Contemporary Fathers as Both More and Less Involved

The thing about single fathers is… there aren’t that many of them.  But, there are a lot more than there used to be.  In 1960, about 1% of households with children were headed by single fathers.  In 2011, this proportion jumped to 8% (here).  While it’s still a minority of households, an 800% increase in 50 years is nothing to shake a stick at.  Single parent households also increased significantly during this period.  Single mother households jumped from just under 1 in 10 households with children to about 1 in 4.  And while this is a much larger share of households with children, the percentage increase is less extreme.

SIDE NOTE: If you’re anything like me, you might wonder, “Who’s included in the ‘single father’ category?”  It’s an important question.  About half of all of the single fathers here are those that you might think of when you read the term–they’re either divorced, separated, or widowed and are not living with another partner.  This group accounts for about 52% of “single fathers” today (which accounts for about 4% of households with children in the U.S. today).  A small group of “single fathers” (7%) are married but living away from their spouse.  And about 41% of the “single fathers” reported here aren’t actually single–they’re living with a non-marital partner.  This last statistic includes same-sex couples living together as well.

None of that means that single dads aren’t on the rise.  It’s just qualifying what we mean by “single dads,” which helps us decide what kind of rise we’re actually talking about.  Single fathers are a growing phenomenon – regardless of how we measure the population.  But, here’s a fact less often mentioned alongside the growing trend of single fatherhood: the proportion of children living apart from fathers made a big jump over the same time period, too.  In 1960, about 11% of children lived apart from fathers; by 2011, 27% of children did.  So, while there are dramatically more single fathers today than a half century ago, dads are also more likely to not live with their kids at all today.  It’s what the Pew Research Center called “A Tale of Two Fathers.”  Simply put, dads are dramatically more likely to be the exclusive parent, but they’re also much more likely to be absent parents.  So, they’re both better and much worse than they were 50 years ago.