A Place to Call Home: Improving Foster Care and Adoption Policy to Give More Children a Stable Family
The need for foster and adoptive families is great. In 2018, more than 400,000 children were in foster care, and 18,000 youth left foster care without a permanent home.
The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home
As sources of valuable social capital, few relationships are as important as the family ties between parents and children. However, as with other features of our associational life, family ties have been weakening for several decades.
The Wealth of Relations: Expanding Opportunity by Strengthening Families, Communities, and Civil Society
For two years, the Social Capital Project has documented trends in associational life—what we do together—and its distribution across the country. With this evidentiary base established, the Project turns to the development of a policy agenda rooted in social capital. Specifically, the focus will be...
The Wealth of Strong Families, Communities, and Congregations: Utah as a Case Study in Social Capital
Last year, the Social Capital Project released its Social Capital Index, a tool that measures the health of associational life across the United States. As explained in our earlier report, What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America, we define associational life as the “web...
Is Marriage Still Popular?
Although family life in America has become less stable over the last several decades, the majority of the American population still agrees that marriage provides value to individuals and society. Yet based on results from the 2018 American Family Survey, marriage and parenting fall low on the list o...
The Geography of Social Capital in America
Social capital is almost surely an important factor driving many of our nation’s greatest successes and most serious challenges. Indeed, the withering of associational life is itself one of those challenges. Public policy solutions to such challenges are inherently elusive. But at present, policymak...
Rising Unwed Pregnancy and Childbearing across Educational and Racial Groups
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 ra...
Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing
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 li...
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 whe...
