WINCHESTER, Va. — It's 6 a.m. and still dark outside. But Adrienne Rumley's two-bedroom apartment is alive with kinetic energy. A 4-month-old kitten darts around. A big dog patters back and forth. Another cat stealthily watches the morning unfold from behind a chair. A 2-year-old child is sleepily sucking on a pacifier and watching TV.
The scene may seem chaotic. But 37-year-old Rumley's morning routine is running in clockwork precision. It has to — she's the only parent.
An alarm beeps every few minutes, keeping her on schedule for her next morning task. Brush her kid's teeth. Put on her work clothes. Dab on a spot of makeup. Get her daughter, Lorelei, ready for day care.
"I leave at exactly 7:02," Rumley says. "I don't get stuck behind the school buses. And if you get stuck behind school buses, then you're going to be late."
Rumley is among millions of American single mothers raising children by themselves. These moms are likely never to have been married and many don't live with partners.
Today, 40% of all babies in the U.S. are born to unmarried women, a dramatic increase since 1960, when they made up only 5% of births.
Increasingly, they are women over 30, like Rumley. This group has swelled in number by over 140% in the last three decades, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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NPR spoke to over two dozen single mothers in this age group. Up and down the income spectrum, they paint a starkly different picture than the persistent stereotypical image of single mothers as irresponsible and incompetent. That's partly because in the 1980s and '90s, most of them were teenagers or in their early 20s. Today, that's less likely.
Women over 30 have more life experience under their belts and they're a lot more capable; they're more likely to have full-time jobs, more education and earn more, all of which give them the power to choose. More importantly, they say, it has given them agency.
"I felt like I had a fire lit under me"
Danielle Townsend from Philadelphia, who is now 36 years old, remembers her 20s as a period of struggle after graduating from college.
She was almost 30, working part time at Trader Joe's, when she found out she was pregnant. "I felt like I had a fire lit under me. I was like, 'I have to figure my life out yesterday,'" she says.
Townsend was in love with the father of her child, an artist. But she says they disagreed on how to raise their child, and his temporary gigs didn't supply the stable income she felt their nascent family needed.
"He wasn't even willing to try to find a better job that had benefits," she says. Under that strain, their relationship fell apart.
Townsend remembers being in survival mode after her son, Khalib, was born. She signed up for food benefits.
Determined to create a better life, she enrolled for a Master's degree in librarianship. Those days, she says, were a blur of studying, lugging Khalib between her own dad's home and her son's dad's for child care, and juggling part-time jobs — all in the middle of the pandemic.
After graduating, she moved to Mississippi for a job, but being alone and far from home with a little child was hard. Even though she felt she was making the right decisions, she could feel "this dark cloud moving in," she recalls, "this heaviness."
Two years ago, she moved back to Philadelphia. She's now a librarian, a job she loves. Khalib, who just turned 7, is a budding environmentalist and wants to be a conservation scientist when he grows up.
His favorite thing to do is to go on "trash walks" with his mom, where they try to keep the city's parks and streets clean. They've even done that to celebrate his last birthday, when Townsend gifted him a trash picker with a claw to his utter delight.
Today, Townsend dreams of buying a home. And she breathes a little easier. "OK, Danielle," she tells herself. "You're not really in survival mode anymore."
Behind the new rise of single motherhood in America
According to Pew Research, the United States has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households; 23% compared to a worldwide average of 7%.
One of the biggest reasons why more women have been choosing single motherhood is that they're financially better prepared to start families on their own. The number of women entering the workforce has skyrocketed in the last five decades.
But those gains have come at a time when men have been dropping out of the workforce. Today, more women than men are enrolled in college, in master's programs and in law and medical schools.
This disparity in work and education means that many women in their mid-30s are ready to start families, and support them, even if they haven't found male partners.
IVF provides another path
Another imbalance is that compared to men, women's fertility declines faster with age. So unlike men, women who want children can feel their reproductive clock ticking louder in their 30s and 40s.
Some women, like Susan Kufdakis, are choosing in vitro fertilization (IVF) to have babies on their own.
Kufdakis, an attorney who works with Florida's Department of Children and Families, finished law school and passed the bar in her early 30s. But when she hadn't met a romantic partner by the time she turned 35, she froze her eggs as a backup plan. Then she turned 37 and could hear her biological clock ticking.
Of Greek-Puerto Rican heritage, she'd dreamed of the perfect Greek Orthodox wedding, but she felt she needed to prioritize having a baby over waiting for that right person. "I don't want to lower my standards just because I want a family," she says.
So she chose IVF. The process is invasive, expensive and it can take several tries to conceive a baby. It wasn't easy on her, either.
Her son, Yiannis, was born earlier this year after Kufdakis got pregnant on her second try. Each cycle cost her $38,000. She took on debt and, even though she wanted to live on her own, she currently lives with her parents, who help with child care.
