WASHINGTON—U.S. Census Bureau data shows that, while slightly more than 60 percent of American children live with their biological or adoptive parents, the downward trend has flattened out and may be heading in a positive direction, according to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS).
“But while the present situation leaves many children bereft of the care, attention, and material benefits of a married household, it’s actually not as bad as it has been in the past,” Stone writes, noting that “since 2014, the share of children living with two married parents has risen ever-so-slightly, from 61.8 percent to 62.3 percent in 2018.”
Stone adds that early data for the past year “suggest that 2019 will show further improvement.”
Even so, the odds that a newborn child in the U.S. will grow up in an intact two-parent family remain heavily dependent upon ethnicity, according to Stone.
“Asian kids are by far the most likely to grow up with two married parents: From 2001 to 2018, a steady 80-85% of Asian children grew up in intact households. Whites come in second, while Hispanics and non-Hispanic other, and multi-racial kids are essentially tied for third,” Stone reports.
“At the other end of the spectrum, only about 40% of Native American kids grow up in married, two-parent households, and only about 30% of black kids” do so.
The precipitous decline in the percentage of intact two-parent families in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to Stone. From 1850 through 1960, between 80 and 90 percent of all U.S. children lived in such families. The earliest U.S. population count for which estimates can be derived on the question was 1850.
But from 1960 to 2014, the percentage plummeted to 62 percent from 87 percent. The biggest declines overall during those years were among black and Native American families.
Intact two-parent families reached a high point in the black community in the early 1920s, but then began a steady decline that reached 60 percent in the mid-1960s and dipped below 50 percent for the first time in 1975. The figure is now at 30 percent, where it has remained in recent years.
Stone acknowledges that there is a continuing debate about the causes of the long decline in intact two-parent black families, saying “slavery systematically dismantled black families for centuries, and black kids make up the majority of these children at least until the 1970s.”
The sharpest recent declines have been seen in the Hispanic and Native American communities, where, Stone points out, “the odds of growing up in an intact family have fallen sharply.”
As a result, there are “considerable and growing challenges for Hispanic and Native American kids and families [as] family conditions have deteriorated markedly over the last two decades” for both groups.
