Between World War II atid the late 1960s most children lived with
two parents. The 1950 census reveals that 84.9 percent of U.S, children under the
age of 18 lived with both parents. Almost 20 years later, in 1968, 85 percent of all
children still lived in this type of household. Then, starting in 1970, the two-parent
family rapidly began to disappear. Figure 1, which maps this decline, shows that by