Reports And Briefings

Executive Summary

America is facing a mental health crisis. Suicide, anxiety, depression, and drug overdose deaths have all risen to record levels. Younger generations have been hit especially hard during this crisis. Millennial men and women experience increased anxiety and depression compared to previous generations at the same age.

Some argue that the emotional state of young adults today is related to their financial precarity. Economic pressures such as student loans add stress in young adults’ lives, and Millennials have also encountered many obstacles in the workforce, including a challenging job market and longer work hours.

Meanwhile, there is a path that young adults who aspire to move up the economic ladder and establish a financially secure foundation should follow: Get at least a high school education, work full-time, and marry before having children. Among Millennials who followed what is known as the Success Sequence, 97% are not poor when they reach adulthood, and 90% reach the middle class or higher. Young adults who manage to follow this sequence—even in the face of various disadvantages—are much more likely to flourish financially.

In addition to offering robust financial benefits, could the Success Sequence also help young adults flourish emotionally and achieve better mental health outcomes? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a new report from the Institute for Family Studies explores the link between the Success Sequence and mental health among young adults when they reach their mid-30s.

We find that the Success Sequence is strongly linked to better mental health among young adults. Our analysis of the Mental Health Inventory (MHI-5) in the NLSY97 demonstrates that the incidence of high mental distress at ages 32 to 38 drops dramatically with each completed step of the sequence. Millennials who completed all three steps are much less likely to be highly emotionally distressed by their mid-30s, compared with those who missed these steps (9% vs. 30%).

At the same time, there is a gender gap in mental distress among Millennials. Women are consistently more likely than men to report experiencing emotional distress. The gender gap is the largest among Millennials who missed all three steps of the Success Sequence (38% vs. 22%). But even among those who followed all three steps, women are still more likely than men to experience higher emotional distress (12% vs. 7%).

A racial gap also exists in mental distress among Millennials. White young adults who missed all three steps of the sequence by their mid-30s seem especially more likely to suffer from mental distress than other racial groups. Among this group, 38% of white young adults reported being highly emotionally distressed, compared with 23% of black and 26% of Hispanic young adults. This racial gap narrows with the completion of each step of the Success Sequence and is almost closed among young adults who have completed all three steps.

It is tempting to link better mental health to the financial success of the young adults who completed the Success Sequence, but the findings suggest that even after controlling for income, the sequence remains a significant factor in predicting your adult mental health. The odds of experiencing high emotional distress by their mid-30s are reduced by about 50% for young adults who have completed the three steps of the Success Sequence, after controlling for their income and a range of background factors, including gender, race, and family background. 

Why does the Success Sequence contribute to better mental health? Further analysis suggests that the sequence is closely linked to family stability, which is key to mental well-being. Millennials who married before having children are more likely to have stable marriages. Among Millennials who followed this path, 73% are in intact families (married and never divorced) by their mid-30s, compared with only 30% of those who had children before or outside of marriage.

Furthermore, among Millennials who have been married and have children, those who became parents before marriage are about twice as likely to be divorced or separated by their mid-30s compared with their peers who married before having children (27% vs. 14%). Even after controlling for confounding factors like education, race, and family background, we find that marrying before having children is linked to a 32% decline in divorce among those who have ever married and have children.

Among the report’s other key findings:

• The order of marriage and parenthood plays an important role in young adults’ overall well-being. Marrying before having children is not only linked to a lower risk of emotional distress but also to better general health and overall happiness. Millennials who married before having children are less likely to experience high emotional distress by their mid-30s compared with those who had a baby first (12% vs. 19%). They are also more likely to report being in great health (65% vs. 52%) and feeling happy all or most of the time (82% vs. 74%).
   
• Millennials who have never married and are childless by their mid-30s (about one in five) report higher levels of mental distress compared with those who followed the path of marrying before having children (20% vs. 12%). They are also less likely to report being happy (71% vs. 82%).
   
• Among Millennial women in their mid-30s, those who are currently divorced and had children before marriage experience the highest rate of mental distress (33%). In contrast, those who are currently married and had their children after marriage experience the lowest level (12%). About 21% of married, childless women experience higher levels of mental distress, as do 23% of never-married, childless Millennial women. 

A growing minority of young men are floundering. “Failure to launch” is a description that’s all too common. Public intellectuals like Reeves, Scott Galloway, and Jonathan Haidt have blamed the falling fortunes of young men on shifts in our economy, schools that don’t do a good job of serving our boys, or technology that distracts adolescent males from real life. But they have largely overlooked an even more fundamental factor in a boy’s life: whether or not he grew up in an intact, married home with his father. 

This research brief remedies this gap by looking at young men’s likelihood of graduating college or ending up in prison or jail in terms of their family structure growing up. The most striking finding is that young men from non-intact families are more likely to land in prison or jail than they are to graduate from college, whereas young men raised by their married fathers are significantly more likely to graduate from college than spend any time in prison/jail.

With fertility falling to record lows in the United States, it is increasingly important to understand what factors may be preventing Americans from having the families they want to have. One factor that many people immediately think of is housing, cities, and density. Because children require a degree of space, people from a wide range of perspectives argue that housing affordability, open space, and housing density could all matter for family formation.

But this debate takes a particularly sharp turn in relation to the modern “YIMBY,” or “Yes In My Back Yard,” political movement seeking to eliminate laws that restrict supply of new housing. Many YIMBY advocates believe that removing these laws will lead to housing becoming more affordable (which most people believe can boost fertility), even as it will also lead to Americans living in denser communities (which some people believe may reduce fertility). In this post, I won’t settle the question over whether removing zoning laws would actually increase density (it really depends on what exact laws are changed). Rather, I’ll focus on: What would happen to fertility if density increased?

Executive Summary

Plummeting fertility rates in southern Europe have led governments across the region to begin considering pronatal policy. Italian Prime Minister Meloni recently spoke alongside Pope Francis about the importance of boosting Italian fertility, Spain’s fertility rate is at record lows, and even tiny Malta’s Parliament has called low birth rates an “existential challenge.” Most recently, France—which, as this report discusses, has historically experienced high birth rates—has begun to see declining fertility, leading French Premier Emmanuel Macron to call for “demographic rearmament.” 

This report undertakes the task of assessing where fertility in southern Europe is headed, what factors are driving its decline, and whether anything can be done. In brief, we find that there are reasons for hope: pronatalism has worked where it has been seriously undertaken, and sources of demographic underperformance are readily identifiable in many countries.

That said, in this report, we do not attempt to provide a blueprint for pronatal policy, for the simple reason that no such blueprint will look the same in any two countries. Despite some broad similarities, the challenges facing Spain are not the same as those facing Italy, and similar headline fertility rates often mask quite large underlying differences. Policies implemented in one context cannot be expected to have the same effects in other contexts, where underlying economic structures and cultural norms may be different.

Key Findings:

• Fertility rates within marriage remain fairly high in much of southern Europe, and only Spain has seen a major decline in married fertility in the last 40 years. However, marriage rates have fallen sharply in all countries. As a result, most of the decline in fertility can be directly attributed to decreasing exposure to marriage.
• Differences in nonmarital fertility alone do not account for cross-national differences in overall fertility: high fertility societies have high rates of childbearing within marriage.
• Fertility differences around Europe are not primarily due to differences in prevalence or sources of immigration, but rather to differences among native-born women in each country. For example, high immigration is not the source of France’s high fertility.
• Desired family size is relatively low in southern Europe, perhaps due to adverse economic conditions leading young people to reduce their family ambitions. Examples of adverse economic conditions could include extended coresidence with parents, lack of independent household formation by young men, and low prevalence of stable, formal employment for young adults.
• France’s pronatal policies undertaken between 1920 and 1950, and expanded in subsequent decades, have caused French fertility to remain durably elevated (0.1 to 0.3 more children per woman) throughout the last century. This has led to France’s population being several million people higher today than it otherwise would have been.
• Because the exact dynamics of marriage, housing, and work vary considerably across countries, the best path forward for governments interested in pronatal policy is a harmonized multinational data collection effort entirely focused on assessing factors shaping fertility and marriage, similar to the country-specific surveys fielded in Spain and Portugal in the late 2010s.

In 2023, the Surgeon General of the U.S. issued an advisory on the apparent upsurge in youth mental health problems, calling it the “crisis of our time.” But amid the many reports issued by professional associations and federal and state agencies, a curious lack of attention has been paid to the roles that family dynamics play in creating or ameliorating stress for children. Nor has there been much mention of the part that families play in seeking out and working with professional psychological help when their offspring need it.

One of the major federal population surveys on children’s health issues, the National Survey on Children’s Health (NSCH) provides periodic information on both the health services that young people get, as well as on key characteristics of the different types of families in which they live.² What follows is my examination, using these data, of how a child’s family structure relates to his or her need for and receipt of mental health services. 

Comparing across relationship status, adults who are married are by far the happiest, as measured by how they evaluate their current and future life. In 2023, married adults ages 25 to 50 are 17 percentage points more likely to be thriving than adults who never married, up from 12 percentage points in 2009. The gap favoring those who are married is consistently large over the entire 2009 to 2023 period, though it ranges from a low of 12 percentage points to a high of 24 percentage points.

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) recently commissioned a poll from YouGov, asking adults in five growing Sun Belt states about their views on policies that aim to support family life. This report focuses on policies for Texas that are not just politically popular but also can meaningfully advance the goal of making it easier to start and raise a family. 

Executive Summary

This Institute for Family Studies report finds that strong families are associated with less crime in cities across the United States, as well in neighborhoods across Chicago. Specifically, our analyses indicate that the total crime rate in cities with high levels of single parenthood are 48% higher than those with low levels of single parenthood. When it comes to violent crime and homicide, cities with high levels of single parenthood have 118% higher rates of violence and 255% higher rates of homicide. And in Chicago, our analysis of census tract data from the city shows that tracts with high levels of single-parent-headed households face 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates, and 436% higher homicide rates, compared to tracts with low levels of single parenthood. We also find that poverty, education, and race are linked to city and census-tract level trends in crime. In general, in cities across America, and on the streets of Chicago, this report finds that public safety is greater in communities where the two-parent family is the dominant norm.

The debate about how best to respond to urban crime—a debate that has become more important in light of recent increases in violent crime and homicide in many cities across America—has tended to focus on two perspectives. The first prioritizes tackling the “social structural factors” (unemployment, economic inequality, poverty, etc.) that are thought to be the “root causes” of crime, and violent crime, in particular. A second perspective rejects this structural approach in favor of a strategy that relies on traditional law-enforcement institutions (namely, police, prosecutors, and jails/prisons), often citing the sharp violent crime declines of the 1990s and 2000s that occurred in the wake of new policing and prosecutorial approaches—even in the face of structural realities said to be at the root of the urban crime problem.

But a third perspective seeks to understand how the fragile state of core social institutions—schools, churches, youth sports leagues, and, above all, families—in too many of our cities may also have a hand in urban crime. Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for instance, has argued that nonprofits “focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities” are linked to lower rates of violent crime in cities across the country. In this Institute for Family Studies report, we turn our attention to the core institution of family. Drawing on the work of scholars like Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson—who found that “(f)amily structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of ... urban violence across cities in the United States”—we explore the relationship between family structure and urban crime in the 21st century. Specifically, we address this question: How is family structure associated with crime, violent crime, and homicide rates in American cities—and with these outcomes in Chicago neighborhoods?

We find that cities are safer when two-parent families are dominant and more crime-ridden when family instability is common. The same story applies to the neighborhoods of Chicago. More specifically, we find the total crime rate is about 48% higher in cities that have above the median share of single-parent families, compared to cities that have fewer single-parent families. That difference is even larger with respect to violent crime and homicide, specifically, with cities above the median level of single parenthood experiencing 118% higher rates of violent crime and 255% higher rates of homicide. In the Windy City, relying on an analysis of census tract level data, our research indicates that neighborhoods above the median fraction of single-parent-headed households experienced 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates, and 436% higher homicide rates. 

When controlling for additional factors such as racial composition, poverty rates, and educational attainment levels, we find that the association between family structure and total crime rates, as well as violent crime rates, in cities across the United States remains statistically significant. However, the association between family structure and homicide in cities does not. In Chicago, the links between family structure and both violent crime and homicide rates at the neighborhood level were significant, net of controls, but not the total crime rate. In addition to the question of whether there exists a statistical relationship between family structure and crime—a question we generally answer in the affirmative—this study also offers possible answers to the question of what might explain the relationships between family instability and crime.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of social science research, we theorize that this relationship is likely a byproduct of some mix of the heightened risk of family instability in the socialization of young children, and the role that father absence plays in providing less guidance and oversight for adolescent and young adult males. 

Particularly in light of the preexisting literature on the role of family structure in various life outcomes, these findings may have important implications for policymakers. They suggest the need to encourage more young Americans—particularly those living in vulnerable neighborhoods with both high rates of violence and out-of-wedlock childbearing—toward forming strong and stable families in marriage.

Executive Summary

America’s system of federalism means that the issues that most directly impact the lives of parents and families are often most appropriately dealt with at the state level. While many conversations about how to make family life more affordable and achievable in the U.S. tend to focus on the federal tax code, state policy interacts with how families live their daily lives—at school, at the workplace, and at home. 

A report, published jointly by the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, incorporates exclusive findings from a new YouGov poll of parents in five key states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. We find that parents in Sun Belt states are looking for a slate of family-friendly policies that can make their lives easier without radically burdening the state’s fiscal capacities.

Decisions over land use, school funding, workforce training, and health care coverage vary widely from state to state. And many states are exploring how to orient their policy status quo in a more pro-family direction.    

At a time when many states are struggling to maintain positive population growth, the five states we highlight in this report have seen population growth rates in double digits since 2010. Only nine states in the nation have more children under five today than they did a decade ago—and Texas, Florida, and Tennessee are among their number. 

Our five selected states share some key similarities—they are benefitting from the U.S. population’s re-balancing towards the Sun Belt, they boast business-friendly economic climates, and they are, on the whole, politically conservative, though not uniformly so. 

Families are voting with their feet towards the Southeast, and governors in these states have already placed a rhetorical down payment on helping their respective states be more friendly to families: 

• “Florida must always be a great place to raise a family—we will enact more family-friendly policies to make it easier to raise children.” – Gov. Ron DeSantis, Jan. 2, 2023
• “We’re not resting on our laurels…Georgia continues to be the best state to live, work, and raise a family.” – Gov. Brian Kemp, May 5, 2023
• “As long as I am Governor, we will ensure Texas remains…the best state to live, build a business, and raise a family.” – Gov. Greg Abbott, March 9, 2023
• “Our state continues to be the best place for people to live, learn, work, and raise a family. I’ve never been more excited about North Carolina’s future.”- Gov. Roy Cooper, Dec. 28, 2022
• “Tennessee is leading the nation as the best state to work, live & raise a family…I am confident that our state’s best days are ahead.” – Gov. Bill Lee, Dec. 29, 2022

And many states have proposed various policies to make it easier on parents. But what does it mean to be the best state in which to raise a family? How should policymakers weigh the different policy proposals that are being discussed? And what are parents looking for from politicians eager to have their state contend for that title? 

As our report will discuss in greater detail, authentically pro-family policy must treat the family as the most essential unit of a healthy and flourishing society. At their best, pro-family policies will expand choices for parents, allowing them to raise their children and order their lives in the way that best fits their values and preferences. Policies that ignore the importance of strong families, engaged parents, and give preference to the state or the market over the institution of the family, will fall short of their goal. But with this definition in mind, it is also important to understand how the public sees pro-family policies, and that is what this report helps to answer. 

The second half of our report shows that there are some meaningful differences of opinion between parents who describe themselves as either Democrats, Republicans, or neither. But on the whole, there is a surprising level of agreement on many of the policies being polled, if a difference of degree in the level of support and how to prioritize them. Importantly, it suggests that even Republican parents are looking for a pro-family agenda that meaningfully address families’ economic and cultural concerns that make it challenging raising a family today. 

Executive Summary

By: Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades

Fifty to 65% of Americans believe that living together before marriage will improve their odds of relationship success. Younger Americans are especially likely to believe in the beneficial effects of cohabitation, and to view living together as providing a valuable test of a relationship ahead of marriage. Yet living together before marriage has long been associated with a higher risk for divorce, contradicting the common belief that cohabitation will improve the odds of a marriage lasting. 

This association between premarital cohabitation and divorce is often called the cohabitation effect. With 70% of couples living together before marriage, it is important to understand how and when cohabitation is associated with poorer odds of marital success. 

Controversy over this topic has abounded, both in the media and in science journals, with some arguing that any association between premarital cohabitation and divorce is due to selection—that is, the association is merely related to differences in who does or does not live together before marriage—and others suggesting that something about the experience of living together makes a couple more likely to struggle in marriage. We believe both selection and experience are part of the explanation, and that there are steps people can take to increase their odds of having a lasting marriage based on how or if they cohabit before marriage. 

Using a new national sample of Americans who married for the first time in the years 2010 to 2019, we examined the stability of these marriages as of 2022 based on whether or not, and when, people had lived together prior to marriage. Consistent with prior research, couples who cohabited before marriage were more likely to see their marriages end than those who did not cohabit before marriage. 

The primary finding of this report is that the timing of moving in together is robustly associated with marital instability. 

• Those who started cohabiting before being engaged were more likely to experience marital dissolution than those who only did so after being engaged or already being married.
  • Specifically, 34% of marriages ended among those who cohabited before being engaged, compared to 23% of marriages for those who lived together only after being either married or engaged to be married. 
• In relative terms, the marriages of those who moved in together before being engaged were 48% more likely to end than the marriages of those who only cohabited after being engaged or already married.

Our findings suggest that one key to reducing the risk of divorce may be either not to cohabit before marriage or to have settled the big question about marital intentions before moving in together.

Key Takeaways

• Not living together before marriage, or only doing so after already being engaged to marry, is associated with a lower likelihood of marriages ending than living together before being engaged. 
• Couples might lower their risks of divorce by having clear intentions to marry before moving in together or by waiting until marriage to live together. 
• Reasons for moving in together also matter: People who reported that their top reason for moving in together was either to test the relationship or because it made sense financially were more likely to see their marriages end than those who did so because they wanted to spend more time with their partner. 
• Having a greater number of prior cohabiting partners is associated with a higher likelihood of marriages ending. 
• Talking about what living together means and making a decision together about it (rather than sliding into it) might help lower the risk of marital difficulties for some couples who will live together before marriage. Clarifying marital intentions may be a particularly important goal for such discussions.