The demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of single parent families have changed dramatically during the past three decades. The increase in single parent families, which was particularly great during the late 1960s and 1970s, slowed in the 1980s. Whereas the increase in divorce fueled the growth in one- parent families in the 1960s and 1970s, delayed marriage and child- bearing outside marriage contributed far more to growth in mother- child families during the 1980s than did marital disruption. During the 1980s, father-child families increased faster than mother-child families. By 1990, almost one in five single parent families was maintained by a father, although only 3 percent of all children lived in this type of household. Single parenting on the part of unmarried mothers is much higher within the black than white community and racial differences were as large or larger at the beginning of the 1990s as a generation earlier. Whereas two-thirds of white children currently live with both biolog...