pewsocialtrends.org | Family and Relationships

The Reversal of the College Marriage Gap

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 EST

In a reversal of long-standing marital patterns, college-educated young adults are more likely than young adults lacking a bachelor�s degree to have married by the age of 30. Marriage rates among adults in their twenties have declined sharply since 1990 both for the college educated and those without a college degree, but the decline has been much steeper for young adults without a college education. By their late 30s, more than four-fifths of college-educated adults were currently or had ever married compared with only three-quarters of adults lacking a college diploma.

Since the Start of the Great Recession, More Children Raised by Grandparents

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EST

One child in ten in the United States lives with a grandparent, a share that increased slowly and steadily over the past decade before rising sharply from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession.

Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EST

Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.

The Typical Modern Mother: There Isn't One

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EST

Today�s mothers of newborns are more likely than their counterparts two decades earlier to be ages 35 and older, to have some college education, to be unmarried or to be nonwhite -- but not all at once.

Marrying Out

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EST

A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the U.S in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new census data. Of all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married outside their race/ethnicity. Patterns also varied by region (intermarriage is most common in the West) and by gender.

The New Demography of American Motherhood

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 EST

Today's mothers of newborns are older and better educated than their counterparts in 1990, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau. They are less likely to be white and less likely to be married.

U.S. Birth Rate Decline Linked to Recession

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 EST

There is a strong association between the magnitude of fertility change in 2008 across states and key economic indicators including changes in per capita income, housing prices and share of the working-age population that is employed across states.

The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST

The multi-generational American family household is staging a comeback � driven in part by the job losses and home foreclosures of recent years, but more so by demographic changes that have been gathering steam for decades. As of 2008, a record 49 million Americans, or 16.1% of the total U.S. population, lived in such a household, up from 28 million, or 12.l% in 1980. Such households had been more common a century ago, but began to fall out of favor after World War II. Now they are coming back.

Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. Recently, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men.

Home for the Holidays... and Every Other Day

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The journey home for Thanksgiving won't be quite so far this year for many young adults. Instead of traveling across country or across town, many grown sons and daughters will be coming to dinner from their old bedroom down the hall, which now doubles as their recession-era refuge.