Single-Parent Households

According to the U.S. Population Resource Center, during the past 50 years, the structure of the American family has been undergoing enormous change; there has been a dramatic increase in divorce, nonmarital births, and single parenthood; and these increases cut across class, race, and religion. Today, in the United States, and increasingly around the world, being raised by a single parent is not uncommon. In 2000, for the first time, less than one quarter of U.S. households (23.5 percent) were made up of nuclear families, a married man and woman and their children, down from 45 percent of households in 1960. This entry discusses issues relating to single-parent households.

Rose Kreider and Jason Fields argue in their 2005 report on the living arrangements of children that if today's family and household structures are compared with family and household structures since the late 19th century, the data from 1880 to 1970 at 30-year intervals show that the distribution of children's living arrangements changed little. During this entire period, the proportion of children who lived with only their mothers increased merely from 8 percent to 11 percent, and between 83 percent and 85 percent of children lived with two parents. Major shifts in living arrangements occurred between 1970 and 1990, however, when the proportion of children living only with their mothers doubled from 11 percent to 22 percent. Since 1990, the changes in children's living arrangements have leveled off.

Divorce and nonmarital births now account for the majority of single-parent households. Currently, nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, and each year more than one million children see their parents separate or divorce. Although the divorce rate leveled off during the 1990s, divorce among couples with children continues to increase as roughly 60 percent of remarriages are projected to end in divorce. Today, one in three children is born to unmarried parents.

[Page 795]Single-mother families increased from 3 million in 1970 to 10 million in 2003, and the number of single-father families grew from less than half a million to 2 million. In 1960, only 9 percent of children under age 18 lived in single-parent homes; in 2003, the percentage rose to 26 percent. According to the 2003 U.S. Census, there are currently 12 million one-parent families.

Roughly half of all children born today in the United States are expected to live apart from a parent before they reach age 18, and this is not only because of divorce and nonmarital births, but also because of death, separation, imprisonment, abandonment, single-parent adoption, donor insemination, and egg donor/ surrogate motherhood. For example, there has been a steep increase in the number of parents imprisoned, as nearly 1.5 million children—roughly 2 percent of all children in the United States—have a parent in prison. More than 90 percent of prisoners in the United States are men, and according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, most prisoners (55 percent) have minor children whose average age is 8.