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.
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.
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.
In 2015, 17% of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, marking more than a fivefold increase since 1967, when the landmark Supreme Court case legalized interracial marriage.
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.
In 2013, 40% of new marriages in the U.S. included at least one partner who had been married before. Almost 42 million Americans have been married more than once, up from 22 million in 1980.
The share of mothers who do not work outside the home rose to 29% in 2012, up from a modern-era low of 23% in 1999, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides and grooms.
In the last 50 years, fathers have become much more involved in the day-to-day lives of the children they live with. During that same time period, though, the share of fathers living apart from their children has risen dramatically, to 27% in 2010.
Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.
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