Monday, February 25, 2008
58% of American Kids Live with Their Married Parents
The latest good news from the Census Bureau finds that a solid majority of kids live with their married parents. Another couple percent live with their unmarried parents -- and a significant hunk of those parents will marry. Being raised by their own married parents is the best situation for kids. That doesn't mean that the other options are terrible, or that all married parents are great. But most kids get the best option. And since most parents want to stay married and raise their kids together, most parents get the best option, too.
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9 comments:
Gruntled, please clarify--does the Census info you're looking at specify biological married parents, or just that there are two parents in the home who are married... which conceivably would include other structures (step parents, adoptive parents) that aren't as predictive of better child well-being. I ask because I'm not aware of the Census information giving us that, and yet I've heard, from time to time, of stats being cited for children in their own biological parents' home, yet without citation.
And so the focus is on the "good news" that 58% of kids live with their married parents rather than on the news that 42% don't. Ahhhhg! Lord have mercy.
sturt: Yes, biological married parents.
Gruntled: Forgive the ask for clarification, but I'd thought that the biological questions had been removed from the Census long ago, though they may appear on the American Community instrument. And, the link you attempted to supply was/is broken, so that's why I asked... and still interested to look at those numbers for myself to see what else I can find in them.
I am sorry the link doesn't work. That is the address for the .pdf, but it doesn't seem to work as a web address. If you go to the Census Bureau's "New on Site" page
http://www.census.gov/newonsite/
and look at February 20, the download link is there.
Thanks, G. I'll go look again.
It hardly matters, but the article reveals that 70% of children live with married parents, and 87% of those children live with their biological married parents... 60.9%, actually, instead of 58%, fwiw. Thanks for digging this up, though. It's a stat I'd looked for a couple of years ago and apparently gave up too easily.
The gap between 60.8 and 58.3 is filled by kids who live with both of their biological parents who are not married to one another.
And all this time we're being told that the intact, married, biological family is "largely a myth".
Wishful thinking on the part of anti-family nihilists, err, i mean, activists?
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