After increasing steadily for several decades, the share of children living in single-mother families leveled off in the mid-1990s at 25% and actually fell slightly between 1999 and 2001.
Yet, researchers, policymakers and members of the media have paid very little attention to the changing American family. This lack of attention is surprising given the extensive discussions among policymakers about the importance of marriage and the need for government intervention to create more stable two-parent families.
This paper attempts to illuminate what happened to family structure during the past decade by taking a closer look at changes among several different subgroups defined by demographic, economic and geographic characteristics.
Researchers learned that:
If the share of kids living in single-mother families increased like it did between 1990 and 1996, 27% of children would have fit this statistic nationwide by 2001. Instead, only 23% of children were in single-mother families in 2001. While the statistic’s decline is relatively small, the break in this long-term trajectory is significant. The yearly increases in single-mother families that defined the U.S. landscape for more than 40 years prior to the mid-1990s have ended.
