8 facts about love and marriage in America
The landscape of relationships in America has shifted dramatically in recent decades. Read eight facts about love and marriage in the country.
Gretchen Livingston is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. She is an expert on fertility and family demographics. In addition, she studies immigrant adaptation and technology use among Latinos. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she was a visiting research fellow at the Princeton University Office of Population Research. She earned her doctorate in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Since joining Pew Research Center, she has written on stay-at-home mothers, the relationship of fertility and the recession, fatherhood, grandparent caregivers, childlessness, and fertility and education. Livingston has discussed her work with numerous print and broadcast outlets.
Publications
Filtering by:
Reset
-
-
More than one-in-ten U.S. parents are also caring for an adult
Multigenerational caregivers in the U.S., who account for 12% of parents, provide more than two and a half hours of unpaid care a day.
-
Adult caregiving often seen as very meaningful by those who do it
About one-in-seven U.S. adults provide unpaid care of some kind to another adult. Caregivers rate about half of their caregiving experiences as meaningful.
-
A third of U.S. adults say they have used fertility treatments or know someone who has
Forty years after the birth of the first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization, 33% of Americans say they or someone they know has undergone fertility treatment.
-
U.S. women are postponing motherhood, but not as much as those in most other developed nations
American women are waiting longer to have children than in the past, but they are still starting their families sooner than women in many other developed nations.
-
Family life is changing in different ways across urban, suburban and rural communities in the U.S.
Changes in marriage and childbearing have reshaped the American family. These shifts are playing out somewhat differently across urban, suburban and rural counties.
-
More than a million Millennials are becoming moms each year
In all, more than 17 million Millennial women in the U.S. have become mothers. In 2016, Millennial women accounted for 82% of U.S. births.
-
About one-third of U.S. children are living with an unmarried parent
The share of U.S. children living with an unmarried parent has more than doubled since 1968, jumping from 13% to 32% in 2017.
-
The Changing Profile of Unmarried Parents
One-in-four parents living with a child in the United States today are unmarried, up from 7% in 1968. A growing share of unmarried parents are cohabiting partners.
-
They’re Waiting Longer, but U.S. Women Today More Likely to Have Children Than a Decade Ago
The share of U.S. women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it had been 10 years earlier.
REFINE YOUR SELECTION
Years
Formats
Topics
Regions & Countries
© 2025 Pew Research Center