Data shown here are provisional and include only events occurring within the United States (50 states and the District of Columbia). Provisional birth, death, and infant death data in this report are based on a combination of counts of events provided by each reporting area and registered vital events processed into National Center for Health […]
A bibliography of resources on unwed parents and parenting.
The period following the Second World War marked an era of high marriage rates. This era between the 1950s and early 1960s was marked by improved economic conditions, high fertility, and a social climate which encouraged an earlier onset of adult transitions. Since the 1960s, marriage rates have declined while divorce rates have increased. The […]
The percent of non-marital births in the United States has steadily increased over the past few decades, from an estimated 4.5% in 1955 to 35.6% in 2004. Several factors account for such trends. Over the past decades, an increasing proportion of women has postponed marriage, while increased numbers of unmarried couples cohabit. The rates of […]
The percentage of children under the age of 18 who live with two parents decreased steadily for several decades (from approximately 85% in 1970 to approximately 68% by the mid-1990s1). Beginning in the mid-1990s, this decrease leveled off and the proportion of U.S. children who live with two married parents has since remained at approximately […]
The Building Strong Families (BSF) project is a large-scale program demonstration and rigorous evaluation to learn whether well-designed interventions can help interested romantically involved unmarried parents build stronger relationships and fulfill their aspirations for a healthy marriage if they choose to wed. The central question of the evaluation is whether interventions can succeed in helping […]
This research brief describes rates of health care coverage for married- and single-parent families with children under age 18, a key target population of both marriage and health care coverage initiatives. Drawing on nationally representative data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the brief reports differences in rates of health care coverage by marital status […]
In an effort to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among welfare recipients, some states have imposed family caps on welfare benefits. One factor that determines the amount of cash benefits a family receives is the family’s size-larger families receive more benefits. In states with a family cap policy, however, no additional cash benefits are […]
Research has consistently shown that family structure can facilitate or limit the ways in which parents are able to positively influence the future outcomes of their children. What is less understood is in what domains family structure matters and the magnitude of its effects over time. This paper presents existing evidence on the association between […]
This paper examines the dynamics of marriage and family patterns and their relationship to living standards of a recent cohort of mothers. It is not obvious that married mothers should perform economically better than mothers in cohabitingrelationships or single mothers living with at least one other adult. But marriage is likely to raise living standards […]