Reports And Briefings

Abstract

Married-couple households are more affluent, less likely to be poor, and experience fewer hardships than other types of households, such as single-parent families or people living on their own. This research brief explores why, focusing on differences across household types in income, non-income resources, such as wealth, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, such as age and education.

In our recent study, published in Demographic Research, we find that married-couple households experience fewer hardships than other households while single-parent families with children experience the most. Other household types, such as cohabiting couples and people living alone, fall in between. The biggest reason for the married-couple advantage is wealth—married couples often have more savings and assets to fall back on. Income also plays a significant role, followed by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

In short, the income- and wealth-building capacity of married-couple households are important for helping them avoid hardships. Meanwhile, a more moderate portion of the married-couple household advantage reflects the selection of more fortunate demographic and socioeconomic groups into marriage—for instance, people with higher levels of education are more likely to marry than others. 

The U.S. individual income tax structure and the safety-net assistance system exact financial penalties on married couples, which worsen when children are in the family. The effect of these penalties is the opposite of what public policy should be. Research has established that society benefits immensely from stable and healthy marriages. This policy brief is divided into two sections. Section 1 focuses on the U.S. Tax Code and restoring the income tax to its primary purpose, while eliminating the marriage penalty. Section 2 presents a way for Congress to eliminate marriage penalties from safety-net programs.

Pronatal Policy Works, and America Can't Afford to Forego it

What would happen to American fertility if the child tax credit were appreciably increased? Many are skeptical of the influence of cash transfers on fertility, but that skepticism is misplaced. Cash-for-kids works. It is relatively cost-effective, and its fertility effects help families achieve their own stated family goals. The pronatal outcomes of an increased child tax credit are a good reason to support such an investment.

Key Findings:

• Financial incentives—such as child tax credits—can indeed boost fertility by a demographically significant degree, and have done so in many contexts around the world.
• We suggest raising the nonrefundable child tax credit (CTC) to $2,000 and making it claimable against payroll taxes, raising the refundable additional child tax credit (ACTC) to $2,500, and indexing both values to keep up with inflation.
• This reform to the child tax credit could plausibly boost fertility by 3–10%, raising U.S. population in 2100 by at least 5 and perhaps as much as 35 million people. 
• This plan would also increase incentives for parents to marry and increase incentives for parents to work, creating not only more births, but stronger families.

How the Character of Men's Work Is Linked to Their Family Status

Media Coverage

John DiIulio, "The best natalist policy: good jobsThe makings of a second Baby Boom," UnHerd, May 26, 2025

Chris Bullivant, Grant Martsolf, Brad Wilcox, "Is the collapse of blue-collar marriage a foregone conclusion," The Washington Examiner, April 30, 2025

Grant Martsolf, "Good jobs, strong families in working-class America," Family Studies, April 29, 2025

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Introduction

Over the last half century, the U.S. economy has shifted, moving away from manufacturing and towards being an information and service economy. The mid-1980s, for instance, were punctuated by news of the closures of major steel manufacturers, including Homestead Works, Aliquippa Works, and Duquesne Works in Pittsburgh, PA, and Republic Works in Youngstown, OH. The closures were part and parcel of a period of massive deindustrialization. Between 1984 and 2004, the U.S. economy lost between 6 and 7 million manufacturing jobs that provided reliable and high-paying employment with good benefits for millions of working-class Americans.

The move away from manufacturing had a significant impact on America’s working class. Real wages of the median Americans with a high school diploma or less (a common measure of “working class”) declined by 11% between 1979 and 2019, while those of the median worker who had finished college increased by 15 percent. Many industrial communities, especially across America’s “Rust Belt,” experienced significant disinvestment and fell into blight. These economic shifts, both in the Rust Belt and nationwide, took a devastating toll. They pushed working-class men’s labor force participation down and led to declines in religious and secular expressions of community life in areas hit hardest by deindustrialization. Families not only broke apart but failed to form. In the wake of this economic dislocation and social breakdown, deaths of despair—that is, deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholism—surged among working-class women and especially men.

The transformation of the American economy has been especially impactful on working-class men. As manufacturing receded, employment in service industries surged, especially in healthcare, financial, and information services. Many of these service jobs require a college degree. And most of the significant growth in jobs that do not require a college degree has been concentrated in industries and occupations that are female dominated. Since 1990, the healthcare industry alone has added roughly 9 million jobs to the US economy. Nearly 80% of Americans who do not have a college degree and work in healthcare are women.nbsp;In fact, declines in real wages for working-class workers were concentrated among men; working-class women have seen their real wages rise since 1979.

Over this same period, Americans have also experienced a significant reduction in marriage and family stability. Since 1970, the marriage rate has fallen by more than 60% to the point where only about 1 in 2 adults are married. Declines in marriage and family stability have been especially precipitous for working-class Americans since 1980. For instance, only 39% of non-college-educated Americans ages 18-55 are married, compared to 58% of college-educated Americans.

