Reports And Briefings

Introduction and Executive Summary

Of the approximately 700 million people who have lived in America since 1600, and the over 690 million since 1776, about 80% were born here. We may be a nation of immigrants—but throughout our history, the true source of our growth has been in family and fertility. As our country celebrates its 250^th anniversary, this report takes stock of how we got here and what the future may hold. Unfortunately, given that U.S. birth rates are now below 1.6 children per woman, the answer for how we reached our current scale and strength as a nation—families raising their own children—points to a dour conclusion: without a new birth of family life in America, the greatest days of freedom will indeed be behind us. Whether our family tree has been a branch of the tree of liberty since its earliest days as a sapling, or was grafted on in living memory, the future of liberty for all of us depends on the future of family. 

In this report, we present fresh estimates of fertility for every state with available vital statistics back to 1917, and—as a special feature in celebration of our nation’s 250^th birthday—we also produce birth rate statistics for one of the nation’s original mother-colonies, Massachusetts, going back 365 years. 

Beyond this new release of data demonstrating when and where American family formation has plummeted, we also use results from a new survey of over 4,700 Americans to explore how American cultural norms around friendship and celebrity families may shape fertility. If American fertility is to recover, new cultural norms around friendship and family life may be an important element. 

Finally, informed by the available evidence on fertility and family policy, and in light of the new evidence on family culture, we outline a plan to raise American birth rates back to where they belong, and where most Americans say they want them to be: 2.4 children per woman.

Major Findings

• New historical data show that the U.S. is now in its third historic period of extended below-replacement-rate fertility. Importantly, this current period of decline is already longer than previous declines, has fallen to lower lows, and is more widely shared around the country. The new data we present on historic American fertility stretches further back into our history at a higher level of quality and reliability than any previous vital statistics-based reconstruction of U.S. fertility.
• U.S. population growth has abruptly slowed down in recent years, driven in large part by fertility rates collapsing to record lows. If fertility rates continue their recent decline, U.S. population will peak around 351 million and begin declining in the 2050s. If fertility rates stabilize, population will peak around 366 million and begin declining in the 2080s.
• Desired family size has not declined nearly as much, and as a result, the gap between actual fertility rates and the number of children Americans report desiring is rising to high levels. Even as the total fertility rate has plummeted below 1.6 children per woman, surveys continue to show Americans incorrectly think they will have about 2 children each and aspire to have 2.4 children each.
• Peer culture is a key factor associated with fertility. Having very helpful versus relatively unsupportive friends can increase desired family size for young Americans by nearly an entire child per family and can increase couple intentions to have another child by about 10 percentage points (an increase of about a third).
• Celebrity culture shapes fertility: fans of celebrities who have more kids themselves want to have more children as well. Comparing family size among admired celebrities to individual aspirations, an admired celebrity having one extra child may increase an individual’s desired family size by as much as 0.15 children.
• If policymakers wish to reverse the birth rate decline, they will have to consider a wide range of out-of-the-box policy proposals, including a generous baby bonus. However, this need not break the bank: generous baby bonuses worth five or six figures can be paid for with less than 1% of the federal budget; in fact, they’re cheaper than recently proposed child care or parental leave expansions. Massive increases in the generosity of family policy do not have to be fiscally reckless.
• Beyond financial supports, policymakers and concerned private citizens should consider interventions aimed at fostering a more family-friendly culture. Based on our findings about friends and celebrities, we outline many ideas for policies that could strengthen and generate family-friendly-friendship.

The Underwhelming Expansion

"It appears the British Americans have doubled their numbers in every period of twenty-five years from their first plantation. A rapidity of population not to be paralleled in the annals of Europe! It has never been equaled since the patriarchal ages. This rapid population of the Americans arises, partly from the great accession of foreigners, but principally from the natural increase of the inhabitants. The reasons, why the Americans are more prolific than the Europeans, are, that they are less luxurious in their manner of living, and the means of supporting a family can be more easily obtained. For the last reason the Americans are induced to marry earlier in life, and consequently their families of children are more numerous.” 

– Edward Wigglesworth, 1775

In 1775, just a year before our nation’s birth, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth published a short tract called “Calculations on American Population.” It was the first true demographic projection of our young nation and documented that the American population was doubling every 20 years, primarily due to births, not immigration. From this, Wigglesworth produced a forecast of future American population. The figure below compares his forecast to the actual history of American population.

Figure 1. U.S. Population 1600-2025, actual data from Census Bureau compared to Wigglesworth’s projection

From 1775 until the late 1800s, American population growth met or exceeded Wigglesworth’s forecast. About that forecast, he wrote, 

But to anticipate [the American] population and improvements, at the close of the twentieth century, overwhelms the mind with astonishment! At that time, should their future population be as rapid as their past, the Americans would amount to ONE THOUSAND TWO-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLIONS! The continent extending back to the south-sea, affording them new plantations; and the diversity of climates and soils, inviting the introduction of all the various productions of the other quarters of the world. (emphasis original)

The infectious enthusiasm with which Wigglesworth anticipated over a billion Americans contrasts sharply with his British colleague, Thomas Malthus, who would pen his gloom-and-doom Essay on the Principle of Population a few decades later, presenting a future of starvation and suffering. The American Wigglesworth saw exponential population growth as a sign of a heroic future for our country and people, while the old-world Malthus just saw people as more mouths to feed.

Why did America undershoot expectations? Why didn’t we keep up with Wigglesworth’s forecasts? It wasn’t a lack of immigration—in fact immigration rates were higher in the 19^th century than in Wigglesworth’s day. Rather, it was a decline of fertility. In the late 1600s, American fertility rates were at least 5.5 and perhaps as high as 7.5 children per woman—far above birth rates in England, which ranged from 3 to 6 children per woman. As a result, while perhaps as many as 140 million people have immigrated to the United States since 1776, at least 550 million have been born here, a ratio of 4 births per immigrant. Even in the era of mass migration from 1840 to 1925, births outnumbered immigrants by more than 4.5 to 1. In fact, it has always been the case that America is a family business of those born here—and that business likes to get some extra growth by incorporating new families through immigration, too. We are first and foremost a nation of families, and secondarily (though importantly!) a nation of immigrants.

Yet today, fertility has fallen sharply. The next page’s figure tracks American total fertility rates in the long run.

Figure 2. U.S. Total Fertility Rate and Cumulative Cohort Fertility, in children per woman, 1800-2025

Whereas in 1800, birth rates by age implied an average family size of seven children per woman, today the average young woman can expect to have fewer than 1.6 children. Annual fertility rates can be very volatile, and so we also show birth rates summed across women’s reproductive lives to estimate completed fertility. 

As can be seen, while completed fertility is less volatile, across the decades it very closely tracks the total fertility rate prevailing at the time a given birth cohort of women was around age 25. The correlation between actual births per woman near the end of a cohort’s reproductive years and the total fertility rate prevailing when that cohort turned 25 is 0.96—nearly a perfect association of the two. Where the total fertility rate goes, completed fertility tends to follow.

Of course, back in the 1800s and before, many of those children who were born did not survive. The figure below uses the same fertility data as above but removes births of children who likely died before age 15.

