Most Children Live With Parents

Story

Most Children Live With Parents

Special Report - July 27, 2010
The majority of American children (67 percent) live with their married parents, according to an annual federal report on child wellbeing released this month. The report, “America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indictors of Wellbeing, 2010,” has been compiled annually since 1997 by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, which is described as a “working group of 22 federal agencies” that gather the latest statistics on key national indicators of child and youth wellbeing, including the family and social characteristics of America’s children. According to the latest report, 70 percent of America’s 74.5 million children (ages 0 to 17) lived with two parents in 2009 (married or unmarried), 26 percent lived with one parent, and four percent lived with neither parent in 2009. Of the children living with two parents, the overwhelming majority—or 88 percent—lived with their married biological or adoptive parents. Among the children living in single parent families, 79 percent lived with their mothers. About 50 percent of children living with neither parent lived with their grandparents.

Also on a positive note, the federal report shows that after increasing slightly between 2005 and 2007, births to teenagers for most race and ethnicity groups declined between 2007 and 2008. The adolescent birth rate (births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 17) dropped from 22.2 in 2007 to 21.7 in 2008. “This drop occurred after two years of increases, and we will be interested to see if this is the beginning of a new trend,” said Edward Sondik, Ph.D., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, in a press release.