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Tool(s): Excel

Source(s): Bureau of Labor Statistics; US Census Bureau

Looks like both single mothers and fathers are peaking?

Women annualized growth rate: 1.1%

Men annualized growth rate: 3.0 %

Women leaving their families to "live their best life"

Neither is good, my friend

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I actually thought the increase would be more than that. What was it in the 1980s, I wonder…

From 14 million (men+women) to 22.8 million, almost a 60%+ increase. Isn't it high enough?

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(includes sarcasm)

I assume men used to die in wars leaving single mothers behind. Now that we have fewer wars, women leave men to do their fair share.

For comparison, in Australia in 2021, there were 1,068,268 single parent families (representing 15.9% of families), with 19.6% of these parents being male.

At the previous census in 2016, with was 959,544, 15.8% of families, and 18.2% of those parents being male.

So single fathers are on the rise here. By comparison, the US has a higher proportion of single-parent families and a greater share of the parents are fathers.

Having written the above, I remembered that a large number of Aussie kids have custody shared between their two parents. The above figures relate to where they were on census night. Lots of those kids would be with their mum most of the time and their dad on some weekends.

It probably is higher than that, depending on how you measure it. A single mother with 3 children from 3 fathers would only count as 1 "family" in the graphic.

What about the total? Is that increasing from 91 as well? The percentage is interesting but totaling to 100 percent from year to year makes it difficult to compare the rate at di gle parents in total.

I wanted to show that single fathers are increasing. The goal isn't/wasn't to show the global increase in single parents. Although, the graph includes numbers so one can see the total is also increasing.

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Okay! I thought your goal was to show how single parent was trending. But that makes sense now that you've clarified it. I noticed the numbers, but am too lazy to add them and compare haha.

The sympathy card of being a single mother needs to be broadened to single fathers as well. Also single motherhood is more of a choice than it used to be with less male specific casualties in war, workplace, farming, ect.

I was talking about the % of parents that were single fathers, which is what the graph is titled as. This is not the best chart to display the data if we’re trying to compare the overall raw numbers.

What do you mean by “titled as”?

World population grew 80%. So no, I would not say that it’s going up unexpectedly quick

You’re correct

Should’ve adjusted for population

Tbf this is total numbers. It would be good to see rise in total number of families to see if the proportion of single parent families is growing

> The above figures relate to where they were on census night.

Thanks for clarifying that, I was thinking that heaps of families should be counted twice by the metric above.

Sympathy card? You must be watching Lifetime Channel. Really not a lot of sympathy for single moms out there. I was a single mom...I had to be the dad too and work a full time job. It was stressful, near poverty level and lonely. This is the majority.

Err... this chart is showing the increase of single parenthood for fathers. It is also clearly shown that single motherhood remains the vast majority. Maybe we don't want ONLY information about the sad majority and nothing else. It's not a competition who's the bigger victim. Instead you could be happy that more men will know what it's like to raise kids alone and maybe things will actually start to change, like more policies for benefits and availability of cheap birth control.

4353 Increase in Mothers4307 Increase in Fathers

number of single mothers has incrasted slightly more than fathers over the last 31 years.

edit: should have adjusted for pop increase for this to be a useful graph. shows very little otherwise. other than over 30 years not much has changed in the ratio of fathers to mothers.

I grew up with a single father after my mother died when I was very young. He got almost none of the benefits that are usually given to single mothers. He wasn't able to take off work to take care of me, the school system wouldn't believe him when he said my mother was unable to sign forms for me until he got annoyed enough and mailed them a copy of her death certificate. People will often assume he is divorced and will act like he's a terrible person for keeping me away from my mother or whatever. I know life isn't easy for single mothers, but there's so many challenges and stigmas that single fathers go through as well. Hopefully as it becomes more common that will get better

Assuming population growth rate (and by proxy households) of 1%, seems like slightly more?

Right, but he's pointing out that yes, both numbers are peaking, but single fathers are peaking at a ~300% rate.

US population has only increased by roughly 50% so it has been going up quicker than population growth.

World population 1980: 4.4B

World population now: 8.1B

That’s a lot more than 50%

This is for the US only.

That’s right. My b

I think this would be better as a line chart with the number of single fathers per capita vs. time and the number of single mothers per capita over time

I think demographic/income separation would be interesting, provide more insight, although I do admit, it might be subject to mischief.