. In 1968, 88% of unmarried parents fell into this category. By 1997 that share had dropped to 68%, and in 2017 the percentage of unmarried parents who were solo mothers declined to 53%. These declines in single mothers have been entirely offset by increases in cohabitating parents: Now 35% of all unmarried parents are living with a partner.2 Meanwhile, the share of unmarried parents who are solo fathers has held steady at 12%.
Due primarily to the rising number of cohabiting parents, the share of unmarried parents who are fathers has more than doubled over the past 50 years. Now, 29% of all unmarried parents who reside with their children are fathers, compared with just 12% in 1968.
While it's well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents is living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).3 There are differences in the demographic profiles of each group as well. Cohabiting parents are younger, less educated and less likely to have ever been married than solo parents. At the same time, solo parents have fewer children on average than cohabiting parents and are far more likely to be living with one of their parents (23% vs. 4%).
......... As the number of parents who are unmarried has grown, so has the number of children living with an eligible parent. In 1968, 13% of children – 9 million in all – were living in this type of arrangement, and by 2017, that share had increased to about one-third (32%) of U.S. children, or 24 million. However, the share of children who will ever experience life with an unmarried parent is likely considerably higher, given how fluid U.S. families have become. One estimate suggests that by the time they turn 9, more than 20% of U.S. children born to a married couple and over 50% of those born to a cohabiting couple will have experienced the breakup of their parents, for instance. The declining stability of families is linked both to increases in cohabiting relationships, which tend to be less long-lasting than marriages, as well as long-term increases in divorce. Indeed, half of the solo parents in 2017 (52%) had been married at one time, and the same is true for about one-third of cohabiting parents (35%).