Here’s how the American family has changed in the past 50 years
There is no such thing as a typical family today.
That wasn’t always true. Fifty years ago, in 1960, 73 percent of children lived in a household with two parents who were both in their first marriage.
Today, however, families come in many forms. Just 46 percent of children today live in the type of family household that was typical in the 1970s. The rest live in single-parent housholds, or with parents who are living together but not married. Some live with two parents who have previously been married and bring with them children from those prior relationships.
We took a look at Census statistics from 1960 to the present, along with various articles and studies, including a 2015 Pew Research Center report, to put together this look at how the American family has changed over the past 50 years.
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Brides and grooms are older
People are waiting longer today to marry.
Today, the median age for men to marry for the first time is 29; for women, it’s 27. On average, people are waiting about six years longer to marry than they did in 1967.
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Young adults stay longer with mom and dad
There are now more young adults — ages 18 to 34 — living with their parents than in any other arrangement.
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And fewer live with spouses
And young adults live in a greater variety of arrangements.
Whereas 39 percent of young adults lived with a spouse in 1967, today that number is just 8 percent.
The number of 18- to 24-year-olds living with an unmarried partner is about 15 times greater than in the 1970s. In fact, cohabitation is so widespread that women now have about a 75 percent chance, by age 30, of living with a partner before marriage.
And the number living alone or in some other arrangement is significantly higher than it was 50 years ago.
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Women are delaying parenthood
Mothers also are waiting longer to have children. In 1960, women ages 15 to 24 accounted for 40 percent of mothers with infants. Today, they account for 20 percent.
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But they aren’t waiting for marriage
Among women in their early 20s, the proportion who ever gave birth fell from 31 percent to 25 percent between 1976 and 2014.
The decline in marriage was even steeper, falling from 57 percent to just 17 percent among women aged 20 to 24 years old over the same period
As a result, parenthood now precedes marriage for many women. Nearly 40 percent of all births in the United States are to unmarried women.
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In fact, there has been a substantial increase over the past 20 years in the percentage of never-married women who become mothers, according to an analysis by Pew Research Inc.
Pew found that the share of women at the end of their childbearing years who never married rose from 9 percent in 1994 to 15 percent in 2014. And 55 percent of these never-married woman have had a child.
This compares with 20 years earlier, when just 31 percent of never-married women in their early 40s were mothers.
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Most still get to the altar eventually
Young people are delaying marriage, but most still eventually tie the knot. In the 1970s, 8 in 10 people married by the time they turned 30. Today, not until the age of 45 have 8 in 10 people married.
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Children’s living arrangements are more varied
In 1960, 87 percent of children lived in a household with two married parents. Today, that number is 62 percent.
Today 26 percent of children live with one parent, 15 percent live with parents in a remarriage and 7 percent live with unmarried parents.
In 1960, only 11 percent of children in the U.S. lived apart from their fathers. By 2010, that share had risen to 27 percent. Children who live apart from their mothers increased from 4 to 8 percent in that time.
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Families are fluid
Not only do families come in many different forms, but families today are very fluid, and a child is likely to experience more than one type of household.
Estimates suggest, for example, that about 39 percent of children will have a mother in a cohabiting relationship by the time they turn 12. But they time they turn 16 years old, 46 percent will have experience with their mother cohabiting.
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Families are getting smaller
The share of households with five or more people decreased by half, from 21 percent to 10 percent, between 1970 and 2012. By contrast, the share of households with only one or two people increased from 46 percent to 61 percent.
In the mid-1970s, 40 percent of mothers who had reached the end of their childbearing years had given birth to four or more children. Now, a similar share (41%) of mothers at the end of their childbearing years has had two children, and just 14 percent have had four or more children.
At the same time, the share of mothers ages 40 to 44 who have had only one child has doubled, from 11 percent in 1976 to 22 percent today.
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An historic rise in people living alone
The proportion of one-person households increased from 13 to 27 percent since 1960, accounting for most of the growth in non-family households.
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Moms move into the workforce
While in 1960 just 18 percent of mothers with infants at home had any college experience, today that share stands at 67 percent.
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In 1975 fewer than half of mothers with children younger than 18 were in the labor force. Today, 70 percent of these mothers are working.
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In fact, women are frequently the main breadwinners — in 40 percent of families with children under 18, mothers earn the majority of the family income. That’s up from 11 percent in 1960.
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More diversity
White householders make up 79 percent of all households in the United States, down from 89 percent in 1970. Black and Hispanic householders each make up 13 percent of households, while Asian householders comprise 5 percent. (Hispanics may be any race; percentages do not add to 100.)
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Multi-racial households increase
Intermarriage among people of different races is increasingly common. In 1980, just 7 percent of all marriages were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity. In 2010, that share had doubled to 15 percent of all new marriages.
Since 2000, the multiracial population of American children has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, between 2000 and 2010, according to a New York Times article. That makes it the fastest growing youth group in the country.
The number of all people who identified themselves as both white and black soared by 134 percent between 2000 and 2010, to 1.8 million people
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More older couples
More older adults live with their spouse today than in 1967. Among those age 75 or older, 67 percent of men and 33 percent of women lived with a spouse in 2016, up from 59 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in 1967.
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