Custody Demographics

I was curious about the demographics of family structure so I put together some more charts from the same data set as the last post.  I’ve created two charts for each category, with the first showing the percentage of children living with both parents, and the second showing the rest.  The more detailed charts have larger versions available if you click on them (check for mouseover).

Overall the data reinforces how much of a race and class marker marriage has become for raising children.  While we can’t take the “both parents” data at face value since it includes nebulously defined step parents (mostly stepfathers), this does show that for specific segments of society marriage is still extremely important when it comes to having and raising children.  We already know that college educated women are far less likely to divorce, and it would appear from the charts below that when they do divorce remarriage is still an essential part of the script if children are involved.  This focus on marriage for raising children is currently running up against declining marriage rates, which means that something will have to give.

Here is the percentage of children living with both parents, by family income.

Edit:  Kman pointed out that following separation family income will drop, so the income comparison is problematic.  This is confirmed by the relevant definitions in the CPS definitions page.  The comparison based on education below is a better measure of the impact of socioeconomic status on living arrangements.


Here is the same basic view but showing the remaining categories:


There is a similar pattern by education, although note the interesting results for those with less than a 9th grade education.  I didn’t chart it out but children of foreign born parents lived with both married parents 76% of the time and lived with both parents (married or not) roughly 80% of the time.  Because of this, I suspect that the first column on the education chart may be more reflective of first generation immigration patterns than native education:


The following two charts show the breakdown by the age of the child.  Note that the category of children with unmarried cohabiting parents shrinks dramatically as we look at older age brackets.  However, it isn’t possible to say how much of this represents the instability of cohabitation compared to marriage.  Some of this could be due to the rising out of wedlock birth rate over the last 20 years;  the children who are oldest today started off with a higher percentage of married parents.  Also, to the extent that initially unmarried cohabiting parents are tying the knot over time this would also shrink the category.



Here is the same breakdown by race:



This entry was posted in Child Custody, Data, Fatherhood, Finding a Spouse, Motherhood. Bookmark the permalink.

55 Responses to Custody Demographics

  1. tbc says:

    So it seems marriage and joint child rearing is increasingly an upper class white phenomenon and yet men in all these cases are still in a precarious position if the woman decides to throw them over.

  2. okrahead says:

    As a former public school teacher, I can add a few thoughts from my personal observations: The breakdowns you see here would also be borne out in academic success rates if you plugged in the same variables. Hence you see higher academic success rates amongst Asian students than any other group, then whites, etc. Some Hispanic students have initial difficulties due to the fact that they are Spanish speakers in English speaking classrooms, yet despite that difficulty over time they tend to outpace black students in long-term success, especially if you count gainful employment in your definition of long term success.
    I have observed that Hispanic students have a much higher work ethic than either my white or black students, although I believe Asians still tend to fare best in this regard. I would add as a caveat, however, that my Hispanic students fare best overall in jobs considered “manual” or “menial” by our culture, whereas Asians are the most industrious in academic pursuits. Considering the fertility rate of Hispanics this does not bode well long-term for blacks as America’s “favorite” minority group. If the Hispanics ever wise up and break their Democratic party coalition with blacks then it will be a whole new ball game. My personal prediction is that this day will come just as soon as a majority of hard-working Hispanics realize just how heavily they are being taxed, and to whom those tax dollars flow.

  3. taterearl says:

    Even though those are facts….”THAT’S RAYCIST!!!!!”

    But that would explain a lot of what is going wrong in the black community.

  4. anonymous says:

    @okrahead, your thesis above states that Hispanics have a strong work ethic than whites. Not true.

  5. Ybm says:

    The percentage children living with parents by age graph surprised me. Shows that only 10% of unmarried mothers keep the father around. This includes cohabitation I assume. It’s strange the way cohabitation is treated in the Anglosphere almost like a trial marriage. In Europe, it’s looked upon as a marriage in all but name,

  6. Ybm says:

    taterearl says:
    December 11, 2012 at 12:38 pm

    And in your case of making light of the racial disparity, claims of racism wouldn’t be unfounded. This is far more if a class issue than a race one. Yes, hispanics and blacks have almost universally higher in all negative categories, but Asians have lower. Would it be rascist for an Asian make to say “whites are inferior” according to thegraph, you Are.