Figure 3. U.S. Total Fertility Rate and Cumulative Cohort Fertility, in children per woman, adjusted for child mortality rates, 1800-2025

Americans had many children, it’s true—but half of them died before age 15. Rates of child mortality in England in 1800 were likely even higher, and fertility lower. So, while America’s fertility advantage was still very real, the truth is that most people in the early days of the American experiment did not raise 7 children to maturity. They typically raised between 2 and 4 children. Moreover, the U.S. has seen three separate episodes of below-replacement fertility once we also account for the true replacement rate determined by child mortality: from 1933 to 1941 during the Great Depression, from 1972 to 1989 during a period of rapidly rising contraceptive uptake and abortion rates, and from 2009 to today. If the correlation between total fertility rates and completed fertility rates continues to hold up in the future, completed family sizes will plummet to new lows.

Finally, it is worth asking what kinds of families Americans actually want. The figure on the next page compares surviving fertility rates to survey-reported family size ideals, both general ideals (i.e., answers to questions about the ideal size of a family), and personal ideals or desires (i.e., answers to questions about what individuals want for their own family lives).

As can be seen, fertility rates have tended to move in the same direction as stated fertility preferences over time: the correlation over time between general ideals and total fertility rates is 0.85, while for personal ideals and fertility rates, it is 0.94. In recent years, large numbers of surveys have been conducted, especially online, and online surveys in particular have tended to produce unusually low estimates of desired fertility. Even so, the gap between actual birth rates and survey-reported desires is the highest it has been since the early 1970s, and approaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. In other words, fertility is not just falling—it is falling further below the number of children Americans report wanting.

Figure 4. U.S. Total Fertility Rate and survey-reported family size ideals and desires, 1930-2025

In this report, the first edition of a new annual research report at the Institute for Family Studies’ Pronatalism Initiative, we present brand-new survey data about American family culture, as well as newly digitized data about the history of American fertility, in order to venture some Wigglesworthian hypotheses about the future of the American family. More importantly, we offer some suggestions on how our country can get back on course towards the fulfillment of its historic promise of growth and abundance.

Fertility in the 50 States

Birth rates vary appreciably around the country, and in fact, not all states even share the same trends in recent years. But Massachusetts first mandated that births be registered in 1639, though compliance was sporadic until 1841, when a reinforced law was passed. Modern genealogical databases have digitized these records, and we extracted a wide range of vital statistics data from Massachusetts annual vital statistics reports after 1840. In combination, these sources can be used to infer fertility rates for Massachusetts with relatively high reliability back to 1660.

Figure 5. Massachusetts Total Fertility Rate, 1660-2025

Massachusetts had high fertility during the Puritan era, but fertility was already declining by 1720 and had entered a steep decline by the 1760s. It then stabilized at around three children per woman throughout the 19th century, before falling again in the 1920s and 1930s before the Baby Boom. Today, Massachusetts’ birth rate is around 1.35 children per woman—one of the lowest in the nation, and on par with rates observed in Europe. Massachusetts is far from the only state with a unique trend in fertility. The figure below shows trends for states which have, historically, had some of the highest birth rates.

Figure 6. Total fertility rates for selected high-fertility states, 1917-2025

As can be seen, several western states have historically had the highest birth rates, especially Utah, Idaho, Alaska, and South Dakota. Mississippi and New Mexico have also historically had high birth rates, though, today, New Mexico has below-average birth rates, as Hispanic fertility rates have fallen rapidly. High fertility in the frontier states has long been an area of academic research. Recent research suggests that land availability for farmers may be part of the reason for this, but high marriage rates may be even more important.

Figure 7. Total fertility rates for selected low-fertility states, 1917-2025

The set of states with very low birth rates is perhaps unsurprising: eastern, urbanized states.

The District of Columbia has almost always had a very low total fertility rate. But even less totally urbanized states like Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts seem to have had low birth rates for a very long time. Even before accounting for child mortality, New York state had below-replacement-rate fertility in 1929, before the stock market crash that set off the Great Depression. The two figures above also clearly show that American fertility was declining from 1917 onwards, which suggests the Great Depression may have intensified fertility decline but did not cause it. Whereas some states have persistently had relatively low or high fertility, other states have seen major changes, as shown in the next figure.

Figure 8. Total fertility rates for selected falling-fertility states, 1917-2025

The states in the figure above all had relatively high birth rates, vs. the national average, from 1980 to 2000—but today are all below the national average. Thus, whereas California was not a low fertility state in the latter 20^th century, it is today, with a fertility rate of just 1.42 children per woman in 2025. Likewise, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico have seen their total fertility rates plunge. Interestingly, so have Oregon and Illinois, states with somewhat smaller Hispanic populations. In those states, fertility rates are especially low in large urban areas.

Figure 9. Total fertility rates for selected less-declining-fertility states, 1917-2025

Then there are, of course, states where fertility rates have seen a less negative trend, as in the figure on the prior page. North Dakota has famously seen its fertility rates move in a more positive direction than national averages, presumably due to the fracking boom fueling high incomes, high male employment, and ultimately higher marriage rates. Less remarked upon is how states like Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee have largely bucked the trend of rapidly falling fertility and kept their fertility rates comparatively stable.

Finally, it is worth assessing American regions by their contemporary rates to get a sense of the overall geography of American family. The figure below shows the map of total fertility rates in 2025.

Figure 10. Total fertility rate by state, 2025

Around the country, just one state still has fertility rates high enough to be near or at the long-run population-stability level: South Dakota. Every other state is below, and some are far below. Along the West Coast, in New England, in Illinois, and in Florida, fertility rates are very low. Only in the upper South and the Great Plains does some vestige of the old American family culture still remain for reproductive-age people. But what of women who are no longer reproductive age? How does completed fertility vary around the country? Technically, women might continue having children into their 50s—but in practice, over 90% of births for recent cohorts have occurred by age 40. Thus, cumulative fertility rates experienced by women who were 40 in 2025 can give us a very strong sense of where in the nation small, completed family sizes might already be emerging. Total fertility rates are currently much lower than cohort fertility rates, which generally implies that future cohort fertility rates are likely to decline vs. present cohort fertility rates.

Figure 11. Cumulative cohort fertility rate by state for the cohort aged 40 in 2025

For women who are in their early 40s today, in much of the middle of the country and the South, actual fertility is near or just above replacement rates. But in the Northeast, and to some extent the West Coast, near-completed fertility rates really are very low. For women who turned 40 in 2025, cumulative Massachusetts fertility rates point to a completed family size of just 1.6 children per woman. Based on U.N. data, that’s lower than completed fertility for similar cohorts in over 200 of the 237 countries for which data exists. This low fertility rate is on par with many Eastern European countries. Eastern European women born in the mid-1980s came of age during the fertility collapse of the 1990s and 2000s after the fall of Communism. Apparently, family life in Massachusetts is about as successful as family life just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Thus, the state of American fertility can be summed up in simple terms: not good. A nation once propelled to unprecedented heights of power by its rapid demographic expansion now rests at a fraction of its historically anticipated population because birth rates have crashed. While immigration has continued, falling fertility rates are a global phenomenon and such skilled migrants as do exist will be in demand by many countries. Reliance on migration for population growth is not a credible strategy in the long run. If current trends continue, American population may peak within the next few decades and then enter interminable decline, as we will lay out in greater detail below.

The State of Family Culture Today

In each annual State of Fertility report, we will present new data on cultural and social forces shaping American fertility. In this one, we ask a simple question: how is American friendship shaping American fertility? A growing body of research has suggested that the digital revolution may be reshaping American fertility as iPhones and social media and pornography replace social life, spread new ideas, and alter the landscape of American relationships. 

