Facts, figures and Google searches for National Step Family Day

Friday is National Step Family Day and National Working Parents Day. The two combined might as well be National Modern Family Day – unofficially, that is.

The celebration is emblematic of declines in picturesque families with stay-at-home moms, breadwinner dads and biological children with white picket fence upbringings.

Instead, it highlights today’s “modern family” of divorces, stepfamilies and second and third marriages.

More children now live in homes with nontraditional families than with traditional families, according to a December report by the Pew Research Center. And fewer than half of U.S. children are living in traditional family homes, according to a Pew report titled The American Family Today.

National Step Family Day, celebrated online with the hashtag #NationalStepFamilyDay, was founded in 1997 by Christy Borgled, who works for the National Stepfamily Resource Center.

So here’s a look at today’s modern family via facts and figures about marriage, stepchildren and families:

Stepfamily stats

▪ 1,300 new stepfamilies form each day.

▪ More than half of U.S. families are remarried or re-coupled.

▪ The average marriage in America lasts seven years.

▪ One out of two marriages ends in divorce.

▪ One in three people who divorce remarry.

▪ Four out of five remarried or re-coupled partners with children both have careers.

▪ Half of children younger than 13 years old currently live with one biological parent and the parent’s partner.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Remarriage statistics

▪ White men and women are more likely than minorities to have married three or more times.

▪ People with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to have married only once.

▪ One in five recent marriages involved both spouses marrying for at least the second time.

▪ The majority of marriages are still first-time couples, but the share of people who have been married only once is declining.

▪ States in the Northeast and Midwest have a lower share of remarried adults than states in the South and West.

Source: 2015 report titled “Remarriage in the United States” from the American Community Survey

Stepfamilies via Google searches

Here’s a look at the popularity of modern-family related search terms via Google.

Searches for “divorce” peaked on Google in November 2011. That’s compared with searches since 2004 – the farthest back Google Trends compares.

Canada and Australia searched for the term “step family” on Google more than the United States.

And people in Texas, New York and California searched for the term more than any other states.

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 6:44 AM with the headline "Facts, figures and Google searches for National Step Family Day."