Is the Family Structure Revolution Over?

Drum roll, please: After more than three decades of relentless advance, the family structure revolution in the U.S. may be over. A series of recent independent reports, based largely on data from the 2000 Census, all suggest that the trend of family fragmentation that many analysts had assumed to be unstoppable - yearly increases in unwed childbearing and divorce, resulting in ever greater proportions of children living in one-parent homes - suddenly stopped in its tracks in about 1995.

Here are the data. The proportion of all U.S. families with children under age 18 that are headed by married couples reached an all-time low in the mid 1990s - about 72.9 percent in 1996 and 72.4 percent in 1997 - but since then has stabilized. The figure for 2000 is 73 percent. Similarly, the proportion of all U.S. children living in two-parent homes reached an all-time low in the mid 1990s, but since then has stabilized. In fact, the proportion of children in two-parent homes increased from 68 percent in 1999 to 69.1 percent in 2000.

Looking only at white, non-Hispanic children, a study by Allan Dupree and Wendell Primus finds that the proportion of these children living with two married parents stopped its downward descent during the late 1990s, and even increased slightly from 1999 to 2000, rising from 77.3 to 78.2 percent. Another study from the Urban Institute finds that, among all U.S. children, the proportion living with their two biological or adoptive parents increased by 1.2 percent from 1997 to 1999, while during the same period the proportion living in stepfamilies (or blended families) decreased by 0.1 percentage points and the proportion living in single-parent homes decreased by two percentage points. (The study finds that in 1999 about 64 percent of all U.S. children lived with their two biological or adoptive parents, while about 25 percent lived with one parent and about eight percent lived in a step or blended family.) Among low-income children, the decline in the proportion living in single-parent homes was even more pronounced, dropping from 44 percent in 1997 to 41 percent in 1999.

Here is perhaps the most dramatic statistic. From 1995 to 2000, the proportion of African American children living in two-parent, married-couple homes rose from 34.8 to 38.9 percent, a significant increase in just five years, representing the clear cessation and even reversal of the long-term shift toward Black family fragmentation.

These changes are not large or definitive. But they are certainly suggestive. And if they continue, they will change the lives of millions of U.S. children and families for the better. Moreover, the potential implications for our national debate are enormous. Instead of saying endlessly that we need to reverse the trend of fragmentation, what if we will soon be able to say, for the first time in decades, that our national priority is to sustain the current trend of reintegration?

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, “Families, by Presence of Own Children Under 18: 1950 to Present,” Internet Table FM-1 (Internet Release date: June 29, 2001); and “Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years Old: 1960 to Present,” Internet Table CH-1 (Internet Release date: June 29, 2001). Allen Dupree and Wendell Primus, Declining Share of Children Lived With Single Mothers in the Late 1990s (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 15, 2001). Sharon Vandivere, Kristen Anderson Moore, and Martha Zaslow, Children’s Family Environments: Findings from the National Survey of America’s Families (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2001).

First published Fall 2001.