Further Reading
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep
Robert Rector, "Marriage: America's Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty"
National Marriage Project, "Why Marriage Matters: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences" 3rd Edition
Robert I. Lerman and W. Bradford Wilcox, "For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America"
Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying
Jul 23 2020
The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home
Apr 30 2019
The Wealth of Relations: Expanding Opportunity by Strengthening Families, Communities, and Civil Society
Feb 14 2019
The Wealth of Strong Families, Communities, and Congregations: Utah as a Case Study in Social Capital
Feb 08 2019
Is Marriage Still Popular?
Apr 11 2018
The Geography of Social Capital in America
Nonmarital childbearing has increased dramatically in the United States. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of births were outside of marriage. Today, over 40 percent of children are born to single mothers. This trend is troubling, considering that children are on average at-risk for poorer outcomes when raised outside a married-parent home.1 As we explain in our recent report, Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing, several factors contributed to the increase in nonmarital births. The most significant factors, however, have been the decline in “shotgun marriage” (unions occurring between a nonmarital conception and a birth) and the drop in marriage altogether.
The most intimate and central form of associational life is the family—an institution with primary responsibility for nurturing children and transmitting values, knowledge, aspirations, and skills to subsequent generations. A healthy family life is the foundation for a healthy associational life. Children can overcome the negative consequences of being raised in unhappy or unstable families, but many start out the game of life already behind in crucial ways. More profoundly, weakened family life portends a diminished ability of a people to promote and nurture the civil society and pro-social norms that facilitate happiness and prosperity.
Nov 08 2017
The Class Divide in Marriage
The American Enterprise Institute recently published a new report by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang that highlights the class divide in American marriage. As the authors explain, prior to the 1970s family life looked similar across socioeconomic levels, but today there are stark divides across class when it comes to marriage, divorce, and unwed childbearing.