Single dads’ numbers grow
Researcher says the number of unmarried U.S. men raising children is ‘bigger than people realize.’
Men make up nearly a fourth of one-parent U.S. families.
The number of single-father households has risen ninefold in the last half-century, swelling to more than 2.6 million nationwide, the Pew Research Center said in a report released this week.
As of two years ago, single dads led 8% of U.S. households with children, compared with 1% in 1960, the Pew analysis of Census Bureau data found. Single mothers remain much more common than single fathers, but fathers made up nearly one-quarter of single parents.
“It’s bigger than people realize,” said Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
Pew attributed the increase to many of the same things that ramped up single motherhood, including more children born outside of marriage and higher divorce rates since the 1960s. Other experts have suggested that divorced and never-married fathers now have more chances to get custody of their children at least some of the time — and have more interest in doing so.
“For a long time, men saw parenthood as a package deal,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families. “If they didn’t have a wife to help them, they tended to not be interested or not feel capable of dealing with the kids.”
Today, “we’ve seen a real decline in the number of dads who walk away from their kids” after divorce, Coontz said. Some men have also asserted their rights as parents outside of marriage, she added.
Single fathers tend to be younger, poorer and less educated than married ones, the Pew report showed. They fare better financially than single mothers, however, even though they are less likely than single mothers to have gone to college.
Being single does not necessarily mean being alone. Among single fathers, 41% were living with an unmarried partner, Pew found — a slight increase since 1990, when the question was first asked.
The rising numbers of single dads are another sign that ideas about fatherhood are shifting, something that has repeatedly popped up in family research. Both single and married fathers are spending more time with their children than in the past, Pew has previously found, although they still spend much less time on average than mothers do.
At the same time, more mothers are breadwinners than in decades past, challenging the assumption that fathers are chiefly providers rather than caregivers.
Another Pew survey found that Americans put more importance on fathers providing values or emotional support than on earning income for their families, ranking those roles in roughly the same order as they do the roles of mothers.
Despite the increase in single fatherhood, dads often find that support for parents is still geared toward mothers, with fewer fathers featured in parenting magazines or on posters and brochures for parenting resources, said Vincent DiCaro, a spokesman for the nonprofit National Fatherhood Initiative.
Chris Dorsey, a Michigan theology professor raising an adopted daughter, said he often faced questions: Is it hard to be a single dad? Why isn’t he married?
They seem to think that “as a single father, you can’t possibly know what you’re supposed to be doing,” Dorsey said. Over time, though, “it has changed a little bit. People are more enlightened.”