Single parent
In the United States, 83% of single parents are mothers. Among this percentage of single mothers: 45% of single mothers are currently divorced or separated, 1.7% are widowed, 34% of single mothers never have been married. Although decades ago, having a child outside of marriage and/or being a single mother was not prominent. Census information from 1960 tells us that in that year, only nine percent of children lived in single parent families. Today four out of every ten children are born to an unwed mother.
Single parent
In this section we will use data from U.S. Census bureau and the National Assessment of Educational Progress to evaluate how the increase in single-parent households may have affected children's educational achievements.
The percentage of children living with single parents increased substantially in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. According to Child Trends 2013, only 9% of children lived with single parents in the 1960s—a figure that increased to 28% in 2012.
The main cause of single parent families are high rates of divorce and non-marital childbearing. According to Blankenhorn 1995, Fagan 1999, Pearlstein 2011, Popenoe 2009 and Whitehead 1997 researches, single parent family is strongly correlated with school failure and problems of delinquency, drug use, teenage pregnancies, poverty, and welfare dependency in American society. Using multilevel modeling, Pong 1997 and Pong 1998 high proportions of children from single parent families perform very poorly on math and reading achievement tests in schools.