Parenthood

There’s no tougher job than being a parent, or so the saying goes. This sentiment seems to be confirmed by a new Pew Research Center analysis of government time use data. Parents find caring for their children to be much more exhausting than the work they do for pay. At the same time, parents find much more meaning in the time they spend with their children than in the time they spend at work.

More dads than ever before—roughly 550,000 in the past decade and counting—are staying home full-time with their children.

In 2011, 7.7 million children in the U.S.–one-in-ten—were living with a grandparent, and approximately 3 million of these children were also being cared for primarily by that grandparent.1 Both of these numbers rose rapidly after the onset of the recession in 2007 and have stabilized since 2009, when the recession officially ended, according to a […]

This posting links to a September 2013 Pew Research Center report on children living with, and being cared for, by their grandparents.

This posting is an excerpt from a FactTank article about unmarried fatherhood, and which fathers are more likely to acknowledge paternity when asked. Unmarried fathers of sons are slightly more likely to acknowledge paternity than fathers of daughters.

This links to a FactTank posting about a new Statistics Canada report showing that birth rates for the first time are higher for women in their late 30s than in their early 20s. Most births in Canada are to women ages 30 and older; by contrast, in the U.S., 40% are.

A record 8% of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over 1% in 1960, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Decennial Census and American Community Survey data. The number of single father households has increased about ninefold since 1960, from less than […]

Currently, 35% of Americans say the increase in gay and lesbian couples raising children is a bad thing, a decline from recent years.

Last week, Sesame Street added a new character -- Alex, a child whose father is in prison. The new feature was meant to deal with the reality of a sharp increase in the number of incarcerated adults in the U.S.