    But ifyou look at the figures for incomes, you get the real answer. Unfortunately whatbwas designed to assist in helping the black and native American communities, title ix, became a project to raise umc white women so far beyond everyone else that america has bankrupted itself doing so, culturally, economically, and environmentally.

  7. okrahead says:

    Dear Anonymous,
    My thesis is that the Hispanics whom I have observed have a higher work ethic in “manual” and “menial” labor jobs. I am familiar with the material in the link you posted, but I think it overlooks a pertinent fact or two. Many Hispanics who work full time ALSO collect benefits from the government (illegally, I know). This is, of course, due to the fact that many (most?) of these individuals are illegal immigrants, and thus have false identification materials for the purpose of working and drawing benefits. Much of this money is of course sent to family members in Mexico. I realize that non-Hispanic whites currently do better in careers that require academic credentials. There are trends here, especially in fertility rates, however, which are going to change this entire dynamic over the next two to three decades, and I believe that Hispanics are currently positioned to benefit from those trends, certainly more than blacks, and quite possibly better than whites.

  8. tbc says:

    @okrahead – I think some of the stratification you see in the ethic communities is due in part to their immigration history. Most Asians who immigrate to the US come from the educated classes in their home countries and are already fairly top-tier people. The Taiwanese kids who drop out of school to work at the petrol station and hang out at the night market are not the ones coming to the US. COnsequently Asian-American metrics are a bit distorted because they are a radically self selecting group. You would find similar numbers among first & second generation African immigrants who tend to be very well educated, from stable family backgrounds with strong work ethic. These people (and their children) would likely have excelled anywhere.

    Most Black Americans on the other hand are descended from involuntary immigrants who up until a generation ago were intentionally disincentivised from doing any of the laudatory things that help you rise. IN many ways the disincentives continue under ‘liberal’ ‘welfare’ programs that keep distorting the social and economic signals into the community.

  9. retrophoebia says:

    This data ties in neatly with what Charles Murray wrote about in Coming Apart which ties affluence to general well being, and the increasing bifurcation of American society into aptitude-stratified neighborhoods. Dalrock has extended the theory to an important aspect of community, which Murray wrote about in terms of “social capital” and how it’s being eroded by the disintegration of families and traditional roles in the lower classes.

    This is another testament to the inexorable power of socialism (read: welfare) and the impact of IQ/g/Aptitude on the lives of everyday Americans.

  10. Ceer says:

    @ Dalrock

    Thanks for crunching the numbers. You do important work here on your blog.

    [D: Thanks!]

  11. Rock Throwing Peasant says:

    Wow. Once again, my divorce is atypical.

    Gents, don’t marry a woman with a history of mental illness. You can both have degrees, make good money, never fight, and be involved in your sons’ lives and she can still blow it up for kicks and giggles.

  12. Freckled says:

    @Ybm What do you mean with cohabitation as a form of trial marriage as opposed to Europe?

  13. Johnycomelately says:

    Boy oh boy, those stats are an eye opener.

    Its interesting to note that the percentage of white household incomes above 75k has increased from 28.9% in 1990 to 33.4% in 2009.

    So we’re definately seeing a social stratification of the marrieds vs the divorced. The odd observation being that those that can least afford it are divorcing the most, clearly government hound outs and divorce theft is incentivizing divorce for those in the lower income brackets.

  14. sunshinemary says:

    These graphs are astonishing.

    To summarize: oodles of research studies show the absence of a father has a huge negative impact on a child. Furthermore, minorities and poorly educated whites have high rates of fatherlessness.

    If it were literally any other dynamic, there would be a government bureau overseeing numerous agencies with lots of educational and outreach activities set up to deal with the problem. Only the fatherlessness epidemic is exempt. Why is this?

  15. Joshua says:

    Because this is the way everyone wants it.

  16. okrahead says:

    The answer may be found when you look at the demographic breakdown of who voted for whom in the last election. Or, in other words, if there were about 1-2 million more intact families in the nation, as opposed to single mothers, then we would have a Republican president and senate. The progressive ruling class relies on single mothers and their bastard broods to provide the necessary votes to retain power, hence we have bureaus working to increase the number of fatherless families, with all their attendant ills, for the benefit of the kleptocrats in D.C.

