Marriage and Cohabitation in the U.S.
As more U.S. adults are delaying marriage – or forgoing it altogether – the share who have ever lived with an unmarried partner has been on the rise.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
As more U.S. adults are delaying marriage – or forgoing it altogether – the share who have ever lived with an unmarried partner has been on the rise.
Changes in marriage and childbearing have reshaped the American family. These shifts are playing out somewhat differently across urban, suburban and rural counties.
About one-in-seven U.S. adults provide unpaid care of some kind to another adult. Caregivers rate about half of their caregiving experiences as meaningful.
One-in-four parents living with a child in the United States today are unmarried, up from 7% in 1968. A growing share of unmarried parents are cohabiting partners.
Forty years after the birth of the first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization, 33% of Americans say they or someone they know has undergone fertility treatment.
The share of U.S. women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it had been 10 years earlier.
U.S. fathers today are spending more time caring for their children than they did a half-century ago. Moms, by comparison, still do more of the child care and are more likely than dads to say they are satisfied with the amount of time they spend with their kids.
In all, more than 17 million Millennial women in the U.S. have become mothers. In 2016, Millennial women accounted for 82% of U.S. births.
A half-century after the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in the United States, 18% of all cohabiting adults have a partner of a different race or ethnicity – similar to the share of U.S. newlyweds who have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (17%).
Long-term growth in total U.S. births has been driven by the foreign born, who accounted for 23% of all babies born in 2014.
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