FEB. 3, 2022 — According to a new report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority (70.1%) of the nation’s children under age 18 lived with two parents, 21.4% lived with their mother, 4.4% with their father, and 4.0% did not live with a parent in 2019. While most of the children living with two parents lived with married parents, 4.4% lived with two unmarried parents (not significantly different from the percentage living with their father), of which half (51.7%) were between the ages of 0 and 5.

The report Living Arrangements of Children: 2019 is based on data from the Census Bureau’s 2008 and 2018 American Community Survey (ACS), the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), and the 2007 and 2019 Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC).

Highlights:

Children living with two unmarried parents were more likely to live below the poverty line in 2019 (38.1%) than children with married parents (7.5%).
Among the 4.0% of children under age 18 who did not live with a parent, 53.2% lived with a grandparent in 2019.
In 2019, 69.7% of children lived with parents who were native-born, while 26.3% lived with at least one foreign-born parent.
Nationally, in 2018, 13.2% of households with children under age 18 contained members of a different race or Hispanic origin. This percentage varied by state, with the West having the most states with a percentage higher than the national average.
The percentage of children living in multigenerational households increased across all racial and ethnic groups between 2008 and 2018.
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander children were the most likely to live in a multigenerational household, at 25.3% in 2018. White, non-Hispanic children were the least likely to live in a multigenerational household, at 7.8%.

The surveys used in this report differ in their data-collection methods, universes, editing, and weighting. More information about the surveys is available in the Source of the Data and Accuracy of the Estimates sections of the report.

More information on the living arrangements of children can be found on our Families and Living Arrangements webpage.

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