The number of families led by a single father has grown in the last decade:

Joe Cioffi, a physician from Fairfield, Connecticut, settled for visitation rights to his son after he and the boy’s mother split up. Soon, he decided that wasn’t enough, so he spent four years struggling to win primary custody…

Cioffi’s custody victory and living arrangement encapsulate two distinct changes driving a 27.3 percent jump in U.S. families led by single fathers in the past decade, according to figures released from the 2010 census. While the number of single dads remains small, greater acceptance of shared custody and more unmarried couples have altered traditional ideas of child rearing, demographic experts said.

“It’s time for us to stop assuming that single parents are always women,” said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “There is a visible presence now of single men caring for their kids. We didn’t see that a few decades ago.”…

The growth in single fathers remains a small percentage of the larger shift away from the traditional family. The majority of single parents are still mothers. They head 7.2 percent of all American households, not just those with kids, compared with 2.4 percent of those households led by single fathers, according to census figures.

The illustration from this story suggests that men tend to become single fathers as the result of a court case. I would be interested to know whether younger men ever really envision or aim to be single fathers or whether this is usually the result of unplanned events. This would be a great question to ask today’s college students to see how they envision their future families.

Additionally, as the number of single father families grow, how are the fathers and kids treated – socially, it is an advantage or disadvantage to be a child in a single father family versus a single mother family?