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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe because fathers are much more involved than 50 years ago? There are probably a load of reasons and I don't think it's just helicopter parenting.

My father in law never changed a nappy for any of his 3 children, and that was normal. It certainly isn't now.

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The article gives statistics broken down by mother/father time as well - there is a substantial increase in both.

Fathers can't be involved if they aren't around.

Single motherhood rate in 1950: 5%

Single motherhood rate in 2010: 41%

Fathers can be around without being married to the mother.

From a technical perspective sure. From a statistical perspective, the point is a distraction.

It's not, because unmarried long-term cohabitation has exploded.

How long term? As long as a whole childhood?

Unsurprisingly most unmarried parents break up before their kid is an adult.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/livin...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-pa...

Yes. Do you really think most unmarried families have both mother and father in the household, though? Regular contact with the father would be a lot more difficult if he's not around except on weekends.

From the numbers, back in the 50s kids probably only saw their fathers on the weekends in married families. It is startling to see how much more time fathers get with their kids nowdays.

Whilst now we're much more progressive and kids don't see either parent!?

By the numbers, kids see more parents nowadays, though.

No, but I do think an increasing share of full-time two-parent families are unmarried (and married families aren't necessarily living together), and people can get married or begin cohabitation after a child is born, so comparing rates of unwed motherhood is misleading on the magnitude (though consistent with the direction, so far) of any change in the share of children living in single-parent families.

There's no reason for an indirect proxy when the actual figure of interest is available:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192...

Sure, the majority still are together, but the gap is widening. Quoting your link:

"During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent."

That means the percentage of families living together is declining.

Thanks for the link BTW. That data is way more relevant than the marriage statistics in this conversation.

> Do you really think most unmarried families have both mother and father in the household, though?

Depends on the country you are in. Here in Norway, quite definitely yes.

About 26% of couples are unmarried now.

Poor working class people?

Absolutely.

It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married, and it's difficult to afford childcare if mom is working and family cannot chip in, especially when you consider that many industries don't provide full-time jobs or sick time. It's cheaper for mom to stop working due to the child and bridge the gap with public assistance until the kids are around age 3, where there are more/cheaper daycare slots.

My wife worked for a utility with alot of blue collar guys -- easily 30% of the guys there had stay-at-home girlfriends with the kids. Not all of them were on public assistance, but people making $30-40k can't afford infant/toddler daycare.

You hit the bullseye with this one. Parents remain unmarried in a monogamous, cohabiting relationship because the government pays them to not get married. Every benefit that has a household means test attached is an additional incentive to strategically realign the membership of your households.

So you designate one household as the mooch household, and one as the worker household. The latter tends to be ineligible for all manner of otherwise useful benefits, working full-time at minimum wage, and benefits may even be curtailed working part-time. The other can collect the maximum available benefits.

This also leads to some strange behavior in states that have common-law marriages.

> It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married

Well, more accurately, it's more difficult if you are married to someone who had income because it affects the means test. Of course, for many of those you can't get them unless you identify and secure a child support order against the parent of your children, and then that child support is also treated as income in the means test for the program, so just staying unmarried (with it without cohabiting) doesn't actually solve the problem.

http://www.prb.org/pdf10/single-motherfamilies.pdf

This paper says it's 24%. Do you have a source for 41? That's too high.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/18/the-u...

Your statistic is for the fraction of children living in single-mother households. dinoleif's statistic is for the fraction of babies born to single mothers. So your statistic doesn't count babies who are adopted to two-parent households or whose father later marries the mother (probably plus other factors I'm not considering). I'd say your statistic is more directly relevant to "is there a male adult living in the same house", but dinoleif's for "is the child being raised with a legally committed biological father".

There's quite a difference between the 5-41% jump in this first comment, and the 8-23% jump you read in the stats dragonwriter posted.

That was precisely dragonwriter's point in the other thread (I can't nest there any further): your unmarried statistic was not particularly germane.

Further, your comment don't quite make sense in context. OP shows how the statistics in the article shows fathers have become more involved. You say they can't actually be more involved because they're not around?

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