  17. hurting says:

    @Sunshine Mary

    I am searching for a better term than ‘fatherlessness’ as that implies that there is no father. Rather – there is one – he’s just often kept out of his children’s lives by their mother.

    @ Joshua

    It’s the way women want it.

    While the differences between socioeconomic strata and race are pretty eye-opening, I find the fact that more than 1/3 of all 15-17 year olds are living in households either than one headed by their married parents. That is a prescription for societal disaster.

  18. @SSM- because men are bad.

  19. sunshinemary says:

    @ hurting
    Yes, we need a better word. It should be a word that could seem innocuous but should subtly shame the woman who has chosen either to be a single baby mama or who has kicked the father to the curb. Hmmm, I will think about it.

  20. KMan says:

    It should be noted that this is based on family income at the date of census, not family income when (and if) parental separation took place.

    We should expect to find nearly all single parents towards the lower income ranges, not necessarily as a cause but mostly an inevitable result of single parenthood.

    Is there any way to control for this effect in the data?

  21. ballista74 says:

    Another socon is at it:

    Rather a liberal feminist that’s trying to push for the favoritism that women has gotten over the years. An “associated” article links to the same author’s rant against “the hook-up culture” and her desire for serial monogamy to be the norm.

    It’s just a woman who’s seeing the more latent white-knight feminism that has plagued the culture over the last four or five hundred years drying up and crying about it.

  22. Anonymous age 70 says:

    I live in Mexico. As a poster said in Europe, here cohabitation is not viewed as cohabitation. It is viewed more like Private Marriage. Marriage without the government or church taking control. A friend says half the married couples here are Private Marriages, which the government calls Free Union.

    The difference is the couple actually view themselves as married, and everyone else does, as well.

  23. Anonymous age 70 says:

    Hey, PB, on that bringing back chivalry article, I suggest chivalry is dead because a high percentage of modern women are “uncouth, cowardly and essentially despicable.” For those of you who did not read the article he linked, that was the standard nasty comment directed at guess who? Men.

  24. ybm says:

    ballista74 says:
    December 11, 2012 at 7:18 pm

    Emily Esfahani is is a self-described “liberal muslim feminist” and lol I couldn’t even finish what I was typing.

  25. ybm says:

    Alright to finish my thought:

    I have some experience with double-speak, political language and “how is idea formed?” I’d like to illustrate something that the majority of people will read but won’t really READ.

    But as MIke Stoklasa says, your brain did.

    Emily says: “If we can all agree that the kind of culture we should aspire to live in is one in which men and women protect and honor each other in the ways that they can—and not one in which men are pushing past women and children to save their own lives—then that is progress that women everywhere should support.”

    You read this and think “hey that’s no bad, seems pretty agreeable” Right?


    Misandrist. I’ll show you why:

    We = Men

    “If MEN can all agree that the kind of culture MEN should aspire to live in is one in which men and women protect and honor each other in the ways that they can—and not one in which men are pushing past women and children to save their own lives—then that is progress that women everywhere should support.”

    Notice how the “we” is applied neutrally at first, then becomes “men pushing past women and children to save their own lives” to “women should support that”

    Nowhere is the life of a man addressed at all in her writing. AT ALL, except as in opposition, even IMPEDIMENT to a woman’s life.

    Man up and get married men, you can game it out of her if you are alfa enough.

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  27. pb says:

    “Emily Esfahani is is a self-described “liberal muslim feminist” and lol I couldn’t even finish what I was typing.” Oh? I thought The New Criterion was a conservative publication, but maybe that’s not such an important factor in hiring decisions.