The 2026 State of Family Culture Survey asked a range of new questions of Americans ages 18 to 50 and specifically explored how their social influences and friendships shape their fertility behaviors. We asked respondents how many children their three best friends had (excluding family members and romantic partners), as well as the sibling with which they have the closest relationship (if they have any siblings). This allows us to estimate the average parity of the respondent’s close social ties: up to three friends and a close sibling. Moreover, we then asked respondents how their social ties would react if they had another child. They could select from four different “positive” options (i.e., “My friends would offer to help me with my new baby,” or “My friends would cook meals for me after the baby was born”) and from four different “negative” options (i.e., “My friends would worry about my career,” or “My friends would not invite me to socialize as much”). We assessed how these and a few other social variables shaped desired family size (the number of children respondents said they’d be happiest having), as well as intentions to have any more children conditional on not yet having reached desired family size. In other words, we measured how friendship dynamics shape overall family size desires, and then, separately among respondents who hadn’t yet achieved their desires, how friendship dynamics shape their concrete intentions to achieve their goals.

Figure 12. Children desired among under-30s and share intending children among couples interested in having more children, by religious attendance, children among social ties, and supportiveness of friends

It is well known that religiosity is closely related to fertility desires and outcomes. Indeed, as can be seen in the figure above, religious attendance predicts higher desired family size among Americans under 30 (~2 children for never-attenders at the mean of control variables, vs. 2.7 for others), and also predicts higher intentions to make progress towards desired fertility (50% for regular attenders at the mean of control variables, vs. under 40% for others).

But the associational effect of helpful friends is similar to or larger than the effect of religion. Since the estimates shown are from a model including all presented variables, we can be fairly confident that the linkage between helpful friends and fertility is separate from the effect of religion: it’s not just that religious people have more helpful friends.

For Americans under 30 with the bottom 10% least-helpful friends (i.e. those scoring -2 or less), desired family size is around 1.7 children per respondent. For those with the top 10% most helpful friends, it’s around 2.8 children—helpful friends are associated with an entire extra child in desired family size. When it comes to intentions to have more kids among couples who ideally would like more, there are similar effects: only 20-30% of those with unhelpful friends intend to have more children, vs. 40-50% of those with the most helpful friends.

Indeed, passive social influences from peers matter, too: simply having more friends with kids is associated with desiring more children. Again, while we can’t rule out reverse-causality (people who want kids may seek out friends with kids), most people form their friendships well before they start having kids, and our results are similar if we only include sibling child numbers. Our results are also unchanged if we include controls for the number of siblings respondents had (i.e. family culture of origin) and are also unchanged if we exclude nonreligious individuals (i.e. a possible source of confounding selection), or if we limit it to just childless respondents under 30. Moreover, we find that the average family size of peers has twice as much of an effect on an individual’s family size desires as their number of siblings in childhood. 

Other questions we asked about parent-child relationships and extended family ties had little or no association with fertility desires. For example, we find no association at all between an individual’s number of cousins and their family size desires: big families do not intrinsically create kids who grow up to have big families. Closeness to extended family, and even stronger relationships with parents, are not strongly associated with differences in family size desires. Rather, fertility desires are more about peer culture than family culture.

Another topic we surveyed also points to the importance of peer and popular culture: publicly admired figures. We asked every respondent to report a public figure whom they most admired and why. We then collated these reports and identified how many children each figure was publicly known to have based on public celebrity or Wikipedia pages. We find that each additional child born to an admired public figure predicts higher desired family size for the survey respondent. The effect is about as big as we find for an individual’s number of siblings, suggesting mere celebrity fandom is almost as important as origin family size. Notably, these effects are larger for women and more statistically credible. 

Celebrity family sizes are about as influential for family size desires as the number of siblings. Women in particular appear to have family desires meaningfully associated with the family sizes of celebrities they admire, which again suggests that popular, peer, and public culture shape family size desires at least as much as family of origin or religion.

Notably, having lots of peers with kids does not predict actual intentions to have kids among couples whose ideals exceeded their current parity (i.e. those who might be open to intending more kids). An admired celebrity’s number of children also has only a small and statistically weak association with actual intentions. 

Figure 13. Children desired among under-30s, by sex and number of children of most admired public figure

To shape behavioral intentions, it is not enough to passively have friends with kids or to admire an influencer with kids—prospective parents need peers who are genuinely helpful and supportive, not just those who demonstrate big families. Demonstrative exposure to family life shapes aspirations, and those aspirations might have various knock-on-effects, but behavioral intentions among individuals whose aspirations exceed their current family size require more than just a pro-family public culture. They require peers who show up to change diapers. Moreover, given the apparently large role of social ties in shaping fertility behaviors, the idea that the digital revolution might be reducing American and global birth rates by reducing the extent to which Americans are exposed to family life is entirely plausible.

The Future of the American Family

Given what we have shown thus far about American fertility trends, and given the range of cultural norms shaping fertility, we next consider the possible range of futures for American demography. 

To start with, it must be noted that existing population forecasts, such as those produced by the U.N. Population Division, the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security Trustees, the Office of Management and Budget, or even the Census Bureau, are often too cautious and uncreative. These forecasting bodies adopt two sets of unrealistic assumptions. 

First, they tend to adopt a very standard, yet unjustified, approach to forecasting net migration: a fixed, flat future net migration rate. This assumption itself is unjustified for at least two reasons. First, under President Trump, net migration has already fallen to near-zero rates, and this is likely to continue through his presidency—and he is unlikely to be the last restrictionist president of the 21^st century. Second, in the very long run, immigration is very likely to decline due to declining global birth rates and ongoing changes in immigration policies. Falling fertility means there will be fewer excess young people looking to emigrate from their homes, and more countries competing to get them as immigrants, and so the default assumption should be that any given country’s immigration rate will tend to decline over the 21^st century. Our assumption about migration is simple: net migration remains only a few hundred thousand people per year during the Trump Administration, then rises through the mid-21^st century to around 1.5 million, then gradually declines until it is just a few hundred thousand again by 2100.

The second unrealistic assumption in most public forecasts relates to fertility. Other forecasters tend to assume various degrees of fertility recovery in the long run (except the latest CBO forecasts, which are more realistic), even though no such recovery is guaranteed. 

To rectify these issues, we produce three new population projections using a cohort-component model of the same type that other statistical bodies would use, except that we assume that over the next century, immigration cannot remain permanently at a high positive level, and we model different fertility trajectories. Our fertility assumptions (Continuation, Recovery, or Revival) for these scenarios vs. public projections are shown below.

Figure 14. Historic and projected future fertility, 1915-2100, by source of projection

The Social Security Trust Fund (OASDI) does consider a scenario where fertility is stagnant at 1.6, but they do not even countenance the possibility that fertility might continue to decline. The base scenario for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid budget planning assumes a rapid fertility increase similar to what we call our “Revival” scenario. On the other hand, the UN and the Census Bureau more-or-less straight-line birth rates at recent levels, while CBO, almost alone among the forecasters, offers a plausible scenario where fertility falls, then recovers a bit as women delaying fertility rush to make it up. CBO’s scenario is similar to our “Recovery” scenario—but no forecaster has had the political capital and resolve to actually tell the American people what will happen if fertility keeps falling. 

We do so here. In the next figure, we show what will happen to American population if, as in our “Continuation” scenario, fertility drops to 1.35 by 2050 and 1.15 by 2095; or, at the other extreme in our “Revival” scenario, what will happen if fertility rises to 2 by 2050 and 2.1 by 2060.

