The common conservative lament is true: marriage is in retreat in America, and the traditional family is becoming less common. The old conservative warning is also proving true: this retreat from marriage is bad for children and for unmarried adults.

Contrary to some conservative assumptions, though, it’s not the liberal elites who are saying, “I don’t.” It’s the working class in “Real America.” And, ironically, the whole situation confirms an aphorism Hillary Rodham Clinton made famous: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

A debate rages over the causes and effects of the retreat from marriage. Some say bad economic conditions for the working class are causing it. Others blame changing social norms. The truth is a blend of both. What has killed the norm of marriage in the working class is mostly the erosion of community, which itself has centered in working-class places.

Political scientists like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray have tracked America’s dwindling community strength and consistently found it centered in working-class places.

America’s elites still enjoy strong communities, planted thick with institutions—even if they call it “networking,” and don’t view it as anything special. In places where college degrees are rare and where factory jobs used to dominate, though, the little leagues, the swim clubs, the rotary clubs, and most of all the churches are fading away, delivering a death blow to family formation.

These local institutions serve as necessary support structures for families. This is obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to raise children. Community, which can seem merely a nice thing to have when you’re a singleton in your twenties, becomes indispensable when you take on the difficult and crucial work of marriage and childrearing.

Community provides miniature safety nets: local institutions like strong schools, sports teams, and swim clubs lift a bit of the burden of rearing kids off the backs of Mom and Dad. And strong communities provide adult company for parents who otherwise spend their free time with their children, who do not always provide the most intellectually stimulating conversation. Finally, community also sets expectations that a couple will get married before they have a baby, or at least soon afterward.

That expectation has disappeared in the working class in the U.S. today. While two-thirds of college-educated adults are married, that’s true of only half of those who never went to college.

Women who don’t attend college are also more likely to give birth outside of marriage than in marriage. Among women with college degrees, the out-of-wedlock birthrates look like they did in 1960: less than 1 in 10.

Those gaps were smaller or nonexistent in 1960. Notably, social scientists have found that in 1960, community bonds were more equally distributed among the classes. Also, America was less geographically segregated by income back then.

So, are poor economic prospects causing the retreat from marriage? Or is it the opposite—is the retreat from marriage undermining economic prospects in the working class?

Scholars like Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution argue for the latter, asserting that marriage helps reduce poverty.

Others have also found that marriage causes higher wages. Take two men of the same age, the same level of education, the same race, in the same region of the country—and the married man makes a lot more (possibly as much as $16,000 per year), according to a 2014 study by Brad Wilcox and Robert Lerman. This finding has been replicated again and again, including by a 2014 study of identical twins that found that the married twin makes 27% more than his brother. This suggested “that marriage causes men’s wages to rise,” the authors concluded.

The counter-argument has evidence, too. MIT economist David Autor found that the disappearance of manufacturing jobs precedes a decline in marriage rates. “[M]anufacturing jobs are a fulcrum on which traditional work and family arrangements rest,” Autor concluded.

Fewer reliable jobs, less marriage, and less civil society are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: life for the working class is becoming deinstitutionalized.

This explanation makes historical sense. Marriage was a norm in the 1950s and 1960s when good factory jobs were plentiful. The norm has died since the late 1960s because working-class men can’t find steady, high-paying jobs. Women, seeing a rise in employment and wages in that period, have less reason to marry working-class men, and working-class adults of both sexes have less reason to believe they can raise a family.

The data here strongly suggest causality, but the causal arrows on different studies point in different directions.

One clue to lead us back to community strength lies in another interesting detail in Autor’s data: the retreat from marriage was localized. That is, your physical place in the world, and not merely your education and income level, predicted marriage. This shows that something is happening in these blue-collar places where marriage and prosperity seem to be waning.

To untangle the cause and effect here, we need to look at a blue-collar place that nonetheless has a lot of money. Those are increasingly rare, but they exist—thanks to fracking. A few years back, I traveled to Williston, North Dakota, a hotspot of the fracking boom.

DK’s Lounge is notorious for fights, but the bartender there told me that fights are only on pay day, when the young men feel rich. “Usually it’s about girls,” Chris Duell told me over a Budweiser. Chris, in dire straits a few years back, left Michigan and came to Williston, where he launched a drinking-water distributorship, now raking in a million a year. Another customer at DK’s had traveled by bus from California with his dad to find a job—and did, at $18 an hour.

“Everyone in here has a wad,” Kel, a DK's patron and a beneficiary of the fracking boom, told me.

That’s why economists Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson of the University of Maryland studied similar fracking towns from Texas to Pennsylvania. Does boosting the wages of blue-collar men also boost marriage? If it did, this would strengthen the case that income determines marriageability.

But that’s not what happened. “[I]n response to local-area fracking production,” Kearney and Wilson found, “both marital and non-marital births increase and there is no evidence of an increase in marriage rates.” Furthermore, they concluded, “We find no evidence to support the proposition that as the economic prospects of less educated men improves, couples are more likely to marry before having children.”

While Autor’s study suggested the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs reduced blue-collar marriage, Kearney’s findings indicated that the appearance of lucrative blue-collar jobs didn’t necessarily increase blue-collar marriage.

There’s something deeper than just economics in these blue-collar places that undermine marriage. You can sniff it out if you visit Williston’s mancamps.

Mancamps are sprawling warrens of modern trailers that oil companies use to house hundreds of men in a large barren field. Each man had his own small, modern room, usually with his own flat-screen television, and a bathroom he shared with a couple of other guys.

One mancamp I visited had a big (also temporary) building that served as the common room, with carpeted rooms full of recliners and big couches, Ping-Pong tables, air hockey, and massive TVs, plus, of course, an all-you-can-eat hot buffet running most of the day.

This land of cash and basic pleasures was not a real community. Mancamps were no place to raise kids, just a place to trade labor for cash. The work schedule often involved 11 days on, with long hours, followed by three days off. The men didn’t have to get themselves to work because the bus took them from the camp to the job site. And their time off work was entirely their own.

Job restoration alone cannot instantly restore the local community institutions that support marriage—like churches, clubs, and local meeting places. These take time to re-emerge organically.

Kearney and Wilson found the same effect in the fracking towns of Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, where their study focused and where the migration wasn’t as dramatic. A return to marriage doesn’t result from simply introducing good blue-collar jobs into places that don’t already have the infrastructure for supporting families.

Fracking created something of a natural experiment, then: isolating the two variables—money and community—that typically go together in America today. If we don’t start with the community, the money doesn’t bring the family formation.

Autor’s study showed that the disappearance of jobs in a place led to a retreat from marriage in that place. This is true, but it skips a step: the factory closure is often the first domino to fall. The second domino to fall may be the coffeehouse next door—a complementary businesses that also serves as a community hub. Then people move out, and one of the churches closes. The old parishioners don’t want to go to the parish a town over, and so they stay home on Sunday. Social isolation spreads. The chain reaction, one by one, takes out the local institutions of civil society.

Tipping over the first domino can cause a chain reaction but standing the first one back up doesn’t cause the opposite reaction. Similarly, the death of blue-collar jobs can kill a community fairly quickly, but bringing back those jobs doesn’t bring back marriage. That’s because job restoration alone cannot instantly restore the local community institutions that support marriage—like churches, clubs, and local meeting places. These take time to re-emerge organically.

Pinning the retreat of marriage on the collapse of community jibes perfectly with Autor’s findings on factory towns. We shouldn’t think of the lost factory as simply a lost source of money, but also as an institution of civil society. The factory (and often the local union) provided the same sort of support, purpose, and modeling as the church and the Kiwanis Club.

Joe Adams made that clear to me. Joe was a General Electric worker who had been laid off from a refrigerator plant when I met him, and he was also the vice president of the local union in Bloomington, Indiana. He shared how confused he felt, as a high school graduate, when a GE official asked him if he had factory experience. Wasn’t this unskilled labor?

What they meant, Joe learned, was “Are you gonna be here, on time, every day? Are you experienced with the mundane? Can you stand to do the same thing again and again?”

These skills, if you think about it, are the basic skills of marriage and fatherhood. Are you reliable, honest, and patient? Can you delay gratification? Do you see the value in self-sacrifice? Are you willing to give decades of your life to your family?

Good factory jobs rewarded and cultivated these skills, which are best called “virtues.” This is what community institutions do. Such institutions used to exist in places of all income and education levels. They are now a luxury good.

Fewer reliable jobs, less marriage, and less civil society are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: life for the working class is becoming deinstitutionalized. The collapse of community exacerbates poverty as adults lose the training grounds and support structures for both reliable work and family. This further weakens community, creating a vicious cycle, and yielding places in Middle America where the lack isn’t merely money—the real lack is the infrastructure around which people can build a family and a good life.

Editor's Note: This essay is adapted from the book, Alienated America by Timothy P. Carney (Copyright 2019 by Timothy P. Carney). It has been published with permission from Harper Books and HarperCollins Publishers.

I picked him up at a Columbus hotel late one Friday night. Out of a job and money, Kareem* was set to join the ranks of Ohio's homeless. 

“Would you let Kareem stay with you for a couple of days?” was the question our New York City friend asked us. Kareem, the son of an Egyptian immigrant, was born in New York City, but after his mom divorced his father, he moved back with his mom to her home state of Ohio. 

After only a couple days at our house on the edge of Cincinnati’s suburbs, Kareem found an IT call center job through a temp agency. He didn’t know anything about IT, but the job paid $15 an hour with the potential to become permanent, and the company promised training. 

Kareem did not have a driver’s license, but we hatched a plan together: after receiving his first paycheck, he could book a room at the budget motel within walking distance of his new job. Kareem seemed excited. Something about suburban Ohio was a breath of fresh air to him—it seemed like there were more opportunities here than in Columbus, where he had spent the last year.

Kareem had been living with us for about two weeks and had already started his new job at the IT call center, when my new issue of National Review arrived. David French’s article, “Those Bootstraps Still Work,” caught my eye. French starts by telling the story of a young man in crisis whom he and his wife helped out. The young man had just graduated high school, but his dad was an alcoholic, and his parents had separated, and he was starting to drink a lot himself. As French explains:

Together with friends from church, my wife and I went to work. We set him up in an apartment next to our house, paid his first month’s rent, and dropped by constantly. Friends got him a good job that would teach him a trade. Next, he found a girlfriend. A year later I was at his wedding. Soon after that, he bought his first home. And now? He’s a member of the upper middle class — living the American dream and raising kids that some would call 'children of privilege.'

Encouraged by the young man’s progress, French and his wife took other people in. But things didn’t work out the same way. As French tells it, "Nobody was blocking their path. In fact, there were people doing their best to push them along—to put them in a position to succeed. But they wouldn’t take the steps. They wouldn’t walk the walk." He concluded: “Is there a boot on the neck of the working-class American? Yes, there is. Sadly, it is typically a man’s own boot. His own choices weigh him down. His own decisions destroy his future.” 

I shared the article with Kareem and asked for his reactions.  

“I think what’s missing is mental health,” he told me after reading the article. He said he didn’t appreciate that French seemed to imagine only two possibilities: a person who makes good choices and succeeds, or a person who makes bad choices and fails. In Kareem’s mind, there is also a category of people who are trying to make good choices but are struggling with deep mental health problems. 

Kareem has struggled with debilitating anxiety for years. At one point, things got so bad that he committed himself to a mental health hospital, where he could get medication. But, as he told me, the medication didn’t work. 

“Some people put a lot of faith in this stuff. Medication. Therapy. Stuff like that—I’ve been trying this stuff for a long time,” he admitted. “I’ve had one doctor straight up tell me, ‘you’re an enigma.’”

Over the years, Kareem has been diagnosed with different problems by different doctors (“It changes with the doctors, really”): major depression, social anxiety disorder, schizoaffective, and bipolar disorder. Kareem said several people in his family have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he does not pretend to understand why he is afflicted the way he is, or even what precisely afflicts him. 

On the one hand, Kareem questions how much choice people really have. “People are not making choices as much as you think,” Kareem said about French’s analysis. “I’m starting to think that the behavioral scientists are right about a lot more than I had expected.”

What were they saying, I asked?

“That a lot of what people do is just reaction. It’s just kind of built in,” he said.

On the other hand, Kareem looks at the lives of other homeless people at the shelter, other people he has worked with, and within himself, too, and he laments his own bad choices. 

“Where you are today,” I asked, “is it mostly a result of bad choices or is it mostly a result of bad circumstances and not good genetics?”

“I think it’s all of it,” Kareem responded. “I think some of my bad choices—some of the worst choices I made—was when I was in college; I just wasn’t right.”

Many of us make our earliest choices in a landscape frozen over by isolation, our mental health affected by the reality that there never was a big coal fire to warm us at all. 

He was a gifted kid who basically coasted through high school, never really putting in a lot of work. He thought he could do the same at Bowling Green State University, putting in a minimal amount of effort for good results, but he failed. When a group of friends invited him to tag along with them to southern Ohio to live, he did. He wasn’t happy in college—in fact, he told me he couldn’t remember ever being happy—and he thought he might find happiness with his friends. So he took a job at a pizza shop and spent five years there. But somewhere during those five years, he ended up in the mental health hospital. 

“Some of the bad choices just happen out of anxiety—running away from bad situations,” Kareem said. ”And in the process, it gets worse.” 

Today, Kareem has come to some peace with his own bad choices, putting them into the context of what he inherited. “I had to get to a point to where I had to hold myself accountable for my decisions, but I had to recognize that some of these decisions I made happened before I was done cooking mentally,” he said. “Bad circumstances, when I was a teenager and a child, affected the decisions I made, and I can’t beat myself up for that stuff. So, if I had finished college, I’d be in a very different place right now.”

Kareem also wonders if he carries some trauma within him from his parents’ divorce. Kareem has never had a girlfriend, but there was a girl he really liked, though they were never formally in a relationship. 

She came from a broken home, too. When we were together/not together, people who watched us interact in person made the observation, ‘They’re like this divorced couple.’ And I’m wondering if that’s because we had already sort of broken up—or if that’s just because that’s what we’re carrying around with us, like that’s what we knew? I’m not sure.

***

We were out of town for my grandpa’s funeral when I got a call from Kareem: after only a week of job training, he was done. It was a terrible work environment that brought out the worst of his anxiety, he said, and there was no way he could be expected to do his job with the level of training provided. So he was back to square one: without a job, without money, and looking for work. 

Was Kareem back at square one because of a bad choice? And could he get to a better place by making better choices? Or was there also something mysterious at work—some combination of genes and biochemicals interacting with free choice that is overwhelming people like Kareem? 

“Mental illness is like any other bodily illness” is a common thing we say—and, in many ways, it’s true.  But what if modern society is also sick, tearing apart organic groups meant to grow and stick together? A mom and dad for a child, an extended family and a community to shelter the nuclear unit, and a web of meaning and support surrounding those core communities. What if there is something about modern life and modern family structures that make our brains more vulnerable to mental illness? 

I ask these questions as a child of the Old Order Amish. Yes, I can point to my Amish cousin—a father and husband surrounded by a supportive community of parents, siblings, extended family, neighbors, and religious meaning—who nevertheless struggles with such severe mental illness that he lives for the time at an in-patient mental health clinic several states away from his family. Without a doubt, Amish people are not exempt from mental illness. But as journalist Johann Hari points out in Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions, a 1970s study on Amish mental health found that they had significantly lower levels of depression than other Americans (Hari says smaller studies have confirmed the finding). 

Why? Perhaps because, as one Indiana Amish man said to Hari, the Amish experience a “sense of being at home.” Hari went on to explain,  "[The Amish man] gave me an image to describe this. Human life, he says, is like a big warm coal fire that is glowing. But if you take out one coal and isolate it, it’ll burn out quickly. We keep each other warm, he says, by staying together."

This keeping each other warm was impossible to miss at my Amish grandfather’s funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I was staying when Kareem told me he was quitting his job. My grandfather died on a late Friday afternoon, and over the next three days, hundreds of family, neighbors, and fellow churchgoers made a pilgrimage to the old family farmhouse to view his body, to comfort those who mourned, and to help out a grieving family. With astonishing alacrity and generosity, a team of about 25 families of neighbors and church people promptly pulled together to coordinate every last detail: traveling to far-flung counties to tell others of my grandfather’s death, cleaning the massive farmhouse that would be the site of the viewing and funeral, making meals for everyone, and shoveling the fresh six inches of snow that fell on the day of the funeral. The visits began immediately on Friday night and never stopped until Monday, the day my grandfather was buried. The Amish have had about three centuries to perfect the art of community, and they have become masters of the craft. 

Often due in part to family breakdown, Kareem and so many others like him have no such community from which to draw—and are devoid of this centuries-old support system. 

“I think a big problem is isolation,” he told me. 

When I mentioned Hari’s thesis to Kareem, it made sense to him. “People in these less advanced countries being happier, [they’re] just not being concerned with stuff,” he said. “Like, ‘I was with my family today and it was a great day.’ That’s where they get their satisfaction.” But, he added, many people today do not have these kinds of family connections.

He said it reminded him of the Pixar film Wall-e, whose dystopian plot he considers an apt depiction of isolation in the modern age. In the film, the humans of the future, atrophied and immobile, are unable to move from their motorized chairs and interact with others through the interface of the personalized screens that constantly hover in front of their faces. 

“We are living in something very unnatural,” Kareem said. “We created our own hell.” 

Isn’t that the nub: We created? Many of us make our earliest choices in a landscape frozen over by isolation, our mental health affected by the reality that there never was a big coal fire to warm us at all. So even if we are invited into the glow of those fires later in life, we find ourselves instinctively turning away, our habits formed amid the fissures of fragmentation and isolation. As Kareem told me, “there is help available”—but his “gut level” instincts kick in, and he finds himself walking away from opportunities and conversations. 

“And sometimes it’s not like I even really want to [walk away],” he said. “You kind of feel like you’ve been uninvited—and then you walk away and realize you uninvited yourself.” 

Is there a boot on the neck of working-class Americans? It may often be a man’s own boot. But we are social beings coming of age in a particular society with brains and bodies that have surely been negatively affected by the weaknesses of our society. That, too, is part of the story that we can’t afford to overlook.

*Name has been changed to protect his privacy. 

David Lapp is a co-founder of Better Angels and a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. Along with his wife, Amber, David serves as co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project. 

In February, the Atlanta Public Schools announced that every one of its 6,000 middle school students would receive a new laptop with wireless Internet access, which superintendent Meria Carstarphen called “the tools they need to succeed both in school and at home.” Likewise, to combat St. Louis’s “digital divide,” schools have given children low-cost laptops, and local libraries are loaning out as many broadband “hotspot” devices as they can. Virginia’s Arlington County is providing free WiFi to low-income residents with school-age children.

But what problem are they trying to solve? The “digital divide” commonly refers to the question of who has access to the Internet, but at least when it comes to race and income, that gap is pretty insignificant. Policymakers are too busy bridging a fake divide to notice the real one right under their noses. The real divide is actually in time spent on screens, and there, the gap is enormous. The children at the disadvantage are the ones who have more access to screens, not less.

According to 2018 data from the Pew Research Center, white, black and Hispanic Americans use the Internet at virtually identical rates. The same is true among teens, for whom smartphone use is “nearly universal.” Even when it comes to computers, the differences are minimal: Slightly fewer Hispanic teens have access to these devices, but even then, 82 percent of them use computers. Income doesn’t make a major difference in Internet access, either.

The amount of time teenagers spend on those devices, however, is significantly affected by both race and family structure.

According to new data provided to me by the American Family Survey, from Deseret News and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, in families headed by two married, biological parents, 49 percent of teens spend less than an hour on screens per day and only 15.1 percent spend more than three hours. In households led by single, divorced or cohabiting parents, 31.9 percent of teenagers spend more than three hours a day on screens. That pattern holds for other forms of media: Teenagers who are growing up in homes with married biological parents are much less likely to spend a great deal of time on social media and video games.

Continue reading at The Washington Post . . . .

It is a truth widely acknowledged amongst the ancients that a society lacking in virtue is in want of many farmers. With apologies to Jane Austen, that is one of the first things that came to my mind while reading U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) recent policy proposals to help rescue American agriculture. Along with other proposed reforms, the presidential candidate plans to reverse major mergers amongst large agricultural companies, such as the recent Bayer-Monsanto merger, and to break up vertically integrated companies like Tyson. She also plans to rewrite certain regulations, so that farmers could, for example, repair their own equipment rather than being required to go through the manufacturer.

The ancient Greek Xenophon praised the generosity of farmers, likening them to artists, and noting that, unlike most artists, farmers are quite pleased to show another the secrets of their handicraft. The early protestant reformer Martin Bucer, who also mentored a young French pastor named John Calvin, wrote that farming is “the most Christian profession,” because it is “the most profitable to the neighbors and (causes) them the least trouble.”

The founders themselves were also clear as to the value of the agrarian life. In a 1794 letter, our nation’s second president, John Adams wrote, “I begin now to think all time lost that is not employed in farming.” It’s a sad thing that a class once so revered has now fallen into such disregard in the halls of power.

Given this rather remarkable litany of praise from the classic writers of the western world, including key figures in American history, one would expect the Republican party to be arrayed in support of today’s struggling family farmers.

And they are struggling. The costs of simply getting a crop in the ground for most farmers are staggering. Food prices are plummeting, which takes a direct cut out of the farm’s bottom line. The safety net for farmers, should something go wrong, is weak. The local support systems traditionally provided by small towns are disappearing as those towns disappear. And, unsurprisingly, all of this has led to a mental health crisis and rising suicide numbers, although the exact nature of the suicide problem among farmers is still contested.

So how is it that today’s farmers and farmworkers in America are dying—often quite literally of despair, if the number of farmer suicides is any indicator—and it is only progressive politicians, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who seem to recognize their plight?

The difficulty is hinted at in the Bucer quote. To the wise men of old, wealth was not predominantly identified with financial wealth. Certainly, financial wealth had some advantages in terms of how it allowed one to serve a neighbor. Indeed, some of Bucer’s successors would go so far as to argue that one should try to become rich so that one can then be more generous. Even so, the most basic form of wealth was believed to be life, and life was sustained first and foremost by the land. Thus, Bucer argued that it is farming and not finance that “brings most profit to neighbor.”

This is because wealth, for Bucer, was not chiefly a matter of finance, but of being materially sustained by the land in order to give oneself more completely to love of God and neighbor which is, after all, what man is made to do, according to these early modern reformers.

The point is not simply that good farming provides for our material sustenance, though it does that. It is that good farming underlies a more general relationship of mutual giving between humanity and nature, a relationship in which each says to the other “what do you need from me in order to thrive?” Such questions underlie the old agrarian virtues. They also go some way toward explaining why so many American founders were concerned with the work of farmers and the cultivation of the land.

Because most of America’s leaders have forgotten this ancient wisdom, they have forgotten the men and women who give their lives to the land. Ugly terms like “flyover country” are ubiquitous across the political spectrum at a time when very few things are. And, indeed, part of what makes Sen. Warren’s work so noteworthy is precisely its rarity even among Democrats. Yet Republicans must share in this blame too, and, in one sense, may perhaps need to bear the larger share of it.

Good farming underlies a more general relationship of mutual giving between humanity and nature, a relationship in which each says to the other “what do you need from me in order to thrive?” 

It was, after all, a Republican secretary of agriculture, Nixon appointee, and Ford cabinet member, Earl Butz, who accelerated the death of family farms in America by telling farmers to “adapt or die,” and “get big or get out.” Moreover, the decline of America’s farms largely occurred under a Republican watch—one recalls the farming crisis of the 1980s at a time when most of the rest of America was booming under President Reagan.

Thankfully, the ideological descendants of pro-worker Democrats are beginning to see America’s farmers. That’s one thing that has become plain even this early in the presidential campaign season. Sen. Warren is championing a set of policies that would level the playing field for small family farms who currently are left with little recourse save to ask, “how high?” whenever Monsanto or Bayer or Tyson instruct them to jump. By breaking up dangerous mergers and vertically integrated companies, Warren is actually creating circumstances where agricultural markets can work as intended instead of simply becoming a tributary to agribusiness.

Warren’s plan has also inspired imitations from other Democrat contenders, including Bernie Sanders. This, of course, comes at the same time that many American farmers who have played the factory farm game, often out of necessity, have been badly hurt by President Trump’s trade policy.

But supporting America’s farmers does not require endorsing every policy proposed by Sen. Warren’s campaign or any other campaign. There may be other, more effective policy levers to pull to secure similar outcomes. There may be better ways of empowering local farmers to care for their land. Indeed, one would think the Republican bias toward federalism would serve well on precisely these questions. But so far, there are few signs that the GOP has even noticed the problems facing American farmers.

But shouldn’t it be a goal of any political movement that calls itself “conservative” to conserve the most basic resource given to us—the land. Doing that well will require those on the Right to realize a certain “eyes-to-acres” ratio, to borrow a term from Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry.

This should be common sense. We do not expect a single teacher to adequately educate 50 children in a single classroom. Nor should we expect a single farmer to adequately care for thousands of acres on a single farm. We may not need progressive policies. But we do need a humane scale for agriculture—and that means we will need, somehow, to grow the number of small, family farms in America.

Older forms of conservatives, who see their conservatism as being defined by a fidelity to what Russell Kirk called, “the permanent things,” should welcome these progressive allies whose pro-worker, egalitarian sensibilities have led them to champion the plight of farming families. Yet surely it is conservatives—who share a philological root term with the environmentalists we know as “conservationists,” after all—who have the better basis for this careful attentiveness to the lives of agrarian workers and the land on which they work?

If our nation’s leaders, on the Right or the Left, are to make such a stand in defense of our farmers, we must first recover a wisdom older than the folly of the Austrians or the wisdom of the pro-labor advocates. We must also recover a love of the permanent things, of the natural order, of growing things. And we need to learn to see the world as it is given and to love it.

This is unsurprising, of course. For politics is first and foremost about love—the love that exists between neighbors who are, likewise, devoted to a love of their home. Ultimately, it is about the establishment of common objects of love that unite a polity, to borrow a phrase from theologian Oliver O’Donovan. If conservatives do not put forth policies that show they love the land and the men and women who cultivate it, then those needed citizens will find other champions.

Indeed, they may already have.

Jake Meador is the author of the forthcoming In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World (InterVarsity Press). He serves as the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy and Vice President of the Davenant Institute. He lives in Lincoln NE with his wife and three children. Follow him on Twitter @jake_meador.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies. 

After crashing my motorbike three times in the space of 12 months, my wife made me sell it. “Too dangerous,” was her logic, and it was hard for me to argue based on my track record. 

I purchased a bicycle, figuring that it would help me regain my lost fitness. My first day on the bike I rode 11kms. The slightest incline sent my heart rate skyrocketing, and I wondered if I would pass out before I made it to my destination. There was nothing easy about it. 

But I persisted. Each day I rode. I built up my endurance and my strength. After about a year, I completed my first 100km ride. I nearly cried at the end of it, but I had done it! After about two years of cycling, I rode from Wollongong to Gosford (New South Wales, Australia)—a distance of around 200kms. Because of the compounding effect of my efforts over the previous two years, it was not as hard as I had thought it might be. 

But what does this have to do with parenting? 

Recently a parent asked me an interesting question. She said, “Can easy parenting be good parenting?” 

My first response was this: 

What’s easy about parenting?

If there was ever a life-course designed for character development, it would be a parenting course! Parenting stretches us, tests us, challenges us, and ultimately, if we let it, molds and refines us. Anyone who knows anything about refining processes knows that it often involves fire (in the case of metals), or thrashing (in the case of wheat) or being spun in a centrifuge (in the case of sugar). All refining is about purification—and none of it seems pleasant. Yet the outcome is remarkable. 

Our characters can be refined by our parenting—but is it easy? 

Good parenting requires immense selflessness. It requires time, effort, patience, guidance, teaching, being there, understanding, and constantly, never-endingly doing! The best parents—the ones who make themselves essentially obsolete because their kids no longer need them to answer every question and help with every task—are the ones who are often the most involved! It’s not easy. 

But it doesn’t have to always be like that.

Nineteenth century philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said:  “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed, but that our power to do has increased.”

 In the same way that my bike riding got easier, and I was able to take on bigger and bigger challenges, our parenting becomes easier the more we practice it, so long as we practice good habits. 

The best parents—the ones who make themselves essentially obsolete because their kids no longer need them to answer every question and help with every task—are the ones who are often the most involved.

The Easy Way is Actually the Hard Way

When we take the easy road with parenting, we often make things harder in the long run. For example, it is easy to: 

• Let the kids eat what they want when they want. 
• Give the kids unfettered access to screens and entertainment. 
• Do all the cleaning up and chores ourselves rather than assign chores and follow up. 
• Yell and threaten and punish when the children don’t do as they’re asked. 
• Let the kids do what they want so we can do all those things that keep us so busy (and distracted). 

Anyone who has taken this parenting road will realize that vacillating between lots of limits (authoritarian) and no limits (permissiveness) actually leads to children who easily become bratty, entitled, demanding, and selfish. In other words, when we go for “easy” what we get is “hard”— it’s just that the results take a little while to measure. 

The Hard Way is Actually the Easy Way

Similarly, when we take the seemingly "hard" road in the short run, we actually make it easier in the long term. For example, it is often hard to: 

• Spend time in our relationships with our children—particularly with so much going on. 
• Establish clear limits and expectations with our children (for everything from food to tech to sleep)—especially when they resist. 
• Work together with our children—because they often fight against us. 
• Get involved in our children’s lives and take the time to understand their challenges. 
• Establish trust and emotional intimacy. 

Yet anyone who has followed this harder course will know that in spite of the regular bumps along the road, the relationship is easier to manage over time because kids feel understood, they trust us, and we can influence them in wise ways. 

So, can easy parenting be good parenting?

Easy parenting can be good parenting, but it takes a lot of hard work for it to become easy. If we are willing to put in the hard work by practicing good parenting habits, we’ll find that we become better at it and that what once was hard, has become easy.

Dr. Justin Coulson is a bestselling author, husband, and father of six. His new book is 10 Things Every Parent Needs to Know.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Happy Families blog. It has been reprinted here with the author's permission.

The “sex drought” is back in the news. The release of a new wave of the General Social Survey in March brought with it the revelation that the proportion of Americans self-reporting no sex in the past year continues to climb, hitting 23% in 2018.

Much of this decline is due to America’s greying population: older people have less sex, and there are more old people today than in years past. But a great deal of debate has centered around the role that young people play in the drop: 18% of 18-to-34-year-olds were not having sex in 2018, compared to just 7% as recently as 2008. This rise appears to be driven by young men.

IFS fellow Lyman Stone has replicated this finding with two other major surveys, albeit with different timing, such that in the aggregate it appears as a slow increase rather than a sudden jump. It’s reasonable to assume, then, that lots of young American men are not having sex. The obvious question is: why?

Answers have tended to focus on issues of the moment. Psychologist Jean Twenge pointed to rising screen use and an increase in living at home; New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg intimated that it was thanks to greater sexual agency among young women thanks to #MeToo.

With limited data, it’s hard to confirm these claims. But we can ask a related question: who are the young men currently not having sex? We can turn back to the GSS to answer this. Every survey period since 1989, it has asked respondents, “about how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?” (What “sex” means is left undefined.)

I looked at data from the 2010, 2014, 2016, and 2018 waves of the GSS on men aged 18 to 34. (I omitted 2012 because the question was only administered to some respondents in that year—the results look much the same if 2012 is included accounting for this fact.) In total, 138 respondents reported no sex in the past year—out of 906 men, aged 18 to 34, who provided responses to the relevant survey question.

Statistically meaningful comparison over time becomes challenging with very subdivided groups, so I did not look at how these data have changed survey-to-survey. But, by combining surveys that cover the “sex drop,” we can get a picture of who the sexless young men are.

The obvious place to start is with demographics. Men who did and did not have sex in the past year look approximately the same in terms of race and Hispanic identity. Hispanic men and “other” men (the language used in the GSS’s race question) were slightly overrepresented among men without sex, although that may just be a fluke.

Note: Each bar represents the proportion of the "any sex" and "no sex" populations in that category,
such that the sum across the categories for each population totals 100%.

There is similarly not a huge difference when it comes to the highest achieved degree, as the figure below illustrates. (I’ve here omitted individuals who describe themselves as in school.) Men who had no sex in the past year are slightly more likely to have some college or a college/graduate degree. But the size of the difference between groups is not pronounced.

Note: Each bar represents the proportion of the "any sex" and "no sex" populations in that category,
such that the sum across the categories for each population totals 100%.

Does this mean that the sex decline is across socio-economic groups, or that higher-status men are having less sex? Sort of, but the full story is more complicated. We can look first at men’s labor force status, i.e. whether they were employed, unemployed, or not in the labor force altogether.

Note: Each bar represents the proportion of the "any sex" and "no sex" populations in that category,
such that the sum across the categories for each population totals 100%.

Sexless men are notably more likely to not be employed, either because a) they are part-time or unemployed or b) they are in school. A degree may not determine sexual activity but being a student does—and contrary to popular belief, it means a greater likelihood of sexlessness (at least for men). After you get the degree, though, having a steady job is clearly linked to being more sexually active.

The other socio-economic fact: among employed respondents, low earning is linked to sexlessness.

Note: Each bar represents the proportion of the "any sex" and "no sex" populations in that category,
such that the sum across the categories for each population totals 100%.

From all of this, we can glean that the sexless men are predominantly either a) students, b) unemployed, or c) partially-employed and/or low-earners. But, as the figure below shows, one factor stands out as an even more pronounced between-groups difference.

Note: Each bar represents the proportion of the "any sex" and "no sex" populations in that category,
such that the sum across the categories for each population totals 100%.

Sexless young men are substantially more likely to classify themselves as “never married,” and less likely to be married, than their sex-having peers. As I and others have argued, the single biggest driver of the sex drop, in general, is the retreat from marriage—a stable partner is the best guarantee of regular sex.

As much is supported by a closer look at the data I’ve used here. Regressing all of these variables (as well as year and age) against past-year sexlessness, the most statistically significant outcome (p < 0.001) is having never been married. The only other categorical variables that are notably significant (p < 0.05) are being unemployed and divorced. In other words, sexlessness is likely mostly about being unmarried (the latter especially explains all the sexless students), with unemployment as a compounding factor.¹

A simplified interpretation of the preceding finding is that not having sex predominates among low-status men: the poor, unemployed, and students. An increase in sexlessness reflects a shift of young men into that group—for example, a declining male labor force participation rate.

Adding marriage allows us to nuance this interpretation. As Richard Reeves and others have noted, the decline of marriage did not happen equally across socioeconomic groups—higher-status groups preserve marriage rates similar to—if slightly less than—those of 50 years ago. Sexlessness is largely explained by being unmarried, but it’s much harder for men to get married if they’re unemployed or low-earning. Thus, the sex drop is an issue of marriage inequity.

There’s a separate story that dovetails with this one, but it is more specific to the 18-to-34-year-old demographic and may also help explain why college students and young men with advanced degrees are not having as much sex as they used to. Millennials are opting to delay marriage later and later, reframing it as a “capstone” accomplishment rather than a “cornerstone” of a stable (sex) life.

This pickiness is revealed, for example, in declining divorce rates among the 18-to-34-year-old cohort. Sociologist Philip Cohen has argued that this decline reflects an “increasingly selective nature” to marriage, which creates greater stability, but also makes marriage an “increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.”

Young men’s sexlessness is mostly about access to marriage, and secondarily about economic disadvantage. But increasingly, these two go together. The “sex drought” is a marriage drought, and the marriage drought both reflects and perpetuates deeper issues of inequality.

Charles Fain Lehman is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon, where he covers crime, law, drugs, immigration, and social issues. Reach him on twitter @CharlesFLehman.

1. Regression table available upon request.

For about two decades, the economist James Heckman has been advancing a striking narrative about human capital. Programs that invest in disadvantaged young children, he claims, have a much higher payoff than do similar investments in disadvantaged adults. Indeed, in his reading of the evidence, investments in adults “past a certain age and below a certain skill level” don’t produce enough in benefits to exceed the costs at all. To take the canonical example, he believes preschools programs deliver far more rewards, per dollar spent, than job training.

Thus the “Heckman Curve” is downward-sloping. The older the person, the less the benefit of trying to improve their human capital.

This is intuitive in some ways: The younger someone is at the time of an intervention, the more years he has left to benefit from it, and we tend to think of kids as “impressionable.” But it’s counterintuitive in another: The effects of an intervention often wear off over time, and the outcomes we care about most—crime, employment, unintended pregnancy, etc.—occur long after preschool age. And a new study by David Rea and Tony Burton, using an extensive set of data about various programs’ efficacy, fails to support the idea that programs targeting kids are systematically more cost-effective.

Before getting to the new research, it’s worth noting that both sides of the preschool-is-awesome/job-training-is-worthless claim are disputable. The effectiveness of preschool is in fact hotly contested, with Grover Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution being a leading skeptic. In a fascinating recent report, Whitehurst advanced a theory that the early-childhood environment merely needs to be “good enough”: we can gain a lot by helping the very most deprived kids, but beyond a certain minimal level of safety and stimulation, kids’ environments don’t make all that much of a difference to their later outcomes. Thus, preschool interventions can help, but to a far more limited extent than many think.

It’s also important that a good deal of Heckman’s faith in preschool, reflected in the high value of early-childhood interventions he reports, stems from just two interventions, the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool Projects. These experiments produced long-term improvements so strong that many find them implausible, may have suffered from methodological difficulties (such as incorrect randomization of which kids were given the treatment), and may not scale up to a nationwide level because they were very small, very focused, and very expensive.

Meanwhile, it may not be the case that job training is generally useless because some newer programs have had decent results. In fact, a recent report on child poverty from the National Academies included one program, WorkAdvance, on its list of solutions. WorkAdvance is a “sectoral” training approach, meaning the program works with employers to get people into job sectors where employment opportunities are strong. There’s good evidence that men in particular benefit, though we could use a lot more research on women, as well as longer-term follow-up to see for how long the program boosts employment and earnings.

Anyhow, to get at the Heckman Curve’s core assertion in a more comprehensive way, the new study relies on a database maintained by the Washington Institute for Public Policy. This is a compilation of information about various interventions, and conveniently it includes estimated cost-to-benefit ratios gathered from the relevant academic research.

Here’s how the institute itself describes its methods (there’s a technical report as well):

First, we systematically assess all high-quality studies from the United States and elsewhere to identify policy options that have been tested and found to achieve improvements in outcomes. Second, we determine how much it would cost Washington taxpayers to produce the results found in Step 1, and calculate how much it would be worth to people in Washington State to achieve the improved outcome. That is, in dollars and cents terms, we compare the benefits and costs of each policy option. It is important to note that the benefit-cost estimates pertain specifically to Washington State; results will vary from state to state. Third, we assess the risk in the estimates to determine the odds that a particular policy option will at least break even.

Within this data set, it turns out there isn’t much of a systematic relationship between the value of an intervention and the age of the people it targets.

As Rea and Burton write:

The average benefit cost ratios for interventions targeted at those aged 5 years and under are lower than for other age groups. However, it is important to note there are large standard errors for many of the estimates, and the difference is not always statistically significant. At a minimum the data suggests that interventions targeted at young children do not have higher rates of return than those targeted at older age groups.

It would be an overstatement to say this debunks Heckman’s narrative, especially the idea that early-childhood development is incredibly important. The authors themselves stop short of saying that, and as Andrew Gelman notes, some of the benefit-to-cost ratios included in the study seem preposterously high, raising questions about the underlying data.

Interested readers can go through the numbers estimate-by-estimate here. I was especially troubled by a ratio of 94.89:1 for “growth mindset interventions ”—“psychological interventions that encourage students to believe that intelligence is malleable and can be changed with experience and learning,” which apparently cost $40 but deliver $3,765 in benefits —given that such interventions proved weak in an enormous meta-analysis last year. In the institute’s defense, however, its methods have been extensively peer-reviewed, as described in the technical document linked above.

But this certainly throws some cold water on the Heckman Curve. It also encourages us to think a little more deeply about what the Heckman Curve means. Even if we do find a systematic relationship between the age ranges an intervention targets and its cost-effectiveness as estimated in academic research, what can we truly conclude from it?

To raise just a few of the difficulties inherent in evaluating a claim like this, there’s the question of which interventions are even being tried and with how much enthusiasm, since you can’t plot the effectiveness of interventions that aren’t being tried. Maybe we’re failing to help some age groups because we’re not trying hard enough or haven’t hit on the right ideas (“sectoral” job training is one candidate), not because those age groups are a lost cause. Or maybe we try too hard with some groups, funding ideas that aren’t that promising to begin with. Or maybe researchers are willing to “tweak” their methods a little more to justify programs they like, and which programs they like depends on the folks targeted.

And don’t forget Whitehurst’s argument that some children might benefit far more from interventions than others, which raises another issue: the degree to which a given age group appears helpable might also be a function of how well programs are targeting the most helpable people within them. Rea and Burton highlight the same thing regarding efforts to reduce youth offending: "While early prevention programs may be effective at reducing offending, they are not necessarily more cost effective than later interventions if they require considerable investment in those who are not at risk."

Further, in terms of the benefit-to-cost ratios we’re so focused on, how long are people being followed in evaluations, and are we always measuring outcomes the right way? Some interventions, such as moving a child to a new neighborhood, might have little impact at first yet improve outcomes years down the line. Other times, an effort to increase test scores might increase softer skills instead, or getting a dad a job might also improve his kids’ outcomes, which the researchers may or may not have thought to measure. And are we “discounting” the benefits we expect in the future too much or too little?

Most of these issues can’t be addressed in a completely satisfactory way. Maybe this entire project—of plotting the “effectiveness” of whatever interventions happen to have been tried, as measured by one’s necessarily subjective assessment of the available studies, against the ages of the people the interventions target—is not helpful. There may not be a systematic relationship between the two at all, as the new study shows, and even if there is a systematic relationship, it may mean any number of things.

It would be better to look at the results of each program by itself, paying very close attention to the methods of the studies used to evaluate it, and increasing or reducing funding from there—and continuing to experiment with promising ideas targeted at all ages.

Robert VerBruggen is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a deputy managing editor of National Review.

Teens Face Health and Safety Risks Exploring Sex Online
Caroline Brooks, Megan Maas,  MSU Today (Michigan State University)

Why Family Matters—Comprehensive Analysis of the Consequences of Family Breakdown
The Centre for Social Justice (UK)

Fanning the Fatherhood FIRE: A National Fatherhood Summit
June 4-June 6, Nashville, TN
Administration for Children & Families, DHHS

Yes Means Yes: Why Verbal Consent Policies are Ineffective
Donna Freitas, OUP blog, Oxford University Press

Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Different Than Child Trauma and It's Critical to Understand Why
Jessica Dym Bartlett & Vanessa Sacks, Child Trends

Shorter legal workweeks in Korea have helped working men give better care to their aging parents, according to evidence cited in a recent research article by Erin Hye-Won Kim, Changjun Lee, and Young Kyung Do. The authors argue this is important for the mental and physical health of both generations, and that the policy even promotes gender equity.

The form of their argument is naturally similar to the rhetoric around work-family reconciliation policies for workers who are rearing children. The parallels are nonetheless striking:

1. They ask whether a legislative change can make work and family more compatible, focusing on the specific question of whether regulating a maximum workweek can help workers interact more with their families. In their case, the question is whether working men spend more time with their parents when they are not required to put in long work hours.
2. Their concern is fueled by low fertility. While we care about the well-being of children and the elderly, regardless of how many of them there are, part of the reason work-family balance attracts so much attention is that without it, people can’t be expected to have as many children. After low fertility has persisted for awhile, the involvement of each adult child with their parents (and parents-in-law) matters more because fewer adult children have siblings with whom to share elderly care.
3. The concern of Kim and her coauthors is further heightened by focusing on a context where caregiving is largely a private responsibility. Just as the U.S. is often singled out as the only advanced democracy without a public provision for paid parental leave, Korea is a familistic society where elder care is largely a private responsibility. So at this point in history, the state is minimally involved in elder care, despite a shortage of siblings and siblings-in-law among adult workers.

Those in the United States seeking work-family balance do, however, have an important advantage over their Korean counterparts—namely a 40-hour workweek. Forty hours doesn’t seem short to any of us who have tried maintaining those hours while providing care to other family members, but it easily beats the 44-hour standard workweek that Koreans had until 2004. That was when the Korean government began reducing its legal workweek, but the changes were not widespread until 2011.

Fortunately, from a statistical point of view, Kim et al. were able to identify the year between 2004 and 2011 in which the legislative change reached individual workers. In short, they were able to identify whether the policy change actually mattered by observing behavior before and after workers were affected. The upshot was that shorter workweeks translated into men visiting their parents more often. The effects were not trivial, with the median number of visits going up from 12 per year to 21, and the average going up from 37.2 to about 90. The authors point out that one of the reasons why these dramatic effects are believable is that a 40-hour workweek allows a 2-day weekend for visiting distant kin, whereas the 44-hour workweek commonly includes a half-day of work on Saturdays.

So, while the Korean government still does not have an extensive social safety net for its elderly, it has expanded the practicality of private care by changing the structure of work in a family-friendly way. This was a preferred intervention in a work-oriented and family-centered culture, and Kim and her coauthors show that it succeeded. 

It would be easy to focus on other interventions that aging Korean adults need, but I instead close by emphasizing why this singular change is nonetheless a success story. First, the greater depression and lower self-esteem among older adults living alone are offset by interacting with their non-resident children. Further, children who visit their parents regularly can identify needs before they become consequential for health and well-being. So for the parent’s health, the policy is a win.

The authors also explain that the policy can help contribute to gender equity in a challenging culture where traditional norms about filial piety, high devotion to work, and low fertility conspire to make it natural for husbands to put pressure on their wives to fulfill their own obligations to their parents. Spousal conflict is likely as wives face the same pressures from family, work, and population age structure. The study’s results showed that reducing men’s work hours increased men’s visits to their parents. Thus, the policy seems particularly beneficial for women and for spousal harmony.

The third win is in the lives of the workers themselves. Long work hours interfere with family roles—not just directly because of the time constraint, but also by contributing to physical strain and mental stress. As Kim et al. write, “Regulating maximum work hours may serve as an effective policy tool for improving the well-being of not just workers and their nuclear families, but also of their extended families.” A triple win.

Laurie DeRose is a Research Assistant Professor at the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland at College Park and a senior fellow with the Institute for Family Studies. She is also Director of Research for the World Family Map project.

Editor's Note: The following essay is a condensed version of a longer essay that appeared first in National Affairs.

Last year, A&E ran a reality program called "Born Behind Bars," which provides a glimpse into life inside a prison nursery. During one episode, a young mother looks at her infant son and says, "You're incarcerated with me and [you] didn't do anything." Then she looks up at another mother, also raising her baby in the nursery at Indiana's maximum-security prison, and says, "It makes you feel guilty. Pregnancy and prison are the two worst things in life together." Not that they're both bad, she explains, just a bad combination, adding, "Pregnancy is supposed to be happy and prison is like the closest thing to dying."

As heartbreaking as her analysis is, her understanding is also a much more realistic take on what it means to raise a child in prison than many advocates of prison nurseries seem willing to acknowledge.

Fewer than a dozen states have such programs, but because of the growth in the number of women in prison, there is increasing pressure to expand them. It is worth examining these programs more closely—not only because we do not fully understand the impact of such environments on children, but also as part of a larger effort to weigh the effects of incarceration on families and the effect that contact with imprisoned parents has on young children.

The oldest prison nursery in the nation was started at Bedford Hills, New York, in 1901 and has been in continuous operation since. There were others in the first half of the 20th century, but their popularity waned in the 1970s as people began to realize that this might not be an acceptable environment in which to raise children. There are currently eight states with prison-nursery programs, some of which allow children to live with their mothers up to the age of three. Most ban prisoners who have committed violent crimes from the program, although there are a few exceptions.

Proponents of such programs point to studies that suggest they produce lower recidivism rates for the mothers who participate. In Nebraska , for instance, of the 30 women who gave birth in prison in the five years before the implementation of the nursery program, 33% reoffended. For a similar period of time after the program was implemented, among 44 women who participated, there was only a 9% recidivism rate, and another two individuals returned to prison for parole violations.

There are problems with this study and others—including selection bias and a lack of information about what happened to a number of the initial participants. But even if these programs produced good results for mothers, their effect on children is much more questionable. A study by Liza Catan, which was released in 1992, found that infants in the prison nursery showed a strong attachment to their mothers, but experienced short-term detriments to development if they were there for four months or more. Another study by Nancy Busch-Rossnagel found that only about half of the infants were securely attached and that 33% were below the mean in overall development. An British study from the 1980s found that all infants in the nursery experienced "progressive developmental decline in motor and cognitive scores."

Despite the colorful walls and baby toys in these nurseries, the mothers and their babies are still in prison, and conditions are stressful. Outwardly it seems like the prison-nursery unit is calm and stable, but one always has the sense of tension bubbling just beneath the surface. The inmates' rooms are regularly searched. Guards listen to their conversations and watch their every interaction. Given what we know about the ways that even small children can sense and internalize the fear and stress experienced by the adults around them, this alone should raise serious concerns about prison nurseries.

In addition, the relationships among the inmates can be fraught. The women in these environments are often involved in turf battles of one sort or another. And sometimes the mothers become involved in sexual relationships with one another, despite it being prohibited. A 2001 study of Nebraska's prison-nursery program found that, of the 44 babies who were in the program, seven of their mothers were "involuntarily removed," and "the main reason was fighting with another inmate."

Even if some kind of secure attachment may occur in a prison-nursery environment, it is important to remember that no sooner do these babies and mothers bond than something might separate them completely, and for a long period of time. Whether because of a disciplinary action against a mother that might result in her removal from the program, a health problem for a baby, or simply the fact that a mother’s sentence is longer than the baby is allowed to stay, the traumatic effects on the child of being removed from the single person he or she has formed an attachment with can be devastating.

It's also true that even if a prison nursery tries to ensure that the end of a mother's sentence coincides with the point at which her baby ages out of the program, mothers can have their sentences lengthened for violating prison rules. This kind of bonding followed by extreme and sudden separation seems to be one of the worst imaginable outcomes for a child. Keep in mind that while they are in the prison nursery, they have almost no contact with any other adult like a father or grandmother—the people who are most likely to take them if they are forced to leave.

The other question, especially as children get older in these programs behind bars, is how their earliest memories will shape their future. Children as old as three may easily have memories of being in prison, or they will grow up hearing from others that they spent their first years of life incarcerated. This has the effect both of normalizing prison as well as presumably bringing them a kind of shame that is unnecessary and difficult to escape.

It is tempting to conclude that there is nothing worse than separating a child from his or her mother. But prison nurseries may be the exception.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  

Across the globe, and especially in the developed world and the United States, fertility rates have fallen below the levels that women say they want. I’ve made this point many times, and in many ways, and have argued that this is a bad sign for society: a world where people systematically fail to experience the family life they desire is likely to be a less happy world.

But one response has been quite common: is there actually any evidence that “missing kids” make parents unhappy? That is, might it be the case that a gap between ideal and achieved childbearing is actually fine because peoples’ abstract ideals aren’t always what would make them happy in the real world?

Women With a “Fertility Gap” Are Less Happy

This is a difficult question to test because it involves a set of basically impossible-to-analyze counterfactuals. We have poor enough data about happiness and fertility preferences to begin with; trying to add in some kind of quasi-causal test of exogenous shocks to the fertility gap would be next to impossible.

But we can at least look at some basic associations. Some people achieve their fertility ideals, and other people don’t. If the people who do achieve their ideals are less happy than people who undershoot their ideals, then it would be a significant argument against using fertility ideals as a valid measure. So, what actually happens in reality? Among women old enough to have completed their childbearing (ages 40 to 60 in my sample), does the relationship between actual and ideal childbearing predict happiness?

Women whose ideal fertility matches their achieved fertility are the most likely to report being very happy, and the least likely to report being not too happy. Both having more kids than desired and having fewer kids than desired are associated with a lower likelihood of being very happy; having more kids than desired is associated with considerably more unhappiness as well.

In other words, having more kids than she considers “ideal” is associated with a woman being less happy later in life. But it is also the case that not having the number of kids she considers ideal is associated with a woman being less happy! The effect is more modest, of course, but it is nonetheless present.

Recent research has shown that while parents of young children used to be less happy than other people, nowadays that gap has vanished. And while some critics have suggested that these findings are due to poor controls for the composition of childless households, the actual explanation is far simpler. Research on a massive database of developed-country survey respondents shows that children are indeed associated with significantly higher happiness throughout a parent’s life, once you control for financial difficulties. Moreover, if the sample is restricted to a parent’s own children in households where the parents of that child remain together, the happiness effects are particularly large and durable. In other words: if you and your spouse stick together and have babies, and if you are able to avoid financial distress, those kids do indeed make people a lot happier. Those are big “ifs,” but they point to the fact that it is not kids that makes people unhappy, it’s the cost of kids.

This helps explain why women who overshoot their fertility ideals are more unhappy than women who undershoot. It’s not that those moms dislike their above-ideals children! It’s that children are associated with greater financial distress, and financial distress causes unhappiness. If we could help reduce child-associated financial distress, such as through a child allowance, the happiness gap between above- and below-ideals for women would likely even out somewhat.

Fertility Ideals Are Stable

Sophisticated critics, however, won’t be convinced by my chart showing the association between happiness and the fertility gap. They might claim that late-in-life fertility ideals are endogenously determined by happiness: perhaps people who are generally happier will tend to say that their actual childbearing matches their ideals, meaning that the fertility gap doesn’t drive happiness, but rather happiness could drive the measurement of the fertility gap.

I can’t perfectly rule this out. But there’s at least some good reason to think this criticism is unfounded: fertility ideals are pretty stable across a person’s lifespan. While I can’t link data from the General Social Survey (GSS) longitudinally, I can at least take generational cohorts and see how their fertility ideals have changed across time, which may be a decent approximation of a person’s longitudinal experience.

As you can see, fertility ideals are quite stable over a generation’s lifespan. There’s some variation here and there, and it does seem like fertility ideals may be systematically higher among women under age 20 or over age 60, but for most working-age women, fertility ideals are insensitive to age and birth cohort. In other words, it does not seem like women make large revisions to their fertility ideals around age 40 to 60, the window I use for my analysis of completed fertility. It is possible that individual longitudinal histories would look different, but this chart is at least suggestive that the burden of proof lies on the critics to show that women revise their fertility ideals to rationalize births late in life. It seems far more likely that most women have stable ideals across their lifespan. This may be a contrast to fertility intentions, which research suggests can be quite volatile.

We can also look at the question a different way using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth’s 1979 (NLSY79) cohort. The women in this survey were asked in 1979 and 1982 about their general fertility ideals, their personal fertility desires, and their personal fertility expectations. Later in life, when these women were in their 50s, they were also asked a series of personality questions, one of which asked them whether they felt they were “calm or emotionally stable.” This is the closest I could find to a question about happiness or life satisfaction in the NLSY79. Looking at the women who said they were not “emotionally stable” is informative.

Women who had the number of children they had said was ideal for a family in a survey 30 years earlier in their life were slightly more likely to say they were emotionally stable than women who over- or under-shot their ideal fertility. Again, overshooting looks riskier than undershooting: although if we restrict it to just women who strongly agreed that they were emotionally stable, overshooting looks better than undershooting.

When it comes to personal desires, we see that undershooting is associated with slightly lower rates of emotional instability, but the difference is small and it vanishes if we restrict to women with the strongest expressed sentiments. Looking at expectations, we can see that women who achieved their childbearing expectations say they are less emotionally stable; but this may be because women with higher childbearing expectations were more likely to have already had a child when they were surveyed in 1979 or 1982, and teen pregnancy can have negative effects on a woman’s life outcomes.

In other words, the achievement of general fertility ideals actually does seem to be associated with at least one indirect measure of happiness even using longitudinal data. Finally, it turns out that the fertility gap as measured by the GSS explains a large share of the variation over time in happiness among women ages 40 to 60. The chart below compares the share of women in that age bracket whose achieved fertility equals their ideal fertility, as well as the share of women ages 40 to 60 who report being “very happy.”

Again, this is a very simple association, and so isn’t conclusive proof that the fertility gap causes unhappiness. But it certainly suggests that when analyzing the relationship between children and parental happiness, it may be important to think about parental fertility preferences. An additional child may be associated with very different happiness effects if it is helping a family achieve their desired number of kids, versus if it’s pushing them past their desired number of kids, and possibly into financial distress.

Thus, it doesn’t seem like what’s happening is just a matter of women redefining their current circumstances as ideal. It seems like what is happening is that there are real costs, in terms of happiness, to women not achieving their desired fertility. The fertility gap is associated with meaningful differences in happiness in cross-sectional data, fertility ideals don’t seem to change a large amount over a generation’s lifespan, and the prevalence of fertility achievement seems related to changes in happiness.

It turns out that if you read the surveys and listen to women, they aren’t just making things up when they express their fertility ideals. These stated preferences are meaningful and represent real differences in happiness when not achieved.

Lyman Stone is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Author’s Note: This is a revised version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. It can be found here. It includes additional methodological details for the statistically curious.

I sometimes encounter people I’ve come to think of as “IQ truthers.”  IQ is the magic social science variable that explains virtually every observed correlation. Racial differences? The intergenerational transmission of wealth? The effects of parenting or family structure? All of it must boil down to differences in IQ.

As a social scientist, I’m naturally resistant to single-variable theories. The world is just too complex for that. But it’s much more persuasive for me to respond with data. I was motivated to do so when I realized I had the appropriate national data at hand: the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-79). This is a representative sample of over 10,000 Americans between the ages of 14 and 22 initially interviewed in 1979, then annually or biennially thereafter. My subset ends in 2014. My NLSY-79 research looks at the economics of motherhood, so my analytic sample is limited to men and women with kids (hey, this is a blog post, not a peer-reviewed article). This leaves me with a sample size of about 7,100, more than enough for population estimates.

Early on in the panel, respondents were administered a variety of IQ tests, as well as the similar Armed Forces Qualifying Test. Only about 1,700 respondents got the IQ tests, while all were given the AFQT. AFQT and IQ measure essentially the same things and are highly correlated (r = .78). Accordingly, I’ll report results based on AFQT scores. Analysis based on IQ produced essentially the same results.

My existing research looks at family income, so I’ll go with it as the dependent variable here. It’s a better measure of living standards than individual income is. It’s top-coded at $300,000, logged for all regression analyses, and converted into 2018 dollars to account for inflation.

Do higher AFQT scores predict a higher income? Of course they do, as this graphic shows:

Note: This is a lowess regression model. The dependent variable is the median annual family income for all 26 waves of NLSY data.

But a lot of other things also predict income. So, what’s the unique contribution of AFQT scores? More precisely, how much of the variability in income can they explain?  Statisticians often answer this question by reporting a statistic called r-squared that varies from zero to one. In this analysis, zero means AFQT has no predictive power, while one would mean that someone’s income can be perfectly predicted by knowing their AFQT score. An r-squared of .5 would mean that half of the variation in income could be explained by knowing someone’s AFQT scores (or, less scientifically, half the time you can predict someone’s income by knowing how they did on the AFQT).

The data show that AFQT scores explain 21% of the variation in income between survey respondents. That translates to a correlation coefficient of .46. 

Is that a large correlation? It depends upon your perspective. If your cup is half full, you can correctly point out that .46 rivals the largest observed correlations in social psychology, sociology, and other relevant fields. But if your cup is half empty, you’ll say that many things determine how much money people make, and smarts is only one of them.

In fact, the true contribution of AFQT to income is probably smaller. That’s because AFQT is serving as a proxy for other attributes correlated with earnings. People with high AFQT scores probably stayed in school longer, and most likely had more successful parents. These and other correlates of intelligence factor into the aforementioned 21 percent.

To look at this, I estimated additional regression models.¹ One of them included a bevy of independent variables, all things social scientists generally use to predict income. Many of these attributes are measured at each survey wave: marital status and presence of a live-in partner, education, number of children, employment status, employment history, hours worked, and age. Measures of race/ethnicity and sex are also included. I compare this to a model including only income. This lets me determine how much the predictive power of intelligence is reduced after accounting for basic social and demographic differences between respondents.

All by itself, a higher AFQT score produces marked average gains in income, as the orange trend line in the figure above shows. The lowest scoring NLSY respondents make an average of $20,000, while the most intelligent earn almost six figures. But a good chunk of that difference goes away after accounting for demographic differences between respondents, as the blue line shows.

Some caveats. My data are nationally representative, but it’s a sample of parents, not all Americans. Childless Americans are excluded. Most of the respondents are now in their 50s. Perhaps the influence of intelligence on earnings has changed over time. I’m also looking at family income rather than individual income. That having been said, I don’t expect it to matter much. More intelligent people generally make more money; when married, their spouses make more money. The differences will wash out in a large sample like mine.

Several readers of my original post suggested that there are endogeneity problems with the analysis used to predict the blue trend line. In plain English: education, marital status, and the like are all downstream of income. AFQT might influence income directly, or indirectly (for example, smarter people are more likely to stay in school, which in turn affects income).

Can this proposition be tested empirically? It can—if we’re willing to make some assumptions. For instance, if we reasonably assume AFQT is anterior to education and education is anterior to income, we can explore AFQT’s direct and indirect effects—as mediated by education—on income via path analysis (the people who want latent variables in their path analysis are asking for a better measurement of IQ than is available in my data). I also have nothing to offer to anyone seeking unicorns of model identification.

I’ll limit the demonstration to the role of education in explaining the effects of IQ on income. The point of this blog post is to show that intelligence is just one of many variables that matter in explaining the world; it’s not to conduct an exhaustive exploration of the predictors of income, nor to identify the extent to which all measured variables at my disposal can mediate the effects of intelligence. Education is a good place to start: it has real-world significance and a noteworthy correlation with earnings. The conceptual model is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. How AFQT affects income as mediated by education

Here are the results based on standardized regression coefficients.² The total effect of AFQT on income (.505) can be divided into partial (.265) and indirect (.237) effects (in a world without rounding error, .265 and .237 would sum to .505, the zero-order effect). The partial effect of AFQT (.265) reflects the extent to which it affects income, net of differences in educational attainment. The indirect effect (.237) represents the extent to which AFQT increases income by increasing education. The partial effect of education (.345) reflects the extent to which education affects income net of AFQT. It’s not rocket surgery to observe that both AFQT and education have large partial effects on income. Indeed, the partial effect of education (.345) is larger than that of AFQT (.265), although the overall effect of AFQT is larger: intelligence affects income both directly and by virtue of its indirect effect through education (i.e., more intelligent people are more likely to attend college, so they ultimately make more money).

Does IQ affect income and other measures of human accomplishment? It does—but so, too, do a lot of other things. The foregoing results suggest intelligence is not the cardinal social science variable, or to paraphrase Tolkien: It’s not the one variable to rule them all, one variable to find them, one variable to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, coauthored with W. Bradford Wilcox (Oxford University Press, 2016). Follow him on Twitter at @NickWolfinger.

1. I estimate random-effects regression models using the 26 waves of NLSY79 data at my disposal. Hausman tests suggest that fixed-effects fit the data better, but don’t allow me to explore fundamentally time-invariant predictors like AFQT scores (in any event, they were only administered once to respondents). My dependent variable is the natural logarithm of inflation-adjusted family income. In addition, I repeated my analyses using OLS regression to predict log-median income across survey waves and obtained similar results.

2. The results of the regressions relevant to the path analysis look like this:

Note: These estimates were obtained via OLS, as described above. The dependent variable is median log-income. I converted education into a continuous variable to facilitate interpretation. All effects are statistically significant (p < .001) based on Huber-White standard errors. I’m generally opposed to standardized coefficients (the βs), but they’re useful here.

Online Safety Across the Generations
Family Online Safety Institute

Protective Factors in Practice
National Childhood Prevention Month 2019, Child Welfare Information Gateway

Will Generation Z Be the Last to Enjoy the Benefits of Marriage?
Ann Farmer, Mercatornet

Health Status, Sexual Activity and Satisfaction Among Older People in Britain: A Mixed Methods Study
Bob Erens, Kirsten R. Mitchell, et al., Plos One

MotherWise: Implementation of a Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Program for Pregnant and New Mothers
Scott Baumgartner and Diane Paulsell, OPRE Report # 2019-42, Administration for Children and Families, DHHS

In 2018, happiness among young adults in America fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 reporting that they were“very happy” in life fell to 25 percent—the lowest level that the General Social Survey, a key barometer of American social life, has ever recorded for that population. Happiness fell most among young men—with only 22 percent of young men (and 28 percent of young women) reporting that they were “very happy” in 2018.

We wondered whether this trend was rooted in distinct shifts in young adults’ social ties—including what The Atlantic has called “the sex recession,” that is, a marked decline in sexual activity for this group in recent years. Human beings find meaning, direction, and purpose in and through our social relationships with others. We’re most happy when our ties with others are deep and strong. And, the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex. In the antiseptic language of two economists who study happiness, “sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations.”

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain the “happiness recession” among today’s young adults.

First, we looked at marriage. Controlling for basic demographics and other social characteristics, married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married, according to our analysis of the GSS, a nationally representative survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Data on cohabitation are not available for as long a period but suggest that the trend in all coupling is probably less steeply negative, though still drifting downward over time. Less coupling, then, probably explains some of the decline in happiness among young adults.

Continue reading in The Atlantic . . . .

The college admissions scandal exposed the absurd lengths the rich and the famous will go to get their kids into desirable colleges. Alas, as I’m not the first to notice, when it comes to the college rat race, celebrities are just like us. Middle-class American parents are now obsessed with ways to enhance their children’s brain development, and these efforts start in infancy (or even before they are born!), continuing into an exhausting 18-year marathon of books, educational toys, museums, tutors, counselors, and swim meets that have become the object of endless eye-rolling by outsiders and even parents themselves.

The American writer Judith Warner happened to be living in France, with its luxuriously long maternity leave, superb day care, and leisurely lunches for mommy friends, when she gave birth to her two children in the 1990’s. She moved her family back to the United States a few years later and was stunned to find American parenting had become a grueling, panic-inducing extreme sport. She wrote a book about what she was seeing, which she called Perfect Madness.

Warner’s description is understandable but inaccurate. As economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti reveal in their recent book Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids, today’s American parents are not so crazy after all. For better and worse, their parenting style is perfectly rational.

The authors’ background premise is simultaneously obvious and little understood. Child-rearing norms are not delivered to mothers and fathers from on high by the patriarchy’s central planners; they are a response to the specific socio-economic conditions in which children are growing up. A parent living in a subsistence agricultural economy would be wasting their already depleted energies reading The Little Prince to their children or asking them what they wanted to be when they grow up; their children would grow up to plant crops and pray for rain just like all the other children around them. Under these circumstances, a parent’s goal is to shape an obedient child who could follow instructions in rote tasks from a young age and wouldn’t think of whining when they couldn’t have pizza for dinner. And to that end, the parenting style would tend towards the authoritarian, in the famous taxonomy of developmental psychologist, Diana Baumrind that is frequently cited by the authors.

Richer, postindustrial economies like our own call for an entirely different set of character traits—and an entirely different approach to parenting. In these countries, the authors point out, education becomes crucial to a place in the high paid workforce. This education premium, as economists call it, means parents’ job description is far more demanding than it is for, say, agricultural or even industrial societies. Parents have to prepare children for, and nurture, their schooling to ensure their future success: hence, the toddler ABC puzzles, the homework coaches, the visits to science museums, the multiple showings of kid-friendly nature documentaries, and the summer service trips to Guatemala. The authors cite Time Use Surveys and PISA questionnaires showing that mothers are spending more time with their children than they were in the family-friendly 1950’s, even though, unlike back in that day, most mothers are holding down jobs. The increase in time spent with children is true not just for Americans but also for Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Canadian and British parents, among others.

Yet as Doepke and Zilibotti go on to explain, not all of these modern economies—or the parenting styles they foster—are exactly alike. In some wealthy cultures, parents give their children a great deal of freedom and would never think of planning three extra-curriculars per week; their “permissive” parenting approach requires them to do little scheduling and supervision. Parents in Anglo countries, by contrast, are “authoritative” and intensively hands-on. The authors attribute the difference to one crucial variable: a country’s level of inequality. In the U.S., where the gap between rich and lower-income people is very large and the education premium is high, parents have a great deal at stake in their children’s achievement. It’s the difference between a four-bedroom house and a flush college fund for the kids on the one hand, and a cramped apartment and State U on the other. By contrast, Swedish parents can be laissez-faire for the simple reason that with low inequality and plenty of state support, their kids will manage a comfortable life whether they get top scores and prestigious jobs or not.

Not so long ago, American parents were also far more able to relax. The permissive parenting methods popular in the 1970’s in the U.S.—older readers might remember the term “latch-key kids”—suited an era of relatively low inequality, according to the authors. But as the industrial age faded and a new knowledge economy took hold, a college education became the ticket to middle-class stability. By the 1980’s, parents began examining both their children’s report cards and college rankings with anxious frowns. In short order, they evolved into the much-ridiculed helicopter parents of today. The uncomfortable conclusion reached by Doepke and Zilibotti is that these parents are on to something. In fact, the authors find that intensive parenting correlates with higher achievement even more than does race, parental education, and income.

Love, Money, and Parenting is packed with striking details about parents and schools in places like China, Japan, France, Turkey, and pre-industrial England. (Did you know, for example, that in China, the gaokao, that country’s version of the SAT, is a matter of such national importance that construction and traffic are prohibited near exam sites on test day?)

Still, I came away from the book unconvinced that inequality explains as much as the authors posit. A rich body of research in cultural psychology, seemingly unknown to the economists, reveals American parents to be invested in more than just their children’s resumes but in their individual preferences, urges, interests, and talents as well. These efforts are not an obvious reaction to inequality.

More than parents in other countries, where children are expected to adapt to more standardized household routines filtered through widespread cultural norms, Americans look to their young to show them how much sleep they “need,” when they should eat, and later, whether they want tacos or chicken fingers for dinner. During the years of schooling, parents try to decipher which academic subjects, sports, or musical instruments their kids are drawn to. All the while they devote themselves to cultivating their children’s self-esteem, praising them repeatedly for a “great job!” for finishing the most ordinary tasks. (I wrote about this particular form of American exceptionalism here). Sure, most parents would love to be able to brag about a Harvard acceptance letter. And their efforts to make that happen can be toxic for families, schools, and the country as a whole ( see, Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, etc.) But in its better moments, American parenting is also a matter of helping children to find their individual “passion” and to pursue happiness in work that might genuinely suit them.

The American way would be alien to Swedes. Like the citizens of other Scandinavian countries, the Swedes are great believers in the Law of Jante, or Janteloven, an informal rule that no one should think of themselves as special or expect to be treated as such. The cultural lesson is clearly connected to the country’s distaste for inequality, just as it is to its parenting and educational methods. You can be sure there are no trophies lining the shelves of the bedrooms of Swedish children. Zilibotti, who was living in Sweden when his daughter was in preschool, recalls telling her teacher that he had taught his child to read. The teacher was visibly annoyed because, the economist assumed, she believed children should learn organically through play. Perhaps, but Janteloven is more likely the explainer here: it dictates that parents should not do anything that smacks of one-ups-manship.

Love, Money, and Parenting neglects long-standing, ingrained cultural ideals (in the American case, individualism, in the Swedish, Janteloven) that underlie the way parents think about and treat children, as well as the way people organize their economy. At the same time, the book’s analysis will likely cause parents to view themselves, their own parents, their friends and even the stranger with the unruly child in the supermarket with more understanding. Because even though helicopter parenting may be driving American mothers and fathers batty, it’s not madness.

Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty, and cultural change in America.

Republican lawmakers are taking a “giant leap forward” when it comes to paid family leave. After decades of inaction and caution, several Republican proposals to fund paid family leave are now making their way through Congress.

Senator Deb Fischer’s (R-Neb.) bill, which incentives employers to provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave through a tax credit, particularly to low wage workers, made it into law as part of the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Senator Marco Rubio, along with Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), just introduced the “New Parents Act,” which would allow new parents to pull forward their Social Security benefits to finance paid leave. This is also the framework for Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) “Cradle Act,” which would allow parents to claim between one to three months of social security benefits early while delaying benefit receipt later in life by two to six months.

Even as I write this article, other bills are being drafted. A Republican counterpoint to the Democrat’s “ FAMILY Act” appears to be taking shape (the “Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act” would allow 12 weeks of paid leave for workers to use for medical and caregiving needs, including for new parents). This is a tremendous moment because compromises are often made when differing proposals compete for consideration. How can policymakers make the most of this opportunity?

Let’s first talk about the Republican framework that is the backbone of both the “Cradle Act” and the “New Parents Act.” The idea that people can use their Social Security retirement benefits early to finance their time off has several advantages.

• First, Social Security is the best administrative agency to handle this new program. This agency already collects the precise data needed in order to figure out details like employment history of the worker, wage replacement rates, and duration of benefits, since this type of lifetime information is used to determine disability benefits or retirement benefits. This is also the agency that would house the “FAMILY Act.”
• Second, the benefit formula guarantees a progressive wage replacement rate, which means that lower-wage workers would see higher-wage replacement rates than higher-wage workers. It is clear from looking at the data that low-wage workers are the least likely to have access to paid leave policies and would benefit the most from higher-wage replacement rates, which makes this policy design crucial.
• Third, the policy is gender neutral and would allow both mothers and fathers to take leave for the same duration. In addition, it is a voluntary program, meaning people can choose whether they want to take advantage of it or not, but they are not required to, as would be the case under a payroll tax.
• Fourth, it is designed to be revenue neutral, which means that people would pay back into the system exactly what they took from it.
• And fifth, and, perhaps most critical for conservatives, is that it imposes no new taxes on either businesses or employees.

However, there are also some obvious drawbacks to this approach. The proposals tack on a new program to Social Security, which, irrespective of adding a paid leave program, is expected to run out of funds by 2034. This adds significant uncertainty about whether the program will be sustainable in the long-run to help future generations of new parents. If funds are expected to run out, will benefits have to be scaled back at some point?

Another concern is whether people who do pull forward their social security benefits will face more economic insecurity when they reach retirement. Will they be able to afford delaying receipt of benefits to compensate for pulling forward benefits earlier in life? It appears that the people most likely to use the program will be the most vulnerable workers, who are also likely to be the least financially able to delay receipt of retirement benefits.

Republican and Democrat proposals for paid leave seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. But they actually have a lot in common. Most important is the recognition that paid leave is a matter of critical importance for working families.

Moreover, the proposals do nothing to expand who gets job protection during the period of paid leave. Currently, about 40% of workers do not qualify for job protection under the Family and Medical Leave Act either because they work in small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, they do not have the requisite hours with the employer, or they don’t meet some other eligibility criteria. Without some kind of job protection, workers who have access to paid leave may still not take advantage of it since they may worry about losing their job if they do. Therefore, access to paid leave for low-wage workers may still continue to be an issue under these proposals.

Finally, while concerns have been raised that allowing Social Security to be used for paid parental leave makes it more likely that the program will expand to other uses, others feel that the program does not go far enough to provide strong support for broader purposes like paid medical and family care leave.

On the face of it, the Republican and Democrat proposals for paid leave seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. But they actually have a lot in common, especially when it comes to the principles underlying the policies. Most important is the recognition that paid leave is a matter of critical importance for working families.

As we highlight in the AEI-Brookings Working Group Report on paid leave, allowing access to paid time off is not just important for families, it is also valuable for the economy. If we want to boost labor force participation rates, particularly among women, moving forward on this front is critical. Furthermore, gender neutrality is key: both mothers and fathers should be allowed equal amounts of paid time off. Also, the duration of leave and the level of benefits should be adequate so that workers feel comfortable taking time off but also maintain their attachment to the workforce. And finally, in terms of administration, Social Security is the agency best equipped to handle this type of program.

The biggest differences between the Republican and Democrat proposals involve the scope of the policy and the funding mechanism. While the “FAMILY Act” covers all three reasons for leave, Republican proposals, such as the “Cradle Act,” only apply to parental leave. Also, while the “FAMILY Act” applies a new payroll tax on employees and businesses to fund the leave, the “Cradle Act” relies on existing funds in the Social Security program and some general revenues.

These differences are not insurmountable and can be resolved through compromise if both sides are willing to come to the table. But getting started is key. For instance, why not begin with parental leave, but leave the door open for a future compromise on paid medical and family care? As is becoming increasingly clear, we need more research on these two aspects of the policy to gain a good understanding of what a federal policy should look like. And both sides already agree that Social Security will need repair, irrespective of whether or not a parental leave program is tacked onto it or not.

Compromise is hard. It means accepting a plan that is less than ideal from one party’s perspective, as we discovered within the AEI-Brookings Working Group. Both sides need to ask themselves whether waiting for their perfect plan is better than moving forward with a compromise. Let’s hope the answer is no. It’s time to take that “small step” forward.

Aparna Mathur (@aparnamath) is a Resident Scholar in Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Last month, I wrote an article published on this blog entitled “Men Who Marry Are Deciders Not Sliders,” where I showed that almost all of the fall in UK divorce rates since the 1990s is due to fewer wives filing for divorce during the early years of marriage. I proposed that this was because today's newlywed husbands are more committed. With less social pressure to marry, today's bridegrooms are deciders and not sliders.

The article prompted a stream of alternative suggestions, including last week’s blog post from Belinda Brown. So, have these (mostly) sensible and intelligent suggestions from sensible and intelligent people caused me to change my mind?

Before making any attempt to interpret the stats, let's remind ourselves of what the stats actually state.

The way I calculate divorce rates is by taking the number of marriages ending after one year or two years, etc., and mapping those onto the total number of weddings in the relevant year. This is the same method used by the Office for National Statistics, but with one small difference: I adjust the number of weddings to include an estimate of overseas weddings, which can boost the overall wedding figure by 5 to 10% in any given year.

This lets me see how UK divorce rates change for every year of marriage going back to 1963. Those 1963 couples have now been around for 55 years, whereas couples who married in the year 2003, for example, have only been around for 15 years. But this means I can compare how older and newer couples fare over time and track the trends in divorce rates really clearly.

One of the additional things I can do is look at divorce rates depending on whether the divorce is granted to the husband or wife. Regardless of who is to blame, only one person fills in the form. This is important to remember. The person granted the divorce is the one who presumably wants it the most, not the one who may be most responsible for what went wrong, in so far as one can pin the blame for divorce on one person anyway.

So, this is not about blaming anybody, men or women!

Here are my two main findings about divorce rates in England & Wales (and, therefore, the UK):

• First, almost all of the fall in divorce rates since the late 1980s is attributable to fewer divorces granted to wives during their first decade of married life. Whereas 16 to 17% of weddings that took place in the late 1980s ended because the wives were granted divorces before their 10th anniversary, that figure fell to 11% for weddings that took place in 2007 (the latest year for which we have a full decade of divorce data). Contrast this with the extraordinarily consistent trend in divorce rates attributable to husbands being granted the divorce, which has fluctuated narrowly between 6.1 and 6.9% through the same period.
• Second, after couples have passed through the first 10 years of married life, divorce rates become highly predictable, declining gradually with every year survived! So, regardless of when couples got married and regardless of who fills in the form, divorce rates during the second or third or fourth decades have followed an almost identical track.

I think these are pretty amazing findings.

Think of all the social and economic changes since the 1960s. Yet once couples pass their 10^th  wedding anniversary, divorce rates have barely changed, whether couples got married in 1963, 1973, 1983 or 1993. It tells us that after surviving the early years, the individual bond that a husband and wife make with one another seems impervious to outside forces.

What we have to explain, therefore, is why divorce rates have changed only among wives during the early years of marriage and not among husbands.

Is it simply because there are fewer marriages?

On its own, I'm afraid this explanation doesn't work at all. We're talking about divorce rates, not numbers. All things being equal, if fewer couples were getting married, divorce rates shouldn't change, whether granted to wife or husband.

Is there a change in factors that inhibit women from divorcing?

In her response to my article, Belinda Brown pointed out that women tend to be economically worse off than men after a divorce. Overall, that should make women more hesitant about divorce than men, whereas, in reality, they have always made up the majority of divorces. In order to explain why women might have become even more hesitant, you have to believe that women's prospects of being worse off have increased since the 1990s, trapping ever more women in dud marriages. 

This seems implausible. If anything, the barriers to divorce have come down as social stigma has retreated. If women are now less inhibited by the financial and social consequences of divorce, I would expect to see more divorces initiated by women, not fewer as has actually happened.

Is it the decline of marriage among middle- and lower-income groups?

Belinda quite rightly also highlights the Marriage Foundation’s own research showing that marriage has increasingly become the preserve of the rich. But why should this have caused fewer women to file for divorce, yet not had a similar effect on men? Among marriages in their first 10 years, divorce rates attributable to husbands haven't changed one iota. Among marriages over 10 years, divorce rates attributable to either spouse have also barely changed. 

If wives are coping better with the early years because they are financially better off, I don't see why the same doesn't also apply to husbands. Wealth and income affect the comfort of both parties. So, I would expect divorce rates attributable to husbands and wives to go up or down in tandem. They haven't.

Maybe, women today are simply choosing better husbands?

This is IFS senior fellow’s Scott Stanley's point, which he made on Twitter. Historically, more women than men have filed for divorce because more men have behaved badly in some way. So, as marriage rates fall, he points out, women are likely choosing fewer of those misbehaving men in the first place. 

That would certainly work if it were true. But are women choosing better-behaved men, or is it the case, as I have argued, that today's married men are better behaved, on average, because they aren't pressured into marriage, but actually want it?

So, do women choose and men decide? Now there's a catchphrase!

Actually, I suspect that women's real choice tends to happen earlier on, whether to form the relationship in the first place. This is precisely how I have advised my own daughters about potential boyfriends. To choose well, you have two questions to answer: 1) Is he marriageable—i.e. kind, decent, honest, reliable, and trustworthy? and 2) Will he fight for you—i.e. will he put himself out for you, since willingness to sacrifice is a strong indicator of men's commitment?

But when it comes to tying the knot, is it really women who choose? I imagine—although I haven't seen any research on this—that it is invariably the man, in general, who makes the decision to propose. This is where I think the selection effect comes into play. With less and less social pressure to marry, fewer and fewer men will be the reluctant husbands who never really bought in to the idea of marriage.

The proportion of men pushing for divorce early on hasn't changed in decades. So, doesn't that suggest men are still marrying the same type of women? 

Yet the proportion of women pushing for divorce early on has reduced sharply. If we agree that women haven't become more tolerant of misbehaving men or more trapped inside marriage, then doesn't that suggest today's bridegrooms are doing something better?

Harry Benson is Research Director of the UK-based Marriage Foundation.

Paid Family Leave: A Discussion with Sen. Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA)
Wed., April 3, 9:00 to 10:30 AM, AEI, Washington, D.C.
American Enterprise Institute

Do Children of Married Parents Do Better?
BBC Sounds (podcast) featuring Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan

Measuring Communities: The State of Military and Veteran Families in the United States
Kathy Broniarczyk and Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth
Purdue Center for Regional Development and Military Family Research Institute

Why Autonomy is Vital to Facilitating a Fatherhood Program
Christopher Brown, The Father Factor, NFI

Supporting the Development of Self-Regulation in Young Children: Tips for Practitioners Working with Families in Home Settings
K. Pahigiannis, K. Rosanbalm, and D.W. Murray
OPRE, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. DHHS

In an article published on this blog, Harry Benson of the Marriage Foundation reflects on the falling divorce rate in the UK over the last 25 years, a consequence of fewer women petitioning for divorce. According to Benson, “men have been behaving progressively better over the last 25 years.” He asserts that men are now more likely to make a deliberate decision to get married, rather than slide into marriage under social pressure. This results in increased commitment leading to women being less likely to sue for divorce.

One can understand the narrative that men are the guilty party when women initiate divorce. The evidence shows that women are significantly worse off financially following divorce. Five years after a divorce, a man has an income that is 25% higher than before the divorce, whereas the woman’s income is 9% lower. The poverty rate for divorced women in the UK is three times the rate of men. This leads to the assumption that if a woman decides to get divorced, the man is likely to have been seriously at fault.

This narrative assumes that women have a practical approach towards marriage and divorce, but perhaps their priorities lie elsewhere.

In The Washington Post, Michael J. Rosenfeld discussed why women are more desirous of marriage, yet more likely to become dissatisfied and initiate divorce. He told the story of one woman who initially reported a good relationship with her husband-to-be: “He is very clever, fun, and sweet. I respect him and feel like we are equals on values, intellect, and humor.” She noted, however, “It is not excellent because I wish that he was more romantic. He’s very practical.” Four years later, they divorced because, as she explained, “I used to be a very happy optimistic person and it was like he was slowly starving my soul.”

An article on DivorcedMoms.com, a website by and for divorced mothers, also probes this question. While spousal infidelity and housework are mentioned—it is the “touchy-feely” elements that come into play. The author notes that women often initiate divorce when they experience boredom: “Women very often need more than their man can provide, especially when it comes to intellectual and emotional intimacy and a sense of adventure and surprise.” He goes on to explain how, even where there were financial and familial reasons for keeping a marriage intact, some women may cheat either when their needs are not being met or as a way of getting an emotionally-absent husbands’ attention.

There are other reasons why women may be less inhibited when it comes to divorce. The majority of children live exclusively or mainly with the mother following a divorce. As a result of this, significant assets are awarded to mothers on the basis that they are caring for children regardless of who is at fault. Lifetime maintenance payments in the UK can be awarded based on the man’s ability to pay and carry on regardless of improvements in the ex-wife’s financial situation.

Baroness Hale, one of the chief architects of family law in the UK for the past 40 years, explained it this way in a speech she gave in November 2018:

The fault-based system of divorce was ostensibly and in practice abandoned. Married mothers gained a status equal to that of married fathers while they were together and in practice became a good deal more powerful once they were apart. This was because of the importance attached to keeping the children in a stable home with their primary caregiver, still in the great majority of cases the children’s mother.

If dealing with the challenges of living with another human being can be avoided while keeping your children and only being slightly worse off financially, there will invariably come times for women when the temptation to do this must be great.

For his part, Benson argues that economic factors affect both sexes alike and therefore do not provide the explanation. This is where he makes his biggest mistake. First, we know that marriage rates in the UK are at their lowest on record and, as Benson’s own research shows, it has increasingly become the preserve of higher-income groups. We also know that the wealthy are less likely to get divorced, perhaps at least partly because of men’s higher income. We would, therefore, expect that as the rate of marriage declines and becomes restricted to the most privileged in society, so would the rate of divorce.

But here in the UK, there are other factors that come into play. We have a tax and benefits system that is designed to encourage the dual-income family.  While there are strong financial incentives to go it alone for those with lower levels of income—these are not the people who get married. For the high earning, two-income marrieds, we have created a system of tax credits, help with childcare and tax thresholds which, as long as they stay together, will leave them better off. For example, if we look at a family with two children and total earnings of 60,000 pounds, they will pay 6,520 pounds less in taxes than a single-income family with the same total earnings.

As these two-earner families become the norm, there is a big increase in fixed household expenses like commuting, childcare, and mortgages leaving little give in the system. Women cannot increase their hours of work as they might have done in the past because they are already working full time. In her book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren described how the ubiquity of two-earner households left families in the United States with more precarious financial circumstances in relation to bankruptcy. I suggest that here in the UK, similar circumstances are making women think twice about divorce.

Finally, women’s presence in the workplace forces them to rely increasingly on their men for child care support. This is not so easy to come by once you get divorced.

Since the middle of the last century, we assumed that marriage was evolving from a union whose primary purpose was largely functional to one in which individual self-fulfillment and companionship are the goals. This companionship approach to marriage left it very vulnerable—particularly when women do not feel fulfilled.

The lowering rates of female-initiated divorce may also reflect a slowly emerging new model of marriage that is not only based on companionship but has social functions, such as the care of children and the elderly, as well as economic functions reflected in the necessity of two incomes. This form of marriage might actually leave women happier. As they perceive the other benefits of marriage, the self-defeating pressures created by the expectation of personal fulfillment might reduce.

What, then, is one to make of Benson’s link between divorce rates and what he attributes to men’s bad behavior? To be clear, Benson does not say that men who initiate divorce are “bounders and cads” who discard their wives irresponsibly, whereas women who divorce their husbands do so because their husbands behaved badly.

On the other hand, he does not distance himself from such a travesty. Divorce has at least as much to do with women’s behavior as men’s. And Benson’s analysis points us away from the things that we can do about divorce rates. Society’s influence on behavior is necessarily indirect. If we want stronger marriages and fewer divorces, we need to understand the social and economic functions of marriage as well as the role it plays for the individuals involved. We need to focus on the big influences on marital demise, such as those public policies that incentivize single parenthood and divorce.

Belinda Brown is a social anthropologist who speaks and writes on family and gender issues. She is the author of The Private Revolution: the role of women in the Polish underground movement. Further links to her work can be found here.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies. 

Should seniors and toddlers go to day care together? It’s a strange sounding question, but a growing number of day care facilities around the country say yes. And an emerging body of research suggests that doing so is good for both the young and old.

Most people likely haven’t heard of “adult day care.” Thanks to the advocacy of public figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Ivanka Trump, we hear constantly about paid care for the youngest members of our society. We hear far less about care for our eldest citizens.

Like day care for infants and toddlers too young for school, adult day care is for seniors who need assistance and supervision during the day and are seeking stimulation and companionship. It’s the result of our increasingly generationally segregated society. Whereas once multiple generations of families lived together or in very close proximity and shared the duties of caring for young, old, and sick alike, now those who need care are tucked away in care facilities with their generational peers. The breakdown of the nuclear family and increasing familial migration has only accelerated this phenomenon. Babies live thousands of miles from their grandparents, and aging adults live several states away from their children.

As a result, our society is more generationally stratified than ever before, making the elderly feel particularly alienated. According to one study from the University of California San Francisco, 43% of seniors report feeling lonely. That same study found that identifying as lonely comes with a staggering 59% higher risk of declining health and a 45% higher risk of death. In short, the epidemic of loneliness among the elderly isn’t just an emotional travesty, it’s a health hazard.

And while infants and toddlers are too young to know what they are missing without seniors in their lives, raising children in a society where the median age hovers around 30 is artificial and strangely backward. Researchers at Stanford pointed out that aging adults are one of the best groups to spend time with young children, not only because they can pass on decades of wisdom, but also because they are at a point in life where they have the availability and patience to do so and can provide the kind of stimulation that young children need to thrive. “Older adults are exceptionally suited to meet these needs in part because they welcome meaningful, productive activity, and engagement, “the researchers wrote. “They seek—and need—purpose in their lives.”

I’ve seen this firsthand with my own children, who spend woefully little time with senior adults, let alone grandparents who are thousands of miles away. Our Washington, D.C., co-op is filled mainly with retirees. One took my six-year-old daughter to her apartment and patiently spent time showing her how to play the cello. Another will spend endless time on the floor with my four-year-old son exploring his globe. Yet another let my daughter help her garden, where she happily pulled weeds for over an hour and learned about the garden’s history as a World War II victory garden. These interactions, while only occasional, have no doubt enriched my children’s lives.

Day care centers are increasingly seeking to institutionalize those kinds of cross-generational interactions in what is called “intergenerational care.” For example, the Mount Intergenerational Learning Center, profiled in The Atlantic, is a preschool inside a nursing home in the Seattle area. Every day, seniors and children do activities together, such as music class or painting. The center boasts over 400 children on the waiting list. According to a report from Generations United, a group that promotes intergenerational programs, there are 105 intergenerational “shared space” centers in the country. 

The report found overwhelming support from Americans for such centers: 94% agree that the elderly have qualities that are helpful to children and 89% agree with the reverse. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans think that bringing together the young and old in the same care centers is a “good use of resources,” and a solid three-fourths think that “programs and facilities that separately serve different age groups prevent children/youth and older adults from benefitting from each other’s skills and talents.”

The report also features extensive research that attests to the many benefits of intergenerational care, finding that: 

participation in intergenerational programs and meaningful cross-age relationships may decrease social isolation and increase older adults’ sense of belonging, self-esteem, and well-being, while also improving social and emotional skills of children and youth participants. 

In particular, the research found that mixed-age care promoted sensitivity to others among both the young and old, with one mother of a preschool aged-participant saying the program had made her daughter “very empathetic, way beyond her years.” Young children who participated in intergenerational care had more advanced motor and cognitive skills, higher developmental scores, and more advanced social and emotional competencies than their non-intergenerational peers, to name a few, and older adult participants reported lower levels of loneliness, reduced agitation, and improved health, among other findings.

We can’t undo our modern reality of young people being forced to leave home far behind in search of better opportunities and families being generationally splintered across the country. But we can, as a society, support and encourage the movement to reintegrate the generations in safe and loving care facilities. Babies and the elderly in day care together may sound far-fetched, but it’s one of the most promising ways to help alleviate elderly alienation and expose children to a generation they might otherwise never know. 

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies. Her new book is Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that some form of paid family leave is long overdue for American families. To that end, several paid leave proposals have been introduced in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, and we hope to spotlight a number of these bills on the Family Studies blog in the coming months. One of these proposals is the “CRADLE Act” sponsored by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). IFS Senior Fellow W. Bradford Wilcox recently spoke with Senator Lee about this paid leave plan and other ways public policy can help reduce the cost of having and raising children. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

W. Bradford Wilcox: The United States appears to be heading to a record low fertility rate in 2019. Surprisingly, even Utah has seen dramatic declines in childbearing in the last few years. What do you think are the key factors driving fertility down in the nation as a whole and in Utah? 

Senator Mike Lee: Interestingly, fertility had been slowly rising for years until the Great Recession, going up during good economic times and down in bad. The depth of the Great Recession partly accounts for the recent drop in fertility. But what’s different now is that fertility has continued to decline as the economy has improved. That might reflect the high costs of student loan repayment—many young adults took shelter from the recession by going to or staying in school. It might also reflect the high cost of housing. 

There may be a more benign interpretation of the continued decline in fertility over the recovery. Since the bottom of the recession, birth rates among married women have increased. It is only among unmarried women that birth rates have continued to fall. If that reflects delayed childbearing—perhaps induced by the recession—we may find that what would have been a greater number of out-of-wedlock births among younger women, instead, became a somewhat lower number of births to older married women. We would have lower fertility but with more children born to married parents.

Wilcox: Today, many women do not have as many children as they would like to have. What can policymakers do to make family formation easier and more affordable for ordinary families?

Sen. Lee: This is an important policy goal of mine, and it will be a focus of my Social Capital Project within the Joint Economic Committee. One way to increase family affordability is through paid leave policies. I just announced my own paid leave bill with Senator Joni Ernst, the “CRADLE Act.” In the past, I have introduced and sponsored legislation to expand the Child Tax Credit. I like the Child Tax Credit over child care subsidies because it also helps families that prefer having a stay-at-home parent. 

There are many other ways policy could help reduce the cost of raising a family. For instance, I have proposed legislation that would give people working overtime the opportunity to be paid in comp-time rather than through higher pay. Getting rid of needless licensing requirements for child care workers would also cut parents’ costs. Federal policy also inflates the costs of health care, higher education, and housing. Smarter regulatory and tax policy could remove some of these distortions and lower the cost of living. 

“The CRADLE Act would allow parents to receive one, two, or three months of paid leave by giving them the option to postpone activating their Social Security benefits. The plan provides every new mom and dad the flexibility to stay home with their newborns during the critical first months after birth, without creating another massive mandated government program or adding to our ever-growing deficit”—Sen. Mike Lee's office.

Wilcox: Tell us more about the “CRADLE Act.” How does it work for ordinary families? Why do you think it would make an important contribution to American family life and the welfare of children?

Sen. Lee: Not only is it important that Americans be able to afford to start and expand families but having the time to nurture new life is likely to produce healthier, better-adjusted children down the road. The days and weeks following the birth of a child are crucial for infant health and the parent-child relationship, which affect development in childhood and adolescence.

The CRADLE Act would give parents the option to pay for up to three months of leave by delaying their receipt of Social Security benefits by up to six months. This benefit would be available to natural and adoptive parents with a recent history of work. It would be more generous the lower a parent’s income.

Wilcox: Why fund the “CRADLE Act” through Social Security? Parents, in particular, are contributing to the long-term viability of Social Security, both by paying their payroll taxes and by raising the next generation of taxpayers. In light of this, some would argue that it is not fair to delay payment of Social Security for parents who are already making sacrifices to raise the next generation. What do you say to these critics, and how would you pay for this plan?

Sen. Lee: We all want parents to be able to make the most of their newborns’ first months. The question has always been how to pay for parental leave. Most paid leave proposals are funded by employer mandates—which may reduce paychecks and jobs—or taxes (which may slow economic growth). Funding paid leave through Social Security creates a voluntary system that avoids these costs. The “CRADLE Act” is fiscally responsible in that parents fully repay the Social Security system through their delayed retirement. In the short-run, we propose transferring general revenue funds to the Social Security Trust Fund, but those costs would be recouped when today’s beneficiaries reach retirement age.

It is true that parents contribute to Social Security twice—once through their own payroll taxes, and again through the payroll taxes of the children they bring into the world. This is a problem I have called the “parent tax penalty.” But that is a separate issue that I have addressed by championing the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which I continue to support.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies. 

Religious couples report experiencing their marriage as anchored, sustained, and sanctified in what I’ve described in my clinical research as a “couple-God triangle”¹  that is invoked through prayer.² This divine triangle conveys the couple’s view of God’s influence and investment in their relationship. James L. Griffith offered a metaphor for this unseen relationship: 

A therapist who tries to work with a religious [couple] without locating God in [their marital] system may find himself or herself in the position of the astronomers in the mid-1800s who were puzzled that their equations could not predict the movement [of the planets].³

Crunching the numbers led them to speculate the existence of a planet whose gravitational force would account for planetary orbits, and they found Neptune. Similarly, therapists working with religious couples may observe an unexplained gravitational pull on marital interaction and discover that their religious beliefs have made God an integral, even central part of their marital solar system and an unexpected resource for positively shifting marriage interaction.

Researchers have found that prayer’s gravitational pull on the marital relationship includes positive outcomes of forgiveness,⁴ trust and unity, decreased infidelity,⁵ and increased relationship satisfaction and commitment, particularly when couples pray for one another (i.e., intercessory prayer).⁶ Our research shows that prayer⁷ may also lead to greater mindfulness of the effects of one’s actions on a spouse, a lessening of negative feelings, and “a shift to God’s meta-perspective” and relationship orientation that lessens anger and frustration.⁸ Prayer can be a self-soothing and de-escalation practice.⁹ Prayer has also been associated with improved conflict resolution for religious couples.¹⁰ Enhanced intimacy, commitment, and communication are also positive effects that prayer appears to confer on a marital relationship.¹¹

Given these potential benefits, it is important to consider how prayer works and under what conditions. Based on research findings from qualitative interviews and survey measurements of religious couples’ experiences with prayer, it may have to do with the gravitational pull on couple interaction that religious couples experience from connecting and communing with God as a personified being possessing specific qualities and interests toward their marriage—a marriage advocate. A religious couple’s experience of God as a transcendent presence and persona appears to be what produces a positive gravitational pull on the couple’s perspective, interaction, and outcome. Thus, the benefits of prayer for marriage are partly a function of a religious couple experiencing their God in very real and specific ways.

Communion with God through prayer has both an immediate and far-reaching influence within a marriage.

Experiencing a Personified Deity

The religious couples we studied experienced their God as a personified being who loves and holds a deep regard for their marriage. Invoking and heightening mindfulness of God through prayer, religious spouses and couples reported experiencing: 1) a deep and caring connection with a God who holds benevolence toward each spouse (relationship); 2) a sense of their God’s care, concern, and commitment to the couple relationship without bias for either spouse (neutrality); and 3) incremental (step-by-step) impressions arising in each spouse regarding how to act to help strengthen the marital relationship (responsibility). In turn, couples experienced an affirmation and restoration of these qualities in themselves that helped them reconnect and positively shift their interaction. 

In this manner, for devout religious couples, their God’s transcendent gravitational presence and pull can be felt daily in their relationship. In our research, religious couples reported that prayer invites and invokes their experience of God’s presence and these attributes, which produces an active pull to their better nature, exercising a softening and sanctifying influence that helps them deescalate and engage with renewed relationship regard, neutrality, and responsibility. 

In other words, prayer’s success appears to be a function of the couple’s faith and experience that they are invoking a very real “couple-God relationship triangle” with a loving and caring relationship advocate.¹² Thereby, connection to and communion with God in prayer has both an immediate and far-reaching influence within a marriage. As their mindfulness of and relationship with God grows, its potential to shift and sanctify the couple relationship is heightened, according to our research.¹³

Frank Fincham and Ross May found in a 2017 study, for example, that this “divine pull” within couple or family relationships is evidenced in a greater willingness to forgive one another.¹⁴ Newer research previously covered on this blog found that there is also a greater capacity and desire to attenuate and alleviate disagreements and tensions.¹⁵

Our research shows that prayer may also lead to greater mindfulness of the effects of one’s actions on a spouse, a lessening of negative feelings, and “a shift to God’s meta-perspective” and relationship orientation that lessens anger and frustration.

The Benefits of Prayer for Conflict

As the couple attempts to prevent conflict or repair their relationship, prayer can become an integral part of the process. In separate studies,¹⁶ my colleagues and I identified several effects of prayer specific to marital conflict. Couples: 1) experienced relationship mindfulness and accountability; 2) recognized that communion and connection with God in prayer is incompatible with the negativity (hostility, contempt, and anger) they might be feeling and therefore felt nudged to surrender that anger and hostility and open themselves to their partner and toward reconciliation; 3) experienced a diminishing of emotional reactivity and a softening towards one another. Significantly, as partners in these studies felt that God heard and understood them in prayer, there was a subsequent shift from a partner-change focus to a self-change focus in their relationship, and they reported perceiving actions that they could take to help heal their relationship. In this way, our research suggests that prayer promotes relationship regard, neutrality, and responsibility, which marriage therapists relate to positive couple interaction.

The Timing of Prayer

Our observations also indicate that the timing of prayer appears to be important to the benefits couples receive.¹⁷ Couples who start their day with relationship-attentive prayer appear more likely to approach disagreements with mindfulness toward caring and conciliation—what John Gottman, Sybil Carrere, and Ellie Lesitsa call “a soft startup position”¹⁸—and they are better at avoiding or ameliorating hurtful exchanges. Prayer heightens and confirms their mindful choice regarding how they will interact with and react to each other. In this way, they practice “fire prevention prayer.”

Conversely, other couples pray only after the sparks are flying. Their “stop, drop, and pray” pattern is used as a “fire extinguisher.” Prayer appears to help soothe raw feelings and dissipate emotional reactivity, returning partners more rapidly from a “hot” to a “cool” condition of relationship regard, neutrality, and responsibility. Once emotional regulation and connection are reestablished, and with the help of the couple-God triangle, these couples are able to problem-solve more effectively. 

Finally, couples sometimes turn to prayer only after conflict burns itself out. At first, conflict escalates, interaction is volatile, and emotions are reactive, and partners are in no mood to offer relationship regard, neutrality, or responsibility. Anger, hostility, and contempt fuel the fire until partners are exhausted. The pain of attachment rupture can promote a rebound to the relationship and a resort to prayer to “make things better.” This we called “Band-Aid prayer.”

When couples pray only after the sparks fly or use prayer as a Band-Aid, their relationship takes a hit because the chance for avoiding hurt altogether is lost, although prayer does appear to help with post-conflict healing. Still, prayer for mindfulness and prevention clearly delivers the best results.

Conclusion

Research supports that prayer works for religious couples. Couples’ reports show the best timing for prayer. Finally, some studies are beginning to uncover just how prayer works, by invoking for religious couples a therapeutic “couple-God triangle,” an intimate relationship and advocacy that helps mediate conflict and invite and coach resolution. Prayer appears to work as a result of religious couples’ vital experience of their God’s gravitational presence and pull in their marital relationship toward a better way.

Mark H. Butler is a Professor and MFT in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Hannah R. Herring is a graduate of the School of Family Life.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies. This article was updated on March 27, 2019.

1. M.H. Butler & J.M. Harper, "The divine triangle: God in the marital system of religious couples," Family Process, 33, no. 3 (1994): 277-286.

2. M.H. Butler, B.C. Gardner, & M.H. Bird, (1998). "Not just a time-out: Change dynamics of prayer for religious couples in conflict situations," Family Process, 37, no. 4 (1998): 451–478. See also: M.H. Butler, J.A. Stout, & B.C. Gardner, "Prayer as a conflict resolution ritual: Clinical implications of religious couples’ report of relationships softening, healing perspective, and change responsibility," The American Journal of Family Therapy, 30 (2002): 19–37.

3. J.L. Griffith, (1986). "Employing the God-family relationship in therapy with religious families," Family Process, 25 (1986): 609–618.

4. F.D. Fincham & R. W. May, "Prayer and forgiveness: Beyond relationship quality and extension to marriage," Journal of Family Psychology, 31, no. 6 (2017): 734-741.

5. N. Reich & S.M. Kalantar, "The role of praying for the spouse and sanctification of marriage in reducing infidelity," Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 21, no. 1 (2018): 65-76. 

6. F.D. Fincham & S.R. Beach, "I say a little prayer for you: Praying for partner increases commitment in romantic relationships," Journal of Family Psychology, 28, no. 5: 587-593. 

7. Our research globally included the sanctifying effects of any of the following: (a) individual prayer, (b) couple conjoint prayer, or (c) individual or conjoint intercessory prayer. 

8. Butler et al., 1998; Butler et al., 2002.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Butler et al., 1998.

12. Butler & Harper, 1994.

13. Butler et al., 1998; Butler et al., 2002.

14. Fincham & May, 2017.

15. J.M. Chelladurai, D.C. Dollahite, L.D. Marks, “'The family that prays together . . .:' Relational processes associated with regular family prayer,'" Journal of Family Psychology, 32, no. 7 (2018): 849-859.

16. Butler et al., 1998; Butler et al., 2002.

17. Ibid.

18. S. Carrere & J.M. Gottman,  "Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion," Family Process, 38, no. 3 (1999): 293–301. See also: E. Lisitsa, "How to fight smarter: Soften your start-up," The Gottman Institute Blog, 3/15/2013 

Religion's Health Effects Should Make Doubting Parishioners Reconsider Leaving
John Sniff and Tyler J. VanderWeele, USA Today

Child Maltreatment, 2017
DHHS, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau 

Drug Overdose Deaths Involving Fentanyl, 2011–2016
National Vital Statistics Reports, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The Evolution of Family Policy: Lessons Learned, Challenges, and Hopes for the Future
Theodora Ooms, Journal of Family & Theory Review

Results of the 2018 GSS Now Available to the Public
NORC at the University of Chicago

In an era of #MeToo, bad behavior by men is quite rightly under the microscope like never before. But it would be wrong to assume that it's only now that something is being done and at last things will improve. 

The Marriage Foundation’s new analysis of UK divorces shows that—at least within marriage—men have been behaving progressively better over the last 25 years. To back this up, we commissioned some new data from the UK Office for National Statistics which details the number of divorces, how long the marriages lasted, and whether the husband or wife was granted the divorce.

From this, we can map the number of divorces that have taken place after one year, two years, three years, etc., onto the years when these weddings took place. By doing this every year for all durations of marriage up to 60 years, we can track what happened to the couples who married in any given year going back to 1963.

The basic pattern of divorce is always the same (see first chart below).

Whichever year you look at, divorce rates rise in the first few years, peak between years four and eight, and then fall progressively. Clearly long marriages do come to an end. But on average, the risk becomes extremely small after about 30 years. 

Where that pattern has changed is almost entirely during the first 10 years of marriage. The four-to-eight year peak in divorce rates rose steadily through the 1970s and 1980s and then fell back again from the 1990s, with the most recent marriages looking much the same as those back in the early 1970s. 

So, just as divorce levels rose because more couples were splitting up early on, divorce rates have now fallen because fewer couples split up early on. Once couples get past the first decade of marriage, there has been little to no change in divorce rates, whether couples married in 1975 or 1985 or 1995. 
Isn't that amazing? Think of all the social and economic changes since the 1960s. Yet once marriages get past 10 years, their stability becomes highly predictable—on average of course. 

But when we divide divorce rates into whether they are attributable to the husband or the wife—in most cases reflecting who wants the divorce more—the full extraordinary phenomenon appears.

While there has been almost no change in divorces granted to husbands—and don't forget this is about rate and not numbers, so it has nothing to do with fewer marriages—about 80% of the entire fall in divorce is because fewer wives are filing for divorce in their early years of marriage. 

This very strong gender effect rules out any kind of economic explanation—such as house prices, or the economy, or cuts, or even changes in women's employment—all of which should affect the desire of both men and women to file for divorce, or not. 

There are only two explanations for this. Either men are behaving the same and their wives have become more tolerant—which seems eminently implausible given the current culture—or men are behaving better. 

Here's what I think is going on. As social pressure to marry has gradually disappeared, those who do choose to marry are making it more of a deliberate choice. We've already seen evidence from the United States that “deciding,” rather than “sliding,” is particularly important to men's commitment. Well, it looks like we are seeing this in the UK with this gender effect. Divorce rates were higher previously simply because some men were sliding into marriage under pressure from family and friends. 

No longer. Men who marry today in the UK are “deciders” who really want to get married rather than “sliders” who are doing it under pressure. Since falling divorce rates are the driving force behind the overall reduction in family breakdown that we've seen in the last five to 10 years, this improvement in men's commitment is having a hugely positive effect. What's more, we expect the fall in breakdown to continue as these stable newly married couples have children who become teenagers. 

It used to be thought that cohabiting couples would look more like married couples as marriage became more of an option. In fact, the gap in stability may well be widening. 

So, at a time when marriage is becoming stronger because men are behaving better, how do we encourage men who are not married, and whose odds of splitting up are so much worse, to make similar decisions, similar commitments, and hence become more stable? 

Harry Benson is Research Director of the UK-based Marriage Foundation.

At age 17, Megan was extroverted, charming, and popular, earning straight A’s in school with her plans for college all mapped out. But her home life was not as glossy. Her parents divorced when she was nine, in large part because her dad blew all his money on “drugs and alcohol and other ladies.” After the divorce, Megan moved with her mom to Alabama, where she learned from a young age to take care of herself because her mom “was always working” to support them. 

When her paternal grandmother passed away, Megan, who was a junior in high school at the time, went back to Ohio for the funeral. There, she saw how much her dad, once sober, was struggling after falling “off the wagon.” Megan called her mom from his house, announcing that she was dropping out of school to take care of him. Although her mom begged her to reconsider, Megan saw it as a simple decision: “I’m his only family, only child,” she explains. “So, I felt kinda obligated to stay.”

Not long after, her dad was in jail again serving a two-year sentence, leaving Megan homeless, and living out of her car for a year. “I felt like crap about myself after dropping out of school,” she says. She could have gone back to her mom or reached out to friends. But shame kept her isolated. Instead, she worked as many shifts as she could get as a waitress, and eventually earned her GED. Three days after her 18^th birthday, she had saved enough to move from her car to her own apartment. 

“I’ve always been very strong willed and free minded,” Megan says. “And, if crap’s hitting the fan, you just buck down, and deal with it, and find the right path to take.”

She sometimes made serious mistakes before finding the right path. Like when she turned 18, and the credit card offers rolled in, and she shattered her credit. But at least she avoided the drugs and alcohol that derailed her father. She also never gave up on her dream of college. Somewhere along life’s way, she’d picked up on the message that if you wanted to do anything worthwhile in life, going to college was an important “stepping stone.” 

A co-worker at a restaurant encouraged Megan to apply for financial aid to attend the local community college, where she spent the next two years studying Art History. By sheer grit, she graduated, which was a feat in itself, given that the national graduation rate for two-year public colleges like the one she attended is just under 20 percent. But for all her hard work, she was rewarded with student loans and what she sees now as a useless associates degree since she is still serving beer at a sports bar to “dirty old men.” 

“Just follow my heart,” she remembers telling herself when she decided to study art history. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, well, I should have followed my wallet.’”

In the interviews my husband David and I did with over 100 young adults in southwestern Ohio, stories like Megan’s were unfortunately common. The pipeline from high school to college to career is not working for the majority of young adults who, like Megan, hail from modest backgrounds. The proposition that something needs to be fixed in the American education system is uncontroversial enough, but what is the solution? 

Megan’s story came to mind as I read Oren Cass’s new and well-received book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass takes on the topic in a chapter entitled, “How the Other Half Learns,” where he writes, “Policymakers continue to emphasize college attendance, but when enrollment bears no relationship to qualifications or completion, the result is generally wasted years and burdensome debt.” This is particularly troublesome for those with the fewest resources. As Cass puts it, 

Pushing every student in that direction [college] yields the occasional Horatio Alger story, which warms the heart and stands for the proposition that the same could happen to anyone, even though its rarity, in fact, underscores the opposite. The approach is most beneficial to those least affected by it, who benefit from innate and environmental advantages, who can flourish in college, and who can now justify a broad array of economic policies that further benefit themselves by claiming that everyone else can follow their path too. It is most harmful to those already disadvantaged, who must now navigate a system that has proven repeatedly its inability to meet their needs. 

Instead, Cass points to Germany’s apprenticeship system, among other models, and suggests the reintroduction of a tracking system—a voluntary sorting into either college-prep or occupational training programs during high school. 

This arrangement could be especially fruitful with public/private collaboration. Cass highlights one program operated by the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education in which employers sponsor students, who spend three days working at a job and two days in the classroom earning an associate’s degree. The combination of education and work means that students have an income, graduate debt-free, and gain work experience—and more than 90% of graduates in this program land jobs paying $50,000 to $75,000 in the first year. Remarkably, Cass says that education reform along these lines could mean that “with no net increase in education spending, America could offer every 10th grader additional classroom learning, a subsidized three-year apprenticeship for which he might also be paid, and a savings account with $20,000 to $40,000 awaiting him upon completion.”

When I read that, I thought of the young adults I know who’ve been carrying student debt like a noose around the neck while working low-paying service jobs completely unrelated to their fields of study. It’s not just the financial burden and limitations imposed, but the psychological burden of feeling like you’re wasting your life, as though your inability to launch a meaningful career post-graduation is a sign of personal failure.

As Megan, then married and with a son, told me, “I want to set that example for [my son], which I did go to college and everything.  But I want to set the example for him that you need to go to school and do something that you love and make money at it. I don’t want him to be like, ‘Oh, my mom’s a waitress.’”

I’m hopeful that smoother pathways to the trades and vocational education is a step in the direction of stronger families, although I do have some concerns about a tracking system—one of them being how to implement it so that the students who choose to go the vocational route don’t end up getting stigmatized as dumb or “less than.”

How much different might it have been for Megan and others like her if we had a system that could smooth the transition from education to vocation? The implications would not only affect individuals but resound in the family. In the first year of her marriage, Megan and her husband found themselves arguing frequently, unsure how they would pay the bills, working opposite shifts and welcoming a baby into the world. They separated for a month, patched things up temporarily, but eventually divorced. The reasons were many and complex. But there’s no doubt that starting out married life with student debt and the stress of low-wage work in today’s labor market does little to form a solid foundation for family formation. 

I’m hopeful that smoother pathways to the trades and vocational education is a step in the direction of stronger families, although I do have some concerns about a tracking system—one of them being how to implement it so that the students who choose to go the vocational route don’t end up getting stigmatized as dumb or “less than.” This, of course, is a larger cultural problem with the way we view blue collar vs. white collar work, but it seems like it would be a hindrance to the effectiveness of a tracking system. The local public high school for our town actually does offer a vocational track and partners with a well-respected Career Center in the area. But I’ve spoken with a handful of young adults who chose not to go this route because of the stigma, even though later in life they regretted it when their peers who went to the Career Center ended up with better-paying jobs. 

For example, Mark, a 30-something underemployed contract laborer we spoke to, remembered that the predominant attitude at his high school was, “If you’re dumb, you go to the career center.” He went the college prep route because he was in the top 10% of his class and didn’t want to sell himself short, something he now regrets. “Would’ve killed two birds with one stone in those four years,” he said. Megan and Mark, like so many others, enrolled in college thinking that it was the ticket to the middle class, but that failed to materialize. 

But what if a working-class kid does want a college degree? Like the friend of ours who works at the family business by day but studies for a theology degree by night? Or the young electrician apprentice who was reading Tolkien at the age of six but went the trade route because college was too expensive? Or my husband, who after high school graduation spent two years working in a warehouse, unsure what to do next? No one else in his family had ever gone to college and the thought of applying was completely overwhelming. 

Perhaps it’s the Millennial in me, but there is a real tension present in Megan’s words about following her heart or her wallet. While many times life requires us to take what we can get and do work that we’d rather not do, I also identify with the desire to find work that is meaningful and that suits the temperament and aptitude of the individual. I think of the factory workers who advise their children to go to college so that they can avoid the mind-numbing, body-breaking repetition of the assembly line. Most well-educated men and women seek work they enjoy. At its best, a tracking system could help everyone find their niche. (As Cass points out, the vocational track is not a “death sentence.” Executives in Europe have gotten their start as apprentices.) But the danger is that a tracking system would funnel kids from blue-collar families into one track and kids from college-educated families into the other for reasons that have little to do with individual interest and aptitude and more with social class. 

In our newfound eagerness to promote blue-collar trades and embrace vocational education, we should not forget that people from working-class homes have the right to pursue their passions and interests as well; they don’t all have to be factory workers and welders. We should expand our definition of success to include blue-collar work, while also reforming higher education so that a working-class kid who wants to get a college degree will find the support to make it happen. 

Amber Lapp is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and, along with her husband David, co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, a qualitative research inquiry into how white, working-class young adults form families and think about marriage.