  28. ray says:

    sunshine — Only the fatherlessness epidemic is exempt. Why is this?

    glad somebody smart summarized those graphs i skimmed!

    okra pointed out political expedience in fatherlessness, but of course there is vast short-term ecomomic benefit in maintaining a society of debased males and empowered females, many serially single, expending their psycosexual frustrations by Consuming, with occasional breaks for Shopping– the engine of u.s. ecomony is war materiel plus females spending money on themselves (babylon)

    the u.s. isnt merely neglectful, but with unabashed glee (obama, hilary, biden etc) persecutes fatherhood, boyhood, and masculinity

    sons connected to fathers, and boys connected to men, is the main threat to the Fat Living of our well-entrenched western matriarchies and the iniquitous glutful citizenry, largely wimminz

    by concidence, sons connected to fathers just happens to be the # 1 Hate on the Shitlist kept by this world’s ruler, and rulers, seeing how theyre not big fans of Father and Son

    as Christians, this identifies for us the condition — and nature — of our nations

    the pastors and pulpits are silent while fatherhood is destroyed before their eyes, while convincing themselves and their congregations that they have something to do with Christ

  29. It is pretty obvious what is going on: To compete with Uncle Sam the Big Pimp a man has to earn north of sixty thousand.

    Women are likely to ditch their husbands in proportion to how attractive the financial deal offered by Uncle Sam the Big Pimp is.

    If Uncle Sam the big Pimp said “I am getting out of the pimp business. No more subsidy for immoral conduct, and anything that deprives children of their natural father is immoral”, bingo, everyone would have marriage levels similar to those earning six figures.

  30. Bobby says:


    The more social conservatives, the better… for all.

    This black man would _love_ to see hispanics (and blacks) bail out of the Demoncratic Party. The destruction of the welfare state would ultimately be a good thing for American blacks.

  31. Bobby says:

    Chivalry is disrespectful to strong, independent women. We need more equality of opportunity.

    If the Titanic disaster were to happen today, women and men would have to fend for themselves equally. No sexism.

  32. Martian Bachelor says:

    WRT that class/race marker aspect of marriage, the percent increase in the number of children aged five or under, from the 2000 census to the 2010 one, for my state (Colorado) by race were:

    Hispanic: +45%
    Black: +35%
    Two or more races: +40%
    White: +5%

    One would not suspect these numbers from your graphs. And we’re a “highly educated” state, as measured by percentage of the population w/college degrees.

    Feminism is a disease primarily affecting white women’s fertility. Marriage or no.

    Since there’s nothing you can do married that you can’t do unmarried (except say you’re married) it’s not clear why the marriage factor matters at all.

  33. This goes to show the importance of parents’ education, marriage and stability on children. Will include it in my next Best of the Manosphere on marriage Dalrock. Well done!

  34. Random Angeleno says:

    A phrase for those selfish single mothers: black widows, perhaps? She mates, she kills (metaphorically anyway).

    Regarding the lack of fathers in the poverty classes, nothing helps a father economically as much as a regular paycheck for a regular job. Figure out how to get fathers into the private sector work force somehow, take the single mother and child support bennies away and you’ll see a lot more family formation that sticks together.

  35. Greg says:

    On the issue of Hispanic vs. black industriousness. I recall a few years ago reading an article about the growth of Hispanic gangs in the country. One cop who specialized in gangs commented that Hispanic gang members were usually easier to find and arrest, because most of them had legitimate jobs in addition to their gang activities, so you could just go pick them up at their workplace.

  36. Greg says:

    that is to say Hispanic gang members were easier to find and arrest than black gang members, who were very seldom employed

  37. Dalrock says:

    KMan says:




    Excellent question. I’m not sure they aren’t counting the income of both parents even when only one has custody though. They use the term “Family Income” as the heading for that section (see cell A117), while otherwise they tend to use the term “Household”. For example, “Household Food Stamp Receipt” and “Household Public Assistance Receipt”. Household income would seem like the logical term if they were only talking about the income of the custodial household.

    Edit: Per the CPS Definitions page “family” is restricted to those living in the household. This is reinforced in the definition of income measurement:

    The income of the family/household does not include amounts received by people who were members during all or part of the income year if these people no longer resided in the family/household at the time of interview. However, the CPS collects income data for people who are current residents but did not reside in the household during the income year.

  38. So in other words from the graphs…. The demographics for the highest levels of divorce also have the highest levels of children born out of wedlock also have the highest numbers of children living solely with mom or even with neither.