If something like what CBO expects, or what we term a “Recovery” scenario occurs, then population growth will continue at a low level until the 2080s. The U.S. may continue to barely eke out a slow pace of growth well into the 21^st century. Growth would be far lower than it has been for most of our history. Edward Wigglesworth’s ghost would be infinitely disappointed in us, but the American experiment would not go into reverse for some time yet.

Figure 15. Historic and projected future population, 1940-2100, by source of projection

But if current trends in fertility rates continue and if births keep getting postponed later and later, then population will peak in the mid-2050s and then go into relatively rapid decline. In this scenario, the latter 21^st century will see America in demographic—and therefore economic and political—retreat.

That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there are ways to avoid this outcome, and to make the Recovery scenario more likely—perhaps even to achieve the trends we list as a Revival, i.e. a return to replacement-rate fertility or better. 

How To Restore American Family Growth

There are five major reforms which, in combination, could restore the fortunes of American fertility. Beyond these five major reforms, we describe three key cultural domains where, if Americans want to see population revival, the culture will need to change.

Pronatal Policies

Reform 1: American Birthday Accounts

President Trump launched a small savings account seeded with $1,000 to give emerging adults a leg up in his “Trump Accounts,” passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Heritage Foundation has proposed a larger investment intended to mature upon marriage. These ideas are good starts. But the most complete proposal in this regard is a recent proposal in Finland called Vauvasampo. Adapted for the American case, this proposal is simple: every child born as a U.S. citizen in 2026 or any future year would have some amount of money, perhaps $15,000, invested in their name, which we call “American Birthday Accounts,” in honor of our 250^th year of independence. 

Beneficiaries could not touch these accounts until they have a child; that is, until they are the legal and custodial parent of a related child born in the United States or under U.S. jurisdiction abroad, and coresiding with that child or else deployed on U.S. government business. At the first birth (or, if preferable to avoid risks of early child abandonment, at the child’s 1^st birthday, if still coresident and full custodial), they would gain access to, say, 50% of their account’s value, and the residual 50% would continue growing. At the second birth, 75% of the fund’s remaining value at that time could be claimed. At a third birth, all remaining funds can be claimed. Assuming funds are invested in something like a mutual fund, a $15,000 investment could easily lead to a married couple receiving a baby bonus worth $100,000 for a first birth, with smaller additional payments for subsequent births. Recipients could be permitted to cash out their benefit over multiple years if they preferred, and any new funds gained through subsequent births would be added to this continuing fund. 

This baby bonus money could be counted as income, which means that part of its cost would be directly recouped through interactions with means tested programs and income taxes: beneficiary families at both very low and very high incomes would receive smaller after-tax-and-benefit returns. All families of any income would be eligible, but in practice the real benefits would be most generous for middle-income married families, subsidizing fertility the most for working- and middle-class families. Because only children born in the U.S. would be eligible for the investment, concerns about subsidies for children of immigrants would also be alleviated: it would be essentially a subsidy only for U.S.-born individuals to have their own children. Because married couples would be eligible for each parent’s baby bonus, the benefit would effectively double for married couples. To avoid creating subsidies for teen pregnancy, fund accessibility could be set aside until parents reach an appropriate age (perhaps 21 for a first birth, and a slightly higher age for subsequent births). 

Bang-for-buck, American Birthday Accounts are the single best way to get more babies born in stable families than almost any other policy imaginable. In the long run, since many individuals will have fewer than 3 children (and many will be childless, thus leaving many funds unclaimed), those unused funds can be reinvested in the program to create a rolling national family trust fund, which would render the program zero-cost to taxpayers after the first eligible generation had completed their childbearing. Even without that reinvestment, the budgetary cost for an investment of $15,000 to $20,000 per child would be between $45 and $80 billion per year. For comparison, U.S. public schools spent just under $19,000 per year per student in 2021, so this program amounts to the public investing just one year of schooling worth of public resources into children’s future family life. 

Assuming American fertility responds to cash incentives the way fertility has responded to cash incentives that we studied in other countries, these American Birthday Accounts would likely boost fertility by between 20 and 40% for the cohorts eligible to receive the benefit. If reproductive-age Americans today already had such accounts, birth rates would be somewhere between 1.9 and 2.2 children per woman—essentially at replacement rate.

Reform 2: Child Caregiver Credits

When a family has a child, they face new expenses. One parent may also stay home from work. The result is that after having kids, families save less. Childcare, diapers, and work disruptions cause parents to approach retirement with fewer resources than they should have had based on their human capital. In dozens of countries around the world, this problem has been addressed through care credits. These credits have a simple principle: if a person has a child under the age of 5 at home, for the purposes of future Social Security benefit calculations, they should be “credited” as if they were still working at their income levels 1-3 years before birth, adjusted for inflation. This gives stay-at-home parents (especially mothers) slightly better retirement benefits, reduces the harms that women especially face from employment disruptions, and helps recognize that parents are doing the real work of keeping Social Security solvent by raising future payers. 

While we cannot estimate exactly what effect this change would have on fertility, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a four-year care credit of this sort could plausibly boost the Social Security benefit by 1% to 3% for a mom who took five years off work to have two children. For a mom who took 15 years off to have four children, care credits might boost her social security benefits by 5-10 percent. Converting these benefits to their net present value at time of childbearing, and using that to infer fertility impacts, only implies a fertility increase of perhaps 1% or 2%, but ensuring basic fairness for parents is a benefit in its own right.

Reform 3: End Marriage Penalties 

Nearly every means-tested program in America creates marriage penalties one way or another, and this discourages family formation. Policymakers must establish a simple principle: getting married should never cause anybody to lose a benefit. In practice, this amounts to suggesting that the U.S. should adopt fully individualized tax and welfare programs. Sweden, Canada, and the U.K. have all changed from joint-filing to individual-filing systems in the past, and in all three cases, fertility rose sharply afterwards. 

The reason is simple: household-filing and household-benefit systems have a strong tendency to punish marriage for working-class people. If switching to an individual system is a bridge too far, policymakers should simply go through existing tax and benefit programs, line-by-line, and remove marriage penalties, especially in Section 8 housing benefits, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, WIC and SNAP nutrition programs, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, interest deductions for mortgages and student loans, FHA loan eligibility rules, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. 

We are unable to provide a specific effect estimate for how marriage penalty elimination might influence fertility, since the academic literature does not currently contain standardized effect estimates for either how marriage causally shapes fertility, nor how marriage penalties causally influence marriage. Nonetheless, we believe that these effects could be substantial. In Sweden, Canada, and the U.K., a switch to individualized tax systems was associated with about 0.05-0.15 more children born per woman.

Reform 4: Build Family Housing Now 

American young people face a housing crisis. There has been zero increase in residential square footage per capita in 25 years according to federal data. New houses are shifting heavily towards small apartments. Home prices have skyrocketed to many multiples of young adult incomes. America must build more family-suitable houses. 

The federal government can encourage this by adopting an extremely simple program: allocate municipalities and states alike a fixed sum per bedroom of housing completed each year. A moderate portion of existing block grant funds could be repurposed and reallocated on the basis of bedrooms being constructed, justified by the simple notion that places building more housing and thus anticipating more population growth really do need and deserve more block grant funding to prepare for a more populous future. Places refusing to build housing can make do with the federal funding they currently have. 

