Only 18% Of American Households Are Families With Married Parents

Children need a mother and a father — a context that more American youth than ever are lacking.

Among the 130 million households in the United States, only 17.8% feature married parents with children — down from over 40% in 1970, according to the Census Bureau.

The Daily Mail summarized:

There are currently just 23.1 million American homes with those ‘nuclear families,’ which is the fewest since 1959. The reasons given for the drop include the pandemic delaying marriage and a continued decline in birth rate.

The average age of a woman at her first marriage is now 28.6 years. In the 1950s and 60s, women typically married at 20.4 years old. The average age for men to marry for the first time in 2021 was 30.4 years old. America’s fertility rate dropped to 55.4 births per 1,000 in the second quarter of 2021, down from 58.5 in the same period of 2019.

Americans are also living alone at a higher rate than they used to. The percentage of adults in the US living with a spouse was 50 percent, down from 52 percent 10 years ago. Over 37 million adults lived alone in early 2021, up from 33 million in 2011. As far back as 1960, 87 percent of adults lived with a spouse.

Analysts and commentators have pointed toward declining rates of religiosity, higher living expenses, the permutation of LGBTQ ideology, and even climate alarmism to explain the erosion of the American family. Indeed, the United States economy is already feeling pressure from the nation’s demographic crisis — for example, through the looming insolvency of Social Security and other programs. – READ MORE