STUDY: 1 in 5 Women Have Children with Different Fathers

Dorius’ study, which was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, examined data from nearly 4,000 U.S. women who had been interviewed more than 20 times over a 27-year period.

Earlier studies that looked at women with children from different dads focused only on young or inner-city mothers.

The new data, pulled from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, shows that this kind of family structure is found at all levels of income and education. And it’s frequently tied to divorce and remarriage, not just to single motherhood, Dorius says. Forty-three percent of the women with kids with multiple dads were married when their first babies were born.

Dorius found that a multiple-father type of family structure was more common among minority women, with 59 percent of African-American mothers, 35 percent of Hispanic mothers and 22 percent of white mothers reporting children with more than one father.

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