Reform 5: Institute Family-Impact Budgeting

At the structural level, Congress and state legislatures must begin to undertake “family budgeting.” Legislators must ask not only how a bill might impact revenues and spending, but how it will impact marriage and fertility. Every bill that receives a cost score should also be scored for how it impacts incentives to marry and have children, giving legislators a constant reminder that their choices have consequences for the physical survival of the nation, not only of its financial accounts.

In combination, we believe instituting these reforms could raise U.S. birth rates to at least 2.1 children per woman and perhaps as high as 2.4 children per woman if marriage effects prove to be substantial.

Family-Friendly Cultural Norms

Norm 1: Enlist Celebrity Culture

Our survey results imply that enlisting celebrities to promote American family life may work—celebrity fertility really is associated with the fertility of fans. Governments interested in boosting fertility should consider enlisting the support of celebrities popular in their jurisdictions, or perhaps even finding a way to obliquely encourage those celebrities to marry and have more children. 

While we would not endorse or recommend such a policy, it is empirically possible that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars to have children might produce more children in society than spending the same money on child tax credits, if her choice sways her wide fanbase. More broadly, to the extent that social and cultural elites set the tone for family life, large tax breaks for parenthood at high incomes (of the sort which France implemented through its family quotient system) might stimulate elite fertility, thus, creating downstream cultural spillovers to fans and followers. 

Outside of government, it would be worthwhile for churches and community actors to consider the social role of parents and families: are they nudged into the back pew, their children sequestered in Sunday school where they can’t bother anyone? Or are parents full participants in community or church leadership—with their children at their side?

Norm 2: Encourage Supportive Friendship

Helpful friends make a difference. The first thing governments can do to support more supportive friendship is to ensure that informal care arrangements are not punished. Liability and negligence laws and enforcement norms should not punish parents for leaving children with friends. Safe-harbor and Good Samaritan-style liability protections, as well as “free range parenting” laws may be advisable.

More broadly, governments could consider creating “civil godparents,” that is, legally recognized roles for specifically designated friends or kin of parents, giving those friends broader in loco parentis rights to care for children. 

Likewise, hospitals could modify antenatal and postpartum care such that nurses making postpartum visits encourage new parents to call friends to come visit the hospital, or prenatal care includes efforts to help expecting parents produce a list of friends they can call to help. This method of “legitimating the request” may help parents overcome embarrassment to ask for help. 

Beyond this, governments often confer status through public campaigns—blood donation and organ donation is almost entirely motivated by appeals to conscience and moral status. Governments could emulate these campaigns for care donation: watching your friend’s kids. This approach would effectively confer honor and status on the individuals who do the helping. 

Further, local municipalities could experiment with subsidies and liability protections for small, designated play areas in coffee shops, grocery stores, and restaurants, where parents can socialize amid productivity. 

While the government cannot mandate supportive friends, it can create conditions where parents and their friends get helpful nudges into helpful behaviors. Needless to say, the kind of supportive friendship described here can only be nudged by government—but they can be supported by book clubs, mom groups, churches, running clubs, pick-up basketball leagues, and other social groups. They can celebrate one another’s family additions, create schedules for babysitting, drop off meals or DoorDash gift cards, and help each other in any number of ways.

Norm 3: Promote Real-Life Socializing

Simply having more friends with kids matters for fertility, but a key driver of having more friends with kids is simply having more friends. Indeed, the average number of children in an individual’s social circle is strongly correlated with their average number of close friends: individuals under 30 with fewer than 4 close friends average around 0.7 children per friend; whereas those with 5 or more average around 1-1.3. And yet, the number of close friends Americans have is in persistent decline. Moreover, Americans are spending less and less time together with their friends. These changes are part and parcel of a long-term decline in American social lives. Reversing this decline must be a central part of any project of cultural change. 

Schools can certainly restrict mobile devices during school hours and at extracurriculars as one step, and should also consider expanding recess time. Limiting how many assignments require devices, reducing solo-homework assignments, and instead assigning group projects requiring in-person collaboration, may also be a useful avenue. 

Expanded public funding for public sports and athletics fields alongside higher usage fees charged to pay-to-play teams, alongside reduced liability for volunteer coaching and informal play, could help restore neighborhood sports and reduce the all-consuming professionalization of travel sports. 

Policymakers should also at least consider more creative options: reinstituting Blue Laws requiring business closures on Sundays might help create more in-person community, for example. And what about “Digital Blue Laws”—laws which impede access to non-essential digital services on certain days or at certain hours? Could such laws be implemented? One possible vehicle might be to charge excise taxes on data usage on Sundays, or excise taxes on digital advertising expenditures on Sundays, essentially encouraging platforms to nudge users offline at those times. 

Laws around existing physical spaces could be tweaked as well—would higher taxes on alcohol sold for home consumption alongside lower taxes on alcohol sold in bars and restaurants lead to more spontaneous friendships? Would raising taxes on restaurant delivery while reducing taxes for in-restaurant dining create new communities? Could expanding the supply of quality park shelters and other bookable spaces be part of a broad “in-person friendship agenda?” 

The exact pathway to restoring American friendship is not clear, but policymakers should consider bold experiments. 

Conclusion

American population growth has already slowed dramatically and is likely to grind to a halt or even go into reverse in the relatively near future. Some current workers may see population decline before they reach retirement, if current trends continue. This is a serious problem and is not the family future most Americans desire. 

Unfortunately, tackling this decline is not just a problem of fixing one or two small issues—fertility is shaped by innumerable factors, including many cultural and social norms governments may struggle to change. Nonetheless, if policymakers will consider policy changes equal in magnitude to the size of the problem we face, Americans need not have anything to fear. Demographic decline is a choice, one that our nation’s leaders can choose to avoid, if they will invest in the future of family. Perhaps, with luck, at our 350^th anniversary, we might finally reach Wigglesworth’s billion. 

Editor's Note: For Data and Methods, author information, and references, please download the full report below.

Introduction

Men in America are not 'alright.' Whether it is men falling behind in the job market, not attending college, or never leaving their childhood home, American men are clearly in trouble.

But not all men have been equally hit. Working-class men have especially faced the brunt of the “happiness recession.”

Experts from all leanings have provided explanations for why men, especially blue-collar men, are doing so poorly. Economists point to data that show how the working class has been left behind. Journalists suggest that insidious ideologies among the less educated share the blame. And some influencers argue that it’s the crisis in masculinity that explains male discontent. But woefully missing from this conversation is a factor hidden in plain sight: the family. 

In a new IFS research brief, we look at the latest data from the Global Flourishing Study, a survey with over 200,000 participants in 22 countries, to explore how family conditions in childhood explain the well-being gap between college-educated and working-class men in adulthood (see the Appendix for the Data and Methods section). Focusing on men in the United States, we find that childhood family conditions—particularly the relationship between father and son—provide a key explanation for why so many working-class men are struggling. The family variables we look at do not completely explain the gap between blue-collar and college-educated men, but they spotlight an important factor on the map: family structure matters for working-class men.

Working-Class Men Are Struggling

The well-being gap between working-class and college-educated men is panning out in nearly every well-being metric measured by sociologists and economists. 

Take just one example. Data from the General Social Survey (GSS) show that the share of men ages 25 to 44 who are “not too happy” has risen from 11% in the 1980s to 24% in the most recent years. Both college-educated and working-class men have seen declines in happiness. But men without a bachelor’s degree fare far worse, with 27% reporting they are “not too happy,” compared to 17% of college-educated men.

