Who are single moms today?

In summary, there are more single-parented headed households today than any other time in recent history. The majority of those families are headed by a single mom. In fact, 64% of millennial moms have a child outside of marriage, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.

The reasons for these quickly changing statistics include high — but declining — divorce rates, but more significantly, a drop in marriage rates overall among young people in the United States, and an overall acceptance for having children outside of a “traditional” heterosexual, first marriage.

There are 1.2 million divorces in the United States each year.

Traditional nuclear families with two married heterosexual parents are now the minority of U.S. The rise of single motherhood is the largest influence on this trend — followed by multigenerational families, blended families, adoptive and foster families, and famililes headed by same-sex parents.

A full 46% millennials and 44% GenXers say “marriage is becoming obsolete.”

This post has recent stats on single-parent headed homes and their children, but also sheds light on the nuance of the surge in single parenthood and marriage, as well as equal co-parenting.

Single moms are growing in number, in part, because women have more financial opportunities, and can more comfortably afford to have children without the full-time financial support of the children’s father. At the same time, the rise in single motherhood has severely lessened the stigma of being an unmarried mom, a fact that has been attributed to the drop in abortion rates in recent decades.

The rise and general acceptance of single motherhood across all demographics (young, African American and Hispanic moms make up the majority of this trend, but older, more affluent single-moms-by-choice is the fastest-growing segment of the single-mom population), is part of a larger trend of redefining what family and healthy family means. It was a few years ago that headlines announced that the married, heterosexual parent household with children is now the statistical minority in the United States. Today, about a quarter of married couples who live with children under age 18 are in these Leave it to Beaver families where only the father works — down 47 percent in 1970.