Stumbled on a census stat from 1970 that stopped me cold

I was digging through old census data online last night for a family history project and found out that in 1970, over 60% of households had a stay at home parent. My own mom worked full time starting when I was six, so it kind of threw me off seeing that number that high. Does anyone else have a hard time reconciling old stats with your own memories of how things really were?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jason12d ago

My dad was a carpenter and my mom stayed home until I was in middle school. We didn't have much but she made it work - packed lunches, sewed our clothes, the whole deal. Then she went back to work as a secretary when my sister started high school and suddenly we had cable TV and takeout pizza on Fridays. The numbers match what I remember from my neighborhood too, most of my friends had a parent home after school until around 1980 or so.

kai46312d ago

Crazy how welfare reform in the 90s forced single moms to work and killed that whole stat.