Figure 1: Unhappiness among men by education 

The class disparity in happiness is nothing new. The GSS data reveal that college-educated men were happier than their less-educated peers going back to the 1980s. And while the GSS shows somewhat steady levels of happiness from the 1980s through the 2000s, other well-being metrics suggest rising discontent in earlier decades. Mortality data, for instance, shows a steady and concerning rise in what researchers call “deaths of despair”—fatalities attributable to drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholism. The rise in “deaths of despair” has been especially dramatic among white working-class men. Our analysis of death records and population estimates finds that the suicide rate per 100,000 white non-Hispanic men ages 25 to 44 has risen from 31 in 1992 to 54 in 2023, a shocking 71% increase over just three decades.

Figure 2: Crude suicide rate among non-Hispanic white men by education 

The roots of this crisis are partly economic. The collapse of manufacturing in the early-to-mid 1980s eliminated millions of stable, well-paying jobs that had long anchored working-class communities. Men without college degrees were hit hardest. Since 1970, their real wages have declined relative to their college-educated peers, and their labor force participation has fallen sharply—a trend that shows no sign of reversing.

But while the economy plays a role in the rise of working-class male despair, many economists miss a key factor: the family. In a recent Institute for Family Studies report, we documented the troubling collapse in family formation among men without college degrees. In 1980, men in their prime working years were roughly equally likely to be married and living at home with children, regardless of educational attainment. Since then, marriage rates have declined for all men, but the drop among non-college-educated men has been far steeper. The share of working-class men ages 25 to 44 who are married fell from 73% to 42% from 1980 to 2025, according to the Current Population Survey. The share of younger working-class men who are married with children at home fell from 61% to just 30 percent. This rising group of untethered men are disconnected from the stabilizing institutions of marriage and fatherhood that research consistently links to better health, purpose, and longevity.

This not only matters for the men themselves, but for the children they are raising in stable or unstable homes. We know that family of origin has a profound impact on well-being across the lifespan. Childhood experiences, particularly those within the home, shape how people assess the quality of their lives and whether they believe their futures hold promise. Working-class communities have now endured nearly 45 years of declining marriage rates and family instability, and the consequences are compounding across generations.

In this Research Brief, we draw on data from the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a large-scale multinational survey fielded in 2023, restricting our analytic sample to U.S. male respondents ages 25 and older (n = 18,178). We define working-class men as those without a bachelor's degree and examine three well-being outcomes—hope, sense of worthwhileness, and purpose—using linear regression models that control for age, race, rurality, and nativity. We then employ a coefficient attenuation framework to assess the extent to which the well-being gap among young working-class men (ages 25–44) is explained by childhood experiences, including parental marriage, quality of relationships with mothers and fathers, perceived parental love, and parental religious attendance. 

In plain terms, this approach asks how much of the well-being gap between working-class and college-educated men shrinks once we account for differences in their childhood family experiences. You can read more about the methods in the Appendix. 

Differences in Well-Being by Class Are Pronounced Among Young Men

Consistent with other studies, we find that working-class men report lower levels of well-being than college-educated men. Specifically, on a 10-point scale, they report .21 lower scores on “hope,” .52 lower scores on “life worthwhile,” and .44 lower scores on “purpose.” These differences are relatively small-to-moderate in magnitude, but even small effect sizes can carry practical significance when examining population-level disparities in well-being.¹

Figure 3: Mean self-reported scores on well-being for men by education 

These overall variations, however, mask meaningful variation by age and class. As shown in Figure 4, two patterns emerge: (1) well-being scores increase with age, and (2) class differences in well-being are substantially attenuated at older ages. As a result, young working-class men report the lowest scores across all three scales. When comparing young working-class men to older men, effect sizes are quite large; when compared to their same-age college-educated peers, the effect sizes are moderate. Among men ages 45 and older, working-class and college-educated men report relatively similar well-being scores.

Figure 4: Mean self-reported scores on well-being for men by age and education

Class Differences in Well Being: Family Structure and Fathers

Class differences in well-being among younger men are partially explained by family experiences, especially the relationship with the father.

We find that young-working class men ages 25 to 44 are much less likely than their college-educated counterparts to have positive family experiences. These men score lower on all variables, and the differences are statistically significant for every variable. 

Figure 5: Childhood experience prevalence among young men by education

Compared to college-educated men, working-class men are 17 percentage points less likely to have grown up with married parents, 11 percentage points less likely to have had a good relationship with their father, and 10 percentage points less likely to have felt loved by their father. 

Working-class men are also less likely to have had a good relationship with their mother, felt loved by their mother, or had church-attending parents. Such family variables demonstrate consistent, statistically significant correlations with the well-being outcomes—meaning that better childhood family conditions significantly predict later-life well-being. Previous studies suggest that relationships of this kind are at least partially causal. 

Figure 6: Difference in childhood experience prevalence among men by education

Next, we focus on men ages 25–44 and examine differences in outcomes across the various family-related variables described in the methods section (see Appendix). The “baseline model” coefficient represents the relationship between the well-being outcome of interest and class. The subsequent variables represent the relationship between well-being and class after accounting for the family variables. 

Figure 7: Attenuation of class differences in well-being among young men using childhood experiences

We find that differences in well-being between college-educated and younger working-class men are significantly explained jointly by the family variables, ranging from 18% to 33 percent. Hope is the most significant factor explained by the family variables, whereas assessments of life as worthwhile and a sense of purpose are explained less by family variables. 

Across all models, relationship with the father is the most significant explanatory variable of the association between class and the outcomes of interest. It explains nearly one-third of the difference in hope between college-educated and working-class young men. In sum, feelings of hope for men in young adulthood and into middle age are connected to childhood family conditions, with the father-son relationship being particularly salient.

Figure 8: Attenuation of differences in hope across classes using childhood experiences

Discussion

In this research brief, we find statistically significant differences in well-being outcomes by class, though it is worth noting that effect sizes in the overall models are small. While these differences are real and merit serious attention, care should be taken not to overstate the plight of working-class men as a whole.

That said, meaningful differences do emerge when we stratify by age. Younger working-class men are considerably less hopeful than their older counterparts. While it is impossible to cleanly distinguish age from cohort effects with the data available, it seems plausible that many of these younger men will grow more hopeful as they move through adulthood and accumulate the stabilizing resources—relationships, careers, community—that tend to come with time. What is clear, however, is that the class gap in well-being is pronounced among younger men in a way that it simply is not among older men. Young working-class men rate their well-being substantially lower than young college-educated men across the outcomes we examine, and this disparity deserves to be taken seriously.

To make sense of these findings, it is essential to situate them within a broader structural context. Over the past four decades, family life in working-class communities has undergone significant and well-documented erosion. Rates of family instability, father absence, and household economic stress have risen sharply in these communities relative to their college-educated counterparts. It is against this backdrop that our results take on their full meaning. Across every family-related variable in the dataset, young working-class men report consistently lower scores than young college-educated men. These differences reflect accumulated disadvantages in the family environments in which these men were raised.

Critically, these lower family variable scores partially explain the relationship between class and well-being, helping to clarify why young working-class men fare worse on the outcomes we examine. The largest and most consistent attenuation effect is observed for hope. The seeds of hope are likely planted early in life, nurtured within the family environment. For these young men, the relationship with their father emerges as arguably the single most influential factor shaping their sense of hope. A similar pattern holds for assessments of life being worthwhile and for a sense of purpose, though the attenuation is somewhat less pronounced for these outcomes. Taken together, the findings suggest that family of origin—and the father relationship in particular —plays an important role in transmitting, or in failing to transmit, the psychological foundations of a hopeful and meaningful life.

