Motherhood & Fatherhood

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.

Today's mothers of newborns are more likely than their counterparts two decades earlier to be ages 35 and older, to have some college education, to be unmarried or to be nonwhite -- but not all at once.

Today's mothers of newborns are older and better educated than their counterparts in 1990, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau. They are less likely to be white and less likely to be married.

Women now make up almost half of the U.S. labor force, up from 38% in 1970. The public approves of this trend, but the change has come with a cost for many women -- particularly working mothers of young children, who feel the tug of family responsibility much more acutely than do working fathers.

Fully 72% of married moms who work say dads are now doing as good a job or better than their counterparts did a generation ago.

Who makes better candidates — moms or dads? And more broadly, what impact do both the gender and parenting status of candidates have on their chances to win an election?

In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers. This trend holds for both those who have such jobs and those who don't.

A broad consensus holds that it is harder to be a father now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. But seven-in-ten adults say it's harder to be a mom today than it was in the past, and only 11% see it as easier.

There is broad agreement among the public that it is harder to be a parent today - especially a mother - than it was in the 1970s or 1980s.