In 2014, just 14% of children younger than 18 lived with a stay-at-home mother and a working father who were in their first marriage. In 1960, half of children were living in this arrangement.
A larger share of young women live at home with their parents or other relatives than at any point since 1940, as more attend college and marry later in life.
In 1960, 37% of households included a married couple raising their own children. More than a half-century later, just 16% of households look like that.
In 2012, 36% of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31—the so-called Millennial generation—were living in their parents’ home, the highest share in at least four decades. The number of young adults doing so has risen by 3 million since the start of the start of the recession in 2007, an increase driven by a combination of economic, educational and cultural factors.
A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The share was just 11% in 1960.
Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides and grooms.
Money-sharing by cohabiting couples is the topic of this article, which focuses on the Census Bureau’s new alternative measure of poverty. Cohabiting couples are much less likely to be considered poor under the alternative measure than the official measure of poverty’; the major reason is that the alternative measure assumes such couples share expenses, while the official measure assumes they are separate economic units.
Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent lifestyle in the United States. The share of 30- to 44-year-olds living as unmarried couples has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Adults with lower levels of education—without college degrees—are twice as likely to cohabit as those with college degrees.
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