Statistics

Half the nations’ children are now growing up in households quite different from the “Leave It to Beaver” model, according to several 1994 reports from the Census Bureau. While 51 percent of kids still live with both biological parents, the other 32 million are being raised with single parents, stepparents, half siblings, or grandparents seated across the dinner table. That’s a big shift from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60, when nearly 70 percent of kids had traditional families. More kids than ever—27 percent—are being raised by a lone parent, twice as many as in 1970. And for the first time in history, those children are almost as likely to be living with a never-married parent as with a divorced one. Fifty-four percent of all kids under 6 now live in families in which the sole parent or both parents work.

U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1994, pp. 111