Conclusion

The well-being struggles of young working-class men are real, consequential, and—as this analysis shows—at least partly rooted in childhood family experience. While economic forces have undeniably shaped the landscape of working-class life, the research points to something closer to home, namely the relationships with parents. The father-son relationship in particular stands out as a powerful driver of whether young men grow up with hope, purpose, and a sense that their lives matter. 

Reversing the tide of working-class male discontent will require honest engagement with this reality. Stronger family stability, father involvement, and support of the relational foundations of childhood are not peripheral concerns. They are central to any serious effort to help the men being left behind.

Note: Download the full research brief for Data and Methods information.

1.  We calculated Cohen's d, a standardized measure of effect size that expresses the mean difference between groups relative to the pooled standard deviation. Effect sizes ranged from .10 to .28, which are generally considered small-to-moderate in magnitude by conventional benchmarks.

Executive Summary

Birthrates have been declining precipitously throughout the United States since the Great Recession and more broadly since the postwar Baby Boom. Within this broad trend, a fertility "gap" has emerged between the American left and right. This report, based on survey results from a sample of over 7,000 Americans ages 18-54, analyzes ideological differences¹ in anxieties related to parenting and self-perceived competence. To a limited extent, this report finds that liberals are more likely to cite certain anxieties related to fertility decisions relative to conservatives. For each of our sections, we find that the differing survey responses account for significant differences in fertility outcomes. 

Here are our major findings:

• Liberals have fewer children than conservatives. Conservative respondents report 1.40 children compared to 1.09 for liberals. Similarly, 51% of liberals report zero children compared to 40% for conservatives. Both of these differences are statistically significant.
   
• Parenting concerns are more prevalent among liberals than conservatives. For example, 18% of liberals are unsure whether they would be a good parent, compared to only 9% of conservatives. Similarly, whereas 36% of liberals view parenting as “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” only 24% of conservatives do. Given that both beliefs are associated with fewer children, their increased prevalence among liberals may help explain the ideological fertility gap. 

• Liberals are more likely to report genetic and mental health concerns. For example, 18% of liberals, but only 10% of conservatives, report worries that they will pass on bad genes or inheritable conditions to their children. Similar percentages of liberals (19%) and conservatives (10%) say that their mental health is currently not good enough for them to have children. Both statements are correlated with lower numbers of children—and may thus shed additional light on the conservative-liberal fertility gap.

Together, these findings indicate that concerns about parental competence, stress, mental health, and genetic conditions might, at least in part, account for the emerging fertility divergence between the American right and left.

Introduction: The Gap

It is a well-known fact that fertility has been decreasing across America over the last 65 years, yet the growing partisan fertility gap has only recently emerged as a measurable phenomenon. Research from 2024 found that, among women who were born in the years 1975 through 1979, conservatives had 2.1 children, moderates 1.8, and liberals just 1.5. Further research conducted by IFS in 2024 showed that more conservative counties have a dramatically higher number of children than more liberal ones.

Recent literature also shows that the number of desired children also differs between liberals and conservatives. For example, a 2024 study found that the gap in desired children has existed between the left and right since 1989, the first year they began tracking for the discrepancy. In this paper, the gap was initially explained by differences in religiosity between the two groups. 

However, in recent years, this gap has grown and can no longer be explained purely by religious differences. Ideological gaps in desired and actual fertility exist in our survey results as well. Among Americans ages 18-54, liberals have 1.09 children on average whereas conservatives have an average of 1.40 children, a difference of 29%. This gap proves statistically significant even when accounting for several important confounding variables including sex, religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.

Figure 1. Mean number of children by ideology

This gap also manifests itself in accordance with the ideal family size. When asked within our survey if a person could choose exactly the number of children they wanted, conservatives report 2.71, moderates 2.43, and liberals 2.16. The differences between conservatives and both moderates and liberals remained statistically significant after accounting for our selected control variables. Lyman Stone, the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at IFS, and Scott Yenor reported that the partisan gap is only appreciable after 1994, meaning that this ideological gap in fertility preferences is a relatively recent discovery. 

Much has already been said about the emergence of this gap. However, much less has been done to explore the underlying reasons why this gap exists. This brief’s objective is to further the discussion of what these reasons might be. While survey data limits our ability to make conclusions about causality, we can still explore and identify the characteristics of this disparity.

We find that the ideological fertility gap operates along two related dimensions. First, conservatives report substantially greater confidence in their ability to parent well. Second, liberals are significantly more likely to be anxious about their mental health or genetic conditions. 

Liberal and Conservative Views on Parenting

We find that concerns about parenting have a particularly strong relationship with fertility outcomes. When people are not sure they would be good parents, or when they perceive parenting to be incredibly difficult and stressful, they have dramatically fewer kids than those who do not. We also find that liberals are more likely to endorse these concerns than conservatives. 

The following chart shows a notable difference in parenting fears between liberals and conservatives, with 18% of Liberals unsure whether they would be a good parent compared to only 9% of conservatives. A large majority of both groups do not believe they would be bad parents. However, among those who fear being a bad parent, the partisan gap is quite large—and, even when controlling for parental status and other variables,² statistically significant. 

Figure 2. Percent of adults who agreed with statement, by ideology

Liberals are more likely to express uncertainty about their parenting ability. We can only hypothesize why this is, but it may relate to a greater sense of anxiety around parenting in general. 

Regardless of why this difference exists, it correlates closely with decreased fertility. Individuals who fear they might be bad parents have, on average, 0.50 kids compared to 1.35 children among those who think they would be good parents. In other words, respondents who believe they might not be good parents report 63% fewer children on average than those who do not hold this belief. It is hard to overstate how significant a difference this is. It represents the largest difference observed among the variables examined. This speaks strongly to the power of perceived competence in parenting.

As already shown, liberals are likely to hold this belief to a much higher degree than conservatives. It follows that one reason the fertility gap exists is that liberals have greater reservations about their ability to parent. In fact, after controlling for uncertainty about being a good parent, the difference in childlessness percentages between conservatives and liberals is no longer statistically significant.

Viewing parenting as difficult could also influence one’s fertility. Those who see parenting as stressful and complicated have only 1.05 children on average compared to 1.31 among those who do not. Thus, respondents who hold this perception around parenting have, on average, around 25% fewer kids—a significantly lower number. This is an intuitive gap, given that many people try to avoid things they find to be incredibly stressful and difficult.

As with doubting one’s parenting abilities, we find that characterizing parenting as difficult also varies by ideology. Significantly fewer conservatives (24%) see parenting as “very complicated, difficult, and stressful” compared to liberals (36%). This gap, which remains significant when controlling for other potential explanatory variables (including parental status), gives credence to the idea that liberals view parenting as a more costly endeavor than conservatives.

Figure 3. Percent of adults who agreed with statement, by ideology

However, even conservative respondents who do see parenting as very difficult are significantly less likely to be childless (42%) than are liberals who share this view (62%). In contrast, there is not a significant difference in the probability of being childless between conservatives (40%) and liberals (45%) who disagree that parenting is difficult. This suggests that being liberal and viewing parenting as difficult may have a particularly strong impact on childlessness. 

Taken together, there appears to be a clear difference between the worldviews of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are less worried about the potential stress and difficulty of parenting, and also have higher levels of confidence in their ability to parent well. Given that these beliefs are correlated with greater numbers of children, these two worldviews surrounding parenting could further influence the fertility gap.