    Why hello there exponentially accelerating decline. Nice to meet you. I’ll grab a drink and watch your antics from the other side of the party.

  39. Opus says:

    It is a common meme that unwed mothers and illegitimacy is a result of Women’s Liberation, but these charts suggest that it is all down to money (and thus education). Have I understood this correctly? If so, this must be galling for Feminists. Women want wealth (which is relative) and a wealthy, that is to say, an up-market husband.

    I wonder if these figures would replicate outside The United States, or whether they are States-specific. One could almost calibrate ones chances of Divorce on ones social-status. The moral must be: be academically successful, get a good job and always marry an up-market white single-girl. This would be galling for the Equality-Diversity Theorists.

  40. Toby Temple says:

    “A bunch of girls say, “You don’t need no man to help you raise no child” … shut the fuck up with the bullshit! Yeah, you could do it without a man, but that don’t mean it’s to be done! Shit, you can drive a car with your feet if you want to, that don’t make it a good fucking idea!”

    – Chris Rock

    I guess there are black dudes who really get it and is preaching it.

  41. TexasEngineer says:

    ” Only the fatherlessness epidemic is exempt. Why is this?”

    It is one of the explicitly stated goals of Marxism to put an end to the nuclear family. Marx himself said as much, that it’s a “bourgeois” institution. Feminism is just the most obvious branch of Marxism right now. If you’re not familiar with Gramsci’s “Long March”, ask the Internet some time. But not after you’ve eaten. Because it will make you both angry and sick to your stomach.

  42. FuriousFerret says:

    I don’t understand how people can think that Marxism is a good thing these days.

    I get it that people flocked to Marxism because under a system of pure captialism most people get an extremely raw deal from the top 1 percent.

    However, Marxism is incredibly flawed and is an over reaction simply because it’s all predicated on the premise that ‘man is good’ which anybody with half a brain can see that man is intrinsicaly evil. You don’t even need to believe the bible on this one, it’s all right in front of you.

  43. Martian Bachelor says:

    I don’t think that’s it, FF.

    Jefferson had a fundamentally optimistic view of individual man; it was men in groups (and their leaders) who history had shown had a tendency to turn bad. This is the basis for individual liberty and restrained government.

    Though he believed in public education, I don’t think anyone would call Jefferson a Marxist.

  44. Highwasp says:

    while it’s obvious Marxism is a cultural train wreck, and has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, Half A Brian thinks: man is intrinsically evil = projection. Those who wrote the Marxist Bible / Communist Manifesto and those who wrote the Bible seem to come from the same philosophical stand point. You know who I’m talking about (and no I am not anti….) however, to project that humanity is inherently evil seems a part of Marxism and Biblical school of thought – and if I’m not mistaken both ‘philosophies’ originated with the same people. Just sayin’ to believe people are evil gives a reason for Marxism, not against.

  45. FuriousFerret says:

    I thought that the end goal of Marxism is that society existed without a government where everybody lived in perfect harmony with everybody else.

    If that doesn’t have the assumption that man is good, then I don’t know what is.

  46. tbc says:


    Marxism actually has a very optimistic view of human nature, which is why it fails. It assumes that people will behave in a rational and economic manner ‘for the good of all’. If you will note, all so-called progressive politics has this same root concept. They are very focused on changing the environmental conditions so that the natural goodness of people can happen. When such natural goodness does not occur, greater and greater manipulation of the environment (through regulation and other means of control) must be implemented. The ultimate end is totalitarianism, where the totality of a socio-cultural and economic environment is controlled ‘for people’s own good’. Marxism is un-realistic.

    The Bible on the other hands paints a quite realistic picture of human nature as both glorious (made in God’s image) and depraved. It’s greatest heroes are all flawed and God uses the vilest of enemies to effect good.

  47. Highwasp says:

    … Marxism requires a dismantling of the evil first and then a rebuilding to harmony – after it gets rid of the bourgeois, which is currently the ‘evil patriarchy’ – then everyone can live in harmony. I don’t know but marxism seems to initially need an evil to eradicate prior to harmony… hence an assumption of evil. I’d like to see the day when feminism becomes the next bourgeois and the self righteous Marxist redirects it’s cross hairs for eradication on their newest evil – then maybe, when the women feel the Marxist manipulation and hatred will Marxism itself be targeted as the evil to be eradicated.

  48. MaMu1977 says:

    Let’s be clear on one thing: children need the carrot and the stick (mommy and daddy). You can tout HBD statistics as much as you like, it won’t change the fact that dual-sex parent households produce the most stable adults.

    Asians: 90% children are living in homes with married parents
    Whites: 70%
    Hispanics: 50%
    Blacks: 30%

    Which race shows the highest levels of scholastic achievement?
    Which race shows the lowest levels of employment?
    Which race (barring interracial relationships) shows the highest levels of matrimony and the lowest levels of illegitimacy?

    Even when broken down to subdivisions (eg. Asian immigrants vs. Asian Americans vs. Hawaiians), you can see the benefits of two-parent households. Or, you could read up on the current takeover of 1st-2nd generation African/Caribbean Immigrant children of the overall African-American demographic in the Ivy League. AA alumni are currently complaining that the numbers are 75% non-AA among black students, regardless of their circumstances of birth (IOW, Nigerian cab drivers and Jamaican security guards are producing more Ivy League students and graduates than the “right kind” of black people. And they aren’t even taking the “right” courses, such as AA Studies or Sociology or Law!)

    Bottom line, children need someone to keep them on the straight and narrow at all times. It’s far easier to get and keep his “eyes on the prize” when you can have an eye on him at all times.

    Or, to put it even simpler: prior to the liberalisation of welfare, black Americans had a 19% fatherless rate and approximately 2.5% of all black people had ever committed a jailable felony. Post-liberalisation, our fatherless rate is about 70% and 25% of all black people have committed a jailable felony. Even if you pare off DUIs and/or drug offenses, you’re looking at a 15% felon rate (modern times) versus 1% felon rate (pre-Great Society.)*

    *-prior to The Great Society, there were 100,000 predicate felons (out of 17 million people) in the AA community. Post-GS, our number of habitual offenders is about 2.5 million (out of under 40 million people.) Again, even if you remove non-violent offenders, the level of criminality skyrocketed. No daddy in the home equals less money (fewer school trips, afterschool activities, more temptation to steal), less give and take (mommy always says “Yes” or always says “No”, if she says anything at all) and less supervision (if no one is there to stop “the bad kids” from convincing a child to do drugs or beat people senseless in the street or to steal, many children are going to steal.) African children and Caribbean children have daddies. The most common crimes in our communities? Drunken menace and weed smoking, because “Father” will hear “Mummy” complain about something and he will drag you back to the scene of the crime. AA children have no daddies, part-time mommies and “Nana’s” and a legal system that teaches them to have no restraint (liberal feminist teachers, guidance counselors, etc.), and the proverbial “chip on the shoulder” (shyster lawyers who want repeat business, “community organisers”, etc.) Immigrant children get busted with weed or pills, or get into fights at the bar, or shoot someone for sleeping with their SO. AA children get convinced to shoplift (after all, they “need” that item for self-esteem), fight in public (because it “turns girls on when they see how tough you are”), stay out until 2AM or later (increasing their level of exposure to drug dealers, robbers, skeevy guys/Post-Wall “liberated women” with youth fetishes…), in an environment in which any adult man who isn’t “exciting” enough has either left or is too afraid to step out his front door after the street lights are turned on.

  49. Hurting says:


    I think you’re on to something here, but perhaps not in the way you intended. I think it is the influence of the feminist imperative that causes effectively all women to see the current state of affairs (default maternal custody and no-fault divorce coupled with remnants of fault-based concepts such as alimony) in the less than horrific light from which men view it.

    I have seen this in my own experience with close family members of the female persuasion, but I honestly can not disaggregate it completely from general ignorance of the process.

    They don’t see it bcause they can’t see it.

  50. an observer says:

    Maternal custody and state-enforced nofault wealth redistribution is the new normal.

  51. Pingback: Why We Need A Grandchildren Strike » Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology

  52. Pingback: Feminists are on the run; like I predicted several months ago. - Glori-US Bastard

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  54. 2121xxx says:

    Great post, great job. Kudos to Dalrock

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