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.
Changes in marriage and childbearing have reshaped the American family. These shifts are playing out somewhat differently across urban, suburban and rural counties.
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.
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.
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.
For women, postgraduate education and motherhood are increasingly going hand-in-hand. Not only are highly-educated women more likely to have kids, they are also having bigger families than in the past.
The latest figures show that 66% of mothers who gave birth to their first child between 2006 and 2008 worked during pregnancy, up from 44% in the early 1960s.
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 number of fathers who do not work outside the home has nearly doubled since 1989, rising markedly in recent years. And more of these “stay-at-home” dads say they’re home primarily to care for family.
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