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.
Money-sharing by cohabiting couples is the topic of this article, which focuses on the Census Bureau’s new alternative measure of poverty. Cohabiting couples are much less likely to be considered poor under the alternative measure than the official measure of poverty’; the major reason is that the alternative measure assumes such couples share expenses, while the official measure assumes they are separate economic units.
Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent lifestyle in the United States. The share of 30- to 44-year-olds living as unmarried couples has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Adults with lower levels of education—without college degrees—are twice as likely to cohabit as those with college degrees.
The Census Bureau today released its first estimates of the number of same-sex married couples in the U.S., as well as alternatives counts to the published data for same-sex unmarried couples that try to account for data-processing issues.
A report from the center’s Social & Demographic Trends project, “The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families,” finds that nearly four-in-ten Americans (39%) say that marriage is becoming obsolete.
More than 2,000 demographers, sociologists and others converged on Washington, D.C., last week for the Population Association of America’s annual meeting.