Young Americans are likelier to have children without marrying than older Americans. Not so surprising.
But they are even more likely to do so amid high income inequality, a study released today in American Sociological Review finds.
Lead author Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, and his team studied 9,000 young men and women from 1997 to 2011. About half the subjects, who were 26 to 31 years old in 2011, reported having had at least one child; 59 percent of those births were outside of marriage. Previous estimates are consistent with the findings.