Household and Family Structure

About one-in-seven U.S. adults provide unpaid care of some kind to another adult. Caregivers rate about half of their caregiving experiences as meaningful.

More than 11 million U.S. parents – or 18% – were not working outside the home in 2016. The stay-at-home share of U.S. parents in 2016 was almost identical to what it was in 1989, but there has been a modest increase among fathers.

Our new calculator allows you to see which group you fit in, first compared with all American adults, and then compared with other adults similar to you in education, age, race or ethnicity, and marital status.

Roughly four-in-ten U.S. adults think families of three or more children are ideal. Yet it’s still much more common for American women at the end of their childbearing years to have had one or two kids than three or more.

Changes in marriage and childbearing have reshaped the American family. These shifts are playing out somewhat differently across urban, suburban and rural counties.

Despite widening gaps in politics and demographics, Americans across community types have a lot in common in key facets of their lives.

The share of U.S. children living with an unmarried parent has more than doubled since 1968, jumping from 13% to 32% in 2017.

The number and share of Americans living in multigenerational family households have continued to rise. In 2016, a record 64 million people, or 20% of the U.S. population, lived with multiple generations under one roof.

In 2017, nearly 79 million adults (31.9% of the adult population) lived in a shared household. In 1995, 55 million adults (28.8%) lived in a shared household.

U.S. fathers today are spending more time caring for their children than they did a half-century ago. Moms, by comparison, still do more of the child care and are more likely than dads to say they are satisfied with the amount of time they spend with their kids.