Single Fathers: Spending More Time With Children?

(AmeriStat, November 2001) Most single-parent households with children are headed by women. Over the past 10 years, however, the proportion of single-parent families headed by men has increased from 18 percent to 23 percent. In 2000, there were more than 2 million families with children headed by men. The rising proportion of male-headed families signals more widespread involvement by divorced, separated, and never-married fathers in their children’s lives. However, the precise character of the change is ambiguous: The census data do not indicate whether fathers are spending more time with their children, or are simply more likely to have or share custody.

One of the few analyses of child custody trends, a study of divorce cases in Wisconsin between 1986 and 1994, found little change in the percentage of cases in which fathers were awarded sole custody of children.

Single-Parent Family Types, 1990 and 2000

	1990		2000
	Number	Percent	Number	Percent
Single-parent families	7,382,949	100.0	9,752,863	100.0
Female-headed families	6,028,409	81.7	7,561,874	77.5
Male-headed families	1,354,540	18.3	2,190,989	22.5

Source: United States Census Bureau, Census 2000.

Citations

PRB analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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