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Cohabiting means parents who live together without being married.
At the beginning of 1997, 17 per cent of all children in Norway lived with a single mother or father and 12 per cent with cohabiting parents. Fully 35 per cent of all children under the age of one have cohabiting parents.
The percentage of children with cohabiting parents drops with the increasing age of the children. While one in four children between one and three years of age had cohabiting parents, this was true of 12 per cent of six-year-olds. Only 1.3 per cent of 17-year-olds had cohabiting parents. The lowest percentage of children aged 0 to 17 with cohabiting parents is found in the southwestern Norway counties of Vest-Agder, with 5.4 per cent, followed by Rogaland and Aust-Agder. In all of the five northernmost counties more than 17 per cent of the children had cohabiting parents.
Married parents still the norm
At the beginning of 1997, 1,015,000 children aged 0 to 17 were living at home. Two in three children had parents who were married to each other. Among children under the age of one, 53 per cent had married parents, while the percentage among the oldest children (17 years of age) was 72 per cent. These percentages have become smaller in the 1990s, with the biggest changes taking place among the youngest children. The five northernmost counties had the lowest percentages of parents with married parents. Finnmark had relatively the fewest number of children living with their married parents. The largest percentage of children with married parents is found in Rogaland and Agder counties.
Weekly Bulletin issue no. 26, 1997