Ahead of Father's Day, Census Bureau releases new insights on fatherhood

Father’s Day is just around the corner.

June 13, 2019, 7:19 PM

With Father’s Day just around the corner, the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday published some statistics that offer a glimpse into what fatherhood looks like.

The first Census Bureau report took statistics from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation and found that 61.6% of men over 15 years old are fathers. That's about 74.4 million men, according to the report.

The demographic breakdown by the census shows that “among men ages 20 to 29, 21.2% of white men, 24.9% of black men, 12.4% of Asian men, and 29.4% of Hispanic men are fathers.”

Of the men who live with biological or adopted children, approximately 75% eat dinner with their children five to seven days a week, the Census Bureau found.

“Outings with children are also associated with positive child development and are an indicator of parental involvement. Around 40% of men in all family types take young children on outings at least three times a week,” a news release from the Census Bureau said.

Lindsay Monte, a demographer in the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch at the Census Bureau, said in the news release that "for the first time, we're able to look at the fertility of men as well as women."

“When looking at the full fertility histories of men, we see a depth and complexity to the experiences of fatherhood that we have not been able to see before in our data,” she said.