America’s single-parent households and missing fathers America leads the world in single-parent household rates, with the large majority of those households missing a father.

N-IUSSP ^ | January 13, 2025 | Joseph Chamie

[daniel1212]

According to a global survey of 130 countries conducted in 2019 (Kramer 2019), the US had the highest rate of children living in single-parent households of any nation in the world, at about 23%, or more than three times the worldwide level of 7% (Figure 1).

The prevalence of these cases was markedly lower in neighboring Canada and Mexico (15% and 7%, respectively), and much lower in developing countries, all below 5%.

For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside marriage (Livingston 2018). The percentage of US children living in single-parent households nearly tripled between 1960 and 2023, increasing from 9% to 25% (US Census Bureau 2023). In the same period, the share of households with fathers missing more than doubled, increasing from 11% to 25% (Figure 2).

The proportions of children living in a father-absent household varies considerably among America’s three major social groups: in 2023, the shares were 20%, 29% and 50% among Whites Hispanics and Blacks, respectively, and in all three groups they are substantially higher than 50 years before (Figure 3).

Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background (McLanahan and Sandefur 1996). For instance, they are nearly four times more likely to live in poverty (Brewer 2023), have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading and mathematics, and are more likely to drop out of school.

[Pelham]

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs blew up the black family. I was 14 or 15 when those programs were created and I remember it all very well.

As liberal, feel good social engineering always does, it created a ‘Road To Hell Paved With Good Intentions’ disaster. One that we still live with, thanks to GOP cowardice about undoing any program connected to “civil rights”.

What it did, is create a financial incentive for unmarried women to have children and continue to remain unmarried. The government welfare check becomes their “husband”, which they lose if they do get married. And the more children, the bigger the check.

Very popular among those who could do basic arithmetic. It went off like a bomb in urban black America, where the marriage rate was lower than white America but not remotely as low as it became in response to the welfare state rewarding that behavior.