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.
Shared earning/shared parenting marriage
In the United States in 2012, wives in dual-earner families contributed, on average, 47 percent of family earnings. A 2011 study of roughly 1,000 working fathers in United States by the Boston College Center for Work and Family found that 30% of them were splitting child care equally with the mother, and most of them aspired "to share equally in caregiving with their spouse/partner." A 2008 study by the Work and Families Institute found that 31 percent of mothers in the United States reported that her partner spent as much or more time on childcare as she did. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz has written that in 2007, 49% of married couples in the United States with minor children were reporting that each parent was spending equal time on child care.