One caveat in interpreting these results is that we cannot be sure about causality. It is certainly plausible that fearing that one will be a bad parent, and viewing parenting as difficult, will reduce one’s likelihood of having children. However, it is also possible that the experience of raising kids itself makes one realize that they are a good parent—and that parenting, despite its challenges, is not as stressful and difficult as they once believed. Future longitudinal surveys could help us identify whether parenting worries are resulting in fewer kids; whether having kids lessens one’s parenting concerns; or whether some other factor is influencing both of these outcomes. 

Anxieties Across the Divide

The ideological differences in our survey results extend beyond parenting concerns. We also find that liberals are more likely than conservatives to report concerns about passing on bad genes; in addition, they more frequently cite their mental health as a reason for postponing children. Groups that identify with each anxiety tend to have significantly fewer children, on average, than those who are not worried about each topic. In particular, worries about genetics and mental health both reflect concerns about what kind of world or situation a child could be born into. Though few people in the aggregate endorse these concerns, liberals have cited genetic and mental health concerns as influencing their fertility preferences considerably more than their conservative counterparts.

To begin, those who are concerned about passing on genetic conditions tend to have fewer children. We asked survey respondents to either agree or disagree with the following statement: "I am worried I will pass on bad genes or inheritable conditions to my children." Potentially, people who are worried about passing on bad genetic traits may fear the burden it would place on themselves as the parent and on the development and life of the child.

We find a wide and statistically significant gap in fertility between those who affirmed this statement and those who did not. Within the survey, those who are worried about passing on inheritable conditions have, on average, 0.88 children, while those who disagree with the statement have 1.30 children. This shows that those who reported genetic concerns have 32% fewer children than those who were not worried.

Additionally, 18% of liberals are worried about passing down poor genetic conditions to their offspring; this percentage is significantly higher than that of conservatives (10%), even when controlling for parental status and other potential confounds. These results are striking, not only because only around 3.9% of American children have a genetic condition, but also because we would expect genetic conditions to be randomly assorted within our sample (thus preventing any relationship between ideology and genetics). 

Despite the presumably equivalent chances of having inheritable diseases, there is a significant divergence between liberals and conservatives on genetic concerns. This divergence holds even when applying controls. 

Figure 4. Percent of adults who agreed with statement, by ideology

Additionally, while 65% of liberals who affirm this statement are childless, the same is true for only 48% of those who do not affirm it. Meanwhile, we did not find a significant difference in childlessness shares between conservatives who affirm this statement (52%) and those who do not (39%).  Thus, the relationship between genetic concerns and childlessness appears more pronounced for liberals than for conservatives. 

Genetic factors are by no means the only anxiety related to childbearing that respondents cite. Roughly 1 in 7 respondents endorse the statement that “my mental health is not good enough for me to have children right now.” This statement has a clear negative correlation with respondents’ fertility: Those who consider mental health a significant concern have—on average—0.84 children, while those who disagree with that statement have an average of 1.30 children.

Again, there is partisan disagreement on the relevance of mental health to fertility decisions. About 19% of liberals affirm this statement compared to only 10% of conservatives; this difference is statistically significant even when controlling for parental status and other variables.

Given these findings, mental health concerns may help mediate the relationship between political ideology and fertility. Indeed, when limiting the analysis to respondents who endorse mental health concerns, we find that the percentage of liberals who are childless (70%) does not differ significantly from that of conservatives (56%).  Similarly, among those who don’t report this concern, the percentages of liberals (47%) and conservatives (38%) who are childless do not differ significantly either.

Figure 5. Percent of adults who agreed with statement, by ideology

In summary, mental health worries, like genetic concerns and parenting fears, are correlated with lower fertility—and are also more prevalent among liberals than conservatives. Looking at both variables, there is a consistent trend: increased anxiety and worries are correlated with having fewer children. In addition to this finding, liberals are more likely to have these anxieties than conservatives. This could help bring to light the reasoning that liberals might give for why they are having fewer children or no children at all. It could also provide insight into some of the factors that influence their fertility decisions.

Conclusion: The Gap Explored

Across multiple measures, ideological differences in parenting confidence and anxiety are strongly associated with differences in fertility outcomes. Conservatives report greater confidence in their ability to parent and lower levels of concern regarding mental health and genetic risk. Liberals, by contrast, are more likely to express these anxieties. The consistency of these associations suggests that worldview and self-perception may play a meaningful role in the emerging partisan fertility gap.

There are limitations within both the data and the statistical models used to draw these conclusions. The methods employed in this report cannot determine whether identifying as liberal leads individuals to adopt these views and ultimately have fewer children, or whether individuals who already hold these views and have lower fertility are more likely to identify as liberal. In other words, the direction of causality remains unclear. Another limitation concerns how political ideology was measured. Respondents were grouped into three simple categories: liberal, moderate, or conservative, which are somewhat ambiguous. Future research could include push questions of sliding scales to potentially ascertain more accurate data on where respondents fall on the political spectrum.

Even with these limitations, the overall pattern in the survey data is consistent. Liberals are more likely to report anxiety about their views on parenting and childrearing than conservatives. Although causal claims cannot be made, the cumulation of these associations suggest that political affiliation is linked to perceptions of parenthood and, in turn, to the emerging partisan fertility gap.

Editor's Note: To view the Appendix and reference notes, please download the full research brief below.

Executive Summary

Religious affiliation and participation in the United States have declined steadily over the past several decades. Fewer Americans now attend worship services regularly, identify with a faith tradition, or describe religion as central to their daily lives. This shift is especially pronounced among younger cohorts, who are more likely than previous generations to report no religious affiliation and less likely to engage in institutional religious practices. While belief has not disappeared, it has become more individualized and less connected to church life. As a result, many religious communities now face a sustained pattern of generational decline rather than temporary fluctuation, raising concerns for churches and church members alike about the long-term vitality of their congregation.

Research consistently shows that families are the single most important factor in whether children adopt and maintain faith into adulthood. Congregational programs, clergy leadership, and peer networks matter as well, but they are most effective when reinforced within the home. Studies demonstrate that parental modeling, shared faith practices, and the quality of parent–child relationships are among the strongest predictors of adult religiosity. When faith is embedded in everyday routines through conversation, ritual, and visible commitment, children are more likely to internalize it as part of their enduring identity. Taken together, this body of evidence underscores the need for analysis of how family processes operate in practice and which specific parental behaviors most effectively foster durable Christian commitment.

Using data on American adults aged 25+ who were raised in a Christian faith, we examine how parents most effectively transmit faith to their children. Consistent with past research, we show:

• Religious practice in childhood is highly predictive of religious practice in adulthood.
• Higher parent–child relationship quality in childhood is associated with stronger retention of religious belief and practice in adulthood.
• Higher parental marital quality is associated with greater faith transmission.
• Congregational involvement on the part of both parents and adolescents is linked to higher levels of faith commitment when children reach adulthood.

Our findings suggest that if faith transmission from parents to children is to remain viable, efforts must focus on equipping both families and churches with practical tools and guidance for intergenerational faith formation. This includes helping parents integrate faith into everyday family life, providing robust faith communities and supports, promoting loving and stable family relationships in the household, and more. By centering families and supporting them intentionally, church communities can better address the decline of Christianity and sustain faith across generations.

We make the following recommendations for parents and pastors, which we elaborate on more fully in the report:

Recommendations for Parents

1) Be your children’s role model for faith

2) Prioritize strong marriages and parent-child relationships

3) Make faