In 1999, 72 percent of all American family households with children were comprised of married couples.  Of the remaining 28 percent of single parents, only five percent were men, meaning 23 percent of households with children in the United States were lead by mothers with no spouse present.  In raw numbers, there were 7,841,000 single moms and 1,706,000 single dads in 1999.

(Source: U. S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P20-447, and earlier reports; and unpublished data, in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition] Washington, DC, 1999, p. 58.)

"Some experts say that one important factor behind the increase of single fathers is a growing willingness among mothers to cede primary custody.  'Part of what's feeding the single-father phenomenon is not just more men wanting to be involved with their kids but the loosening of the bonds on women,' said James Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at the Families and Work institute in Manhattan."

(Source: Carey Goldberg, "Single Dads Wage Revolution, One Bedtime Story at a Time," The New York Times, June 17, 2001.)

Like the unicorn and the leprechaun, the single parent does not exist.  So asserts economist Jennifer Roback Morse of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in a recently published analysis.  She explains her heterodox dismissal of the "single parent" as "the mother of all myths" by pointing out that "some third party is always in the background, helping the mother who is unconnected to the father of her child."  In some cases, Morse acknowledges, this third party is the mother's own extended family, though she hastens to point out that it is more typically "an impersonal institution": "The person who appears to be raising a child all by herself has substituted for the other parent some combination of market-provided child care, employment income, and government assistance."

Insisting that the task of child-rearing is always "too big for an individual person," Morse concludes that "no social arrangement can alter the basic fact of the dependence of mothers on some source of assistance in providing for their children."  As a consequence, "the modern arrangements" defended as ways of liberating mothers from their status of economic dependency do no more than "mask [these women's] dependency by transferring it from the father of the child to some other person or institution."  "There is a tragic irony in this," Morse adds, "for the father is more likely to have an interest in and commitment to the mother and her child than any other person or institution."  

(Source: Jennifer Roback Morse, Love & Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work [Dallas: Spencer, 2001], 89-92.)