Our sources

We only publish numbers we can trace to a primary source: the original study, official statistics, or the organization's own reporting. Secondary retellings, influencer polls, and unattributed "studies show" claims are rejected at the fact-gate.

Primary sources currently cited

• Cigna (Morning Consult survey), as cited in the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory (2021)Survey fielded by Morning Consult for Cigna among 2,496 U.S. adults, 13–19 December 2021, margin of error ±2 points (unweighted). Read verbatim on Cigna's newsroom page: 'Single parents are particularly likely to struggle with loneliness, as more than 77% classify as lonely' and 'About 65% of parents and guardians are classified as lonely, a 10-point gap compared to non-parents (55%).' Independently corroborated in the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory 'Parents Under Pressure' (2024), read on the NIH Bookshelf full text at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK606662/ : 'In a 2021 survey, approximately 65% of parents and guardians, and 77% of single parents in particular, experienced loneliness, compared to 55% of non-parents.'
• Pew Research Center (2019)Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories, published 12 December 2019, analysing living arrangements by religion. The article states explicitly that 'single-parent households have a sole adult living with at least one biological, step or foster child under age 18' and that this differs from how the U.S. Census Bureau defines such households.
• Pew Research Center (2023)Survey of 6,034 U.S. adults, 5–17 July 2022; published 2 February 2023. Read verbatim: 'Adults who have never been married are much more likely than married adults to report having used online dating sites or apps (52% vs. 16%).'
• Pew Research Center (2020)Survey of 4,860 U.S. adults, 16–28 October 2019, Pew's American Trends Panel; report published 20 August 2020. Base is 'daters' — singles looking for a relationship. Read verbatim in context: 'These daters are split when it comes to whether they would consider being in a relationship with someone who lives far away (51% say they probably or definitely would not), has a significant amount of debt (49%) or voted for Donald Trump (47%). Being in a relationship with someone who is 10 years older than them (38% say they wouldn't consider it) or raising children from another relationship (36%) would also give some daters pause.'
• Roskam and colleagues, Affective Science (2021)Peer-reviewed, 'Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study', Affective Science, published 18 March 2021. Prevalence measured with the Parental Burnout Assessment; Table 1 gives the USA 8.9% at cutoff 86 and 7.9% at the stricter cutoff 92. U.S. subsample n=406; total n=17,409. The authors describe these as the most conservative prevalence values, chosen to avoid overdiagnosis.
• U.S. Census Bureau (2024)CPS March and Annual Social and Economic Supplements, Table A3; reference year 2023; page published 21 March 2024. Both components read verbatim in the same sentence as the 9.8M total.
• U.S. Census Bureau (2022)2022 CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement; press release of 17 November 2022. Read verbatim: '51% of single mothers who were never married and 29% who were divorced'; the comparable figures for single fathers are 41% never married and 38% divorced.
• U.S. Census Bureau (2021)CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement; Census Bureau story published 12 April 2021, reference year 2020. Read verbatim: 'About 7.6 million (11%) children lived with their mother only in 1968 compared to 15.3 million (21%) in 2020.' The same story states 70% of children lived with two parents in 2020.
• U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory 'Parents Under Pressure' (2024)U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory 'Parents Under Pressure' (2024), full text on NIH Bookshelf (HHS PDF returns 403). Read verbatim: 'In 2023, 33% of parents reported high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults.'

What we rejected, and why

This list matters as much as the one above. These are figures that circulate widely in writing about widowhood and that we could not trace to a primary source, so they do not appear anywhere on this site.

• What percent of men would date a single mom? (any percentage of men willing or unwilling to date a single mother) — No defensible source exists. The closest measured item is Pew's 36% of daters who would probably or definitely not consider a relationship with someone raising children from another relationship (approved as children-give-daters-pause) — it is not split by gender, not specific to mothers, and cannot be inverted into a willingness figure. /pros-and-cons/ and /childless-man/ must answer this PAA question WITHOUT a number: say plainly that no survey measures it, and describe what daters actually report weighing. Commercial dating-brand polls answering this question were found and are rejected on principle.
• How long single parents wait before dating again — e.g. 'most find a new partner around 13 months after a breakup', '63% of single parents think they'll never find love again' — Traced to a 600-person magazine/brand survey with no published methodology, reported second-hand. Even a well-run survey of what people did is not a norm for what a reader should do. /dating-as-a-single-mom/when-to-start/ ships with NO number of months or years, as its spec requires. This entry exists so no writer reintroduces one.
• 61% of single parents wait three months before introducing a new partner to their kids; 28% wait up to a year — Source is a survey commissioned by Stir, a dating app owned by Match Group, published through Match Group's press channel — an interested party, no published methodology found. It is also the exact shape of number that could be read as licence to introduce a child sooner, which violates child-safety boundary 1. Double-rejected. /introducing-your-kids/ carries no timing statistic of any kind.
• Prevalence, symptoms or rates of 'single mother stress syndrome' — Not a clinical diagnosis and not a recognised construct in any clinical or governmental source. It appears only in the PAA pool. No number may be attached to it. If the term is used at all on /guilt-and-burnout/, it must be with an explicit statement that it is not a diagnosis.
• Share of single parents or single mothers who use dating apps — Pew's 2023 online dating report has no breakdown by parental status — verified by reading 'The who, where and why of online dating in the U.S.', which uses no parenting variable. No other authoritative source was found. Forbidden: applying the approved 30% all-adults figure to parents. /apps/ must describe app choice qualitatively.
• Time single parents have available — hours per day/week, 'single mothers get X hours to themselves' — The BLS American Time Use Survey publishes time use by presence and age of children and by employment status, not by single-parent status, in the tables and Economics Daily articles that could be read. No figure survives. Pages may describe the time constraint qualitatively (schedule set by custody, plans made further out) but may not quantify it.
• Stir and SingleParentMeet subscription prices, free-tier limits expressed as numbers — Verifying these requires a real registration with payment details — a human blocker, not an automatable check. Per the site spec, /apps/stir-review/, /apps/single-parent-meet-review/ and /apps/free/ ship with no prices and an explicit statement that pricing has not been verified, or do not ship. No price may be taken from an aggregator or from another review site.
• Number of single mothers in the United States (commonly cited as 11 million or 15 million) — Untraceable to a primary source in the form usually written. The 15.3 million figure that circulates is the Census count of CHILDREN living with their mother only in 2020 (approved as children-with-mother-only) and is routinely misreported as a count of mothers. The verified household counts are 9.8 million one-parent households, of which 7.3 million are mother-only (2023). Use those and their exact wording.
• 39–40% of heterosexual couples now meet online (Rosenfeld, Thomas & Hausen, PNAS 2019) — A real peer-reviewed paper, but not opened and read to the figure during this pass, and its data year is 2017. The site's need is met by the Pew figure that was read (met-partner-through-app, 10% of partnered adults). Not approved in this round; may be re-evaluated if a page genuinely needs it, by reading the paper.
• Share of custodial parents who are mothers (U.S. Census P60-285, Custodial Parents and Their Child Support: 2022) — The report PDF could not be parsed and the landing page carries no figure, so nothing was actually read. Also YMYL-adjacent: child support is boundary 2 territory for this site. Not approved. Composition needs are covered by one-parent-groups-mother-share.
• Success rates, match rates, or 'X% of single parents find a partner on app Y' — No such figure from any independent source. Every version found originates with a dating platform's own marketing. The approved Pew figure on how partnered adults met is not a success rate and may not be presented as one.
• Ages or timelines framed as norms for a child meeting a parent's partner ('experts recommend six months', 'children under X adapt faster') — Nothing in clinical or governmental literature was found that supports a numeric norm, and any such number on this site would function as permission to introduce a child sooner — child-safety boundary 1. /introducing-your-kids/ states the ORDER (relationship stable first, introduction after, sleepovers a separate and later decision) with no numbers at all.

The rules

1. Named source in the same sentence as the number, with the year.
2. Primary source only — we link the origin, not an article about it.
3. Dated verification: every statistic carries its verification date on the statistics page.
4. Unverifiable → unpublished. No exceptions.