"I don't think I could have done it without them," says Kufdakis, who is now 39.
Single vs. married parents
But not everyone has the option of moving in with their parents, and many sociologists and economists who study families say kids do better when there are two parents to raise them.
Economist Melissa Kearney's book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind got a lot of attention from proponents of marriage when it was released two years ago. It argued that two married people together bring in more income and have more time to devote to their children.
"These resource advantages then set children up with more opportunities to get ahead in life," Kearney wrote in her book. It cited data that showed, compared to two-parent households, a third of children in single-parent households spend their lives in poverty, and many don't graduate from high school or go to college.
But, Kearney's research has also showed that children of older moms have an advantage over younger ones. Kids born to unmarried mothers over 30 were almost three times more likely to have college degrees and earn higher incomes as adults, when compared to those raised by single moms who give birth in their early 20s or teens.
Much of the research was based on the world's longest-running household survey, which followed 5,000 U.S. families with children born between 1960 and 1989 — when there were fewer single mothers in America, and they tended to be younger.
That data, however, hasn't yet caught up with the current generation of children raised by older single moms.
"As single mothers are much less likely to be teen or young mothers as compared to previous generations of single mothers, they are increasingly likely to be able to provide financially for their children, especially when it comes to avoiding poverty," Kearney said recently via email.
The American family
Today's single moms still face structural disadvantages, including laws that provide overt legal or financial benefits to married couples. For instance, couples can save thousands of dollars by jointly filing taxes. They can also collect more Social Security.
Those laws reflect a past centered on the institution of marriage and the nuclear family — a focus some political groups would like to bring back.
The Trump administration is heavily influenced by Project 2025, a policy and staffing blueprint published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. It starts with a promise to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.
Its first chapter opens with the argument that the American family is in crisis, partly because "40% of all children are born to unmarried mothers" and calls fatherlessness "one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse."
Heritage Foundation research fellow Delano Squires points out that not only are people having fewer children, they're waiting longer to have them, marriage rates are declining and the number of children born to unmarried parents is increasing. "Those are all troubling statistics," he says.
To encourage marriage, Project 2025 recommends the use of government funding to provide a school curriculum on healthy relationships and sexual abstinence.
"You can't have strong communities without strong families," Squires says. "You can't have strong families without strong, enduring marriages."
But Jane Mattes, who in 1981 founded the support group Single Mothers By Choice, says that what's most important for children is having a loving, stable home — regardless of how many parents are in it.
"Being born into a marriage does not guarantee anything as far as your stability or your functioning," she says.
Her group now counts 30,000 members, and she says that although she's observed that women in the group with lower incomes struggle more, "Parenting is really the key, not your income."
"We're about to have one hell of a life together"
As for Rumley in Winchester, Va., she can't imagine her life without Lorelei: "She is just fierce and wild and beautiful and caring, and my life would be so much darker without her in it."
Rumley's own journey started out as a surprise pregnancy from a boyfriend she'd been dating for barely four months. When she told him about it, he offered to pay for an abortion.
But she had always wanted to have a baby. And Rumley, at 35, felt she didn't have time to wait for a picture-perfect husband. She told him she was keeping her baby. He responded by hanging up on her and has been absent from their lives since.
The years before that had been hard ones. Burned out during the pandemic, she had quit her job as an assistant at a veterinary clinic. Then she lost her apartment. She was working part time and living in a shed at the wildlife center that employed her.
But the pregnancy changed the calculus of Rumley's life.
She knew she needed a job with a steady income. She found work again as a vet's assistant. It got her health insurance, and $30,000 a year — which qualified her for food benefits. She swallowed her pride and moved in with her parents. It was hard, she says. "I was afraid that I was just going to sit and waste away and I did not want to do that."
And Rumley desperately wanted to chart a new course for her life. She started by naming her daughter Lorelei after the iconic single mom of the 2000s show Gilmore Girls.
She went back to an old hobby, running. Soon she was running with Lorelei in the stroller, first a mile, then 5K and 10K.
She recently moved up in her career, landing a new job as an assistant manager at a vet's clinic. She now earns $45,000, and she got her own apartment. She doesn't qualify for food benefits anymore.
These days, Rumley is building a new community for herself and Lorelei. She joined a running club and is training for a marathon. She's made new friends at work and around town, other moms with whom she swaps playdates and babysitting duties in a pinch.
She acknowledges that raising a child alone isn't easy. There isn't a second income to help pay the bills, or another pair of hands to pitch in with the housework. "I have got her 100% every single day," she says of Lorelei. "And there's very little wiggle room for that."
She also worries about the questions that Lorelei will ask, or get from others, about her absent father. But more often than not, she's relieved that she gets to make all the decisions for the family. "I kind of have more control of how Lorelei and I get to take this journey," she says.
And on any given day, she often remembers the moment just after Lorelei was born, when they first locked eyes: "That was the moment that I knew we were about to have one hell of a life together."
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