Our hypothesis in this Institute for Family Studies (IFS) report is that the nature and character of work play a key role in affecting male marriageability. We contend that features of work like job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands. Moreover, we note that class divides in marriage today are driven in part by differences in the character of work, with college-educated men generally benefiting, in terms of marriage and family formation, from jobs that are more stable, predictable, higher status, and remunerative. But we also suspect that the character of work varies among working-class men themselves, such that some jobs among working-class men are more likely to facilitate marriage and family formation than others.

In this report, we examine family formation among working-class men, defined here as men without college degrees, within the context of distinct employment environments. We also examine differences in married family formation rates—measured here in terms of being married with children at home—between working-class and college-educated men, and we investigate the extent to which these differences might be explained by differences in “good job” variables—primarily differences in pay, benefits, and stability. We then explore differences in the rates of married family formation among working-class men by industry and estimate the extent to which differences across industries are explained by the same “good job” variables. We conclude with a discussion of how public policies might better support working-class men in their jobs to improve their family prospects.

Part 1: Family Formation Among Working-class Men

Trends in family formation rates

In this section, using historical Census data from 1980-2021, we discuss recent family formation trends among working-class men.¹ Working class throughout this report is operationalized as completion of less than a college education. Here, college education is defined as completion of at least four years of college. Importantly, this is slightly different than the operationalization of “working class” because the measures of educational attainment in historical Census data are slightly different from the CPS data used in subsequent analyses.

There is ample evidence that college-educated Americans are more likely to get married, stay married, and avoid having children out of wedlock. This is partly because more educated men and women have more stable incomes, more shared assets, greater civic supports for their marriages, and networks that are dominated by married peers, as Wilcox argued in Get Married.²

However, this has not always been the case. In fact, before the 1980s, men who did not complete college had higher rates of married family formation compared to those who did complete college. In our analysis of Census data, we found that in 1980, 59% of all prime working-age men (ages 25-55) who did not complete college were married with children living in their homes, compared to 55% of men who did complete college.

Over the course of the next 40 years, all men in America were increasingly less likely to be married and living with children. By 2021, only 37% of prime working-age men were married living with children compared to 58% in 1980 (Figure 1). But the overall decline in married family formation was more significant for men who had not completed college. Over the last 40 years, men who had not graduated from college were now actually less likely than college-educated men to be married and living with their own children. By 2021, 34% of non-college-educated, prime working-age men were married and living with their own children compared to 44% of college-educated men. 

Introduction

The last quarter century has seen a dramatic increase in grade inflation on student report cards in elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States. So much so that a student’s grade point average (GPA), which was once as useful as SAT or ACT scores, has become almost worthless as a predictor of how well the student would do in college or graduate school. And high school graduation rates have continued climbing even as the 12th-Grade results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained stagnant or even declined. There has also been a notable decline in disciplinary actions by schools for student misconduct or lack of application.

Progressive education reformers have sought to make family background less of a determinant of how well a student does in school. Yet evidence from two nationwide household surveys of parents conducted nearly a quarter of a century apart demonstrate that family factors, such as marital stability, parent education, family income, and race and ethnicity, are as important as ever—or even more so

Housing is a core part of the family formation process, yet surprisingly little is known about what kinds of houses Americans want for their families. We remedy that gap in our recent report, Homes for Young Families: A Pro-family Housing Agenda, which presents evidence from a survey of nearly 9,000 Americans ages 18-54. 

Today, apartments as a share of home construction are at their highest level in decades. This is concerning since, as we show in Homes for Young Families: A Pro-family Housing Agenda, almost nobody in America wants to raise a family in an apartment. Our survey of almost 9,000 Americans finds a broad-spectrum rejection of apartment living across every single demographic group surveyed.

For decades, one of the dominant trends in American housing geography has been suburbanization, which has always been associated with public narratives around crime. In Homes for Young Families: A Pro-family Housing Agenda, our survey of almost 9,000 Americans finds that safety is the single most important factor shaping the housing decisions of young families. No amount of affordability or amenities will ever be enough to convince a family that a neighborhood where they feel unsafe is a great place to raise kids.  

Introduction

Our report, Homes for Young Families: A Pro-family Housing Agenda, presents evidence that local land-use regulations worsen housing affordability for young families. These regulations include: floor-area ratios set at very low levels, high parking requirements, height limits, and convoluted permitting processes. This fact sheet explores how land-use regulations affect housing affordability and fertility.  

Introduction

Our report, Homes for Young Families: A Pro-family Housing Agenda, highlights one set of policies that imperil housing affordability: urban growth boundaries. UGBs are rules or policies setting hard limits about where land can be developed, with development beyond those limits requiring hard-to-get special exemptions or permissions. In some areas, UGBs are impenetrable barriers, while in others they simply increase development cost and restrict how much housing can be built on undeveloped land. This fact sheet explores UGBs.