IS THE AMERICAN family doomed? Fewer than half of U.S. adults are married. The nation’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement level. The percentage of children living with married parents has fallen drastically. There’s no denying the trend lines.
That trajectory has spawned a public panic that sometimes verges on the apocalyptic, along with a related discussion about how best to use money and power to reverse course. Journalists, sociologists, and public intellectuals, most but not all of them right-of-center politically, have called for everything from tax credits to tariffs to transformations of the American welfare system in hopes of changing the way Americans conceptualize and form families.
But the declinist narrative doesn’t tell the whole story—and the calls for big, centralized solutions misunderstand the issues at hand. The relevant obstacles to more marriages, more babies, and more stable families can’t be moved by tax incentives, marriage promotion campaigns, or federally subsidized day care.
Four new books about American families—written by people with different politics, different professional backgrounds, and 24 kids between them—make a compelling case that the American family needs a course correction. But that correction won’t come from any of the typical promarriage or pro-natalist policy prescriptions.
If it comes, the change will be the result of a ground-up transformation: a cultural paradigm in which family formation is understood as an individual choice but not a lonely one, and in which distributed cultural support provides what a top-down program handed down from Washington cannot.
What the American family needs is a vibe shift.
GET MARRIED, GET HAPPY?
MARRIAGE IS STILL the norm in America, but it is declining.
In 1990, 67 percent of the country’s adults were married and 71 percent had been married at some point. By 2019, those percentages had dropped to 53 and 62 percent, respectively. The number who lived unmarried with a romantic partner grew from 4 percent to 9 percent.
That drop in the marriage rate alarms Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. In Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, Wilcox argues that many people would be better off married, especially where kids are involved.
Wilcox doesn’t think that should be wed, nor that every marriage is worth saving. But married people, he notes, have higher median household incomes than unmarried counterparts and more assets at retirement. On average, they raise more well-adjusted children. And in recent surveys, the married-with-children set scores high above single, child-free folks on various measures of
