Factors Affecting Poverty and Welfare Use - Never-married Adults

The number of people age fifteen or older who had never married rose from 25 percent in 1970 to 32 percent in 2002. The proportion of those who have never married has increased as young adults delay the age at which they marry. (See Table 5.3.)

Single-parent women are more likely never to have been married (31.2 percent in 2002) than single-parent FIGURE 5.2
Award status of custodial parents, 2002
(Numbers in millions) men (20.3 percent in 2002). In 2000, 47.4 percent of African-American mothers, 16 percent of Hispanic mothers, and 34 percent of non-Hispanic white mothers with children under age eighteen had never been married. In addition to a growing trend away from marriage, these percentages could also be explained by marriages following the birth of the first child.