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    Breadwinner Moms

    A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The share was just 11% in 1960.

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    No Reversal in Decline of Marriage

    The number of Americans who recently wed has been declining for years, and 2011 was no exception, according to estimates from the American Community Survey. An estimated 4.2 million Americans were newlyweds in 2011, about the same as in 2010 and sharply lower than in 2008.

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    Generations Differ on the Rise of Unmarried Parents

    Just over half (52%) of Millennials say that the increase in people having children without getting married has been a change for the worse. Older generations hold a significantly more negative view of this trend.

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    Cohabiting Couples and Their Money

    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.

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    How Accurate Are Counts of Same-Sex Couples?

    This posting discusses the challenges for the Census Bureau in counting same-sex couples, married and unmarried. The accuracy of data depends on responses in Census Bureau questionnaires and bureau procedures to collect and edit responses, and the posting describes both.

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    Census Data on Unmarried Partners

    This All Things Census posting announces a new Pew Research Center report using census data to explore the economics of cohabitation, which uses census data to compare the financial well-being of adults who are married, living with an unmarried opposite-sex partner, or not living with such a partner or spouse. The Census Bureau is releasing detailed local-level counts of unmarried couples over the summer.

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    Living Together: The Economics of Cohabitation

    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.

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    Census 2010 News Stories: The Changing Family

    The ongoing release of so-called SF1 data from the 2010 Census–detailed local-level tabulations about age, families, housing and other topics–has produced a wave of news stories about the changing family. Stories from newspapers in California and Pennsylvania focus especially on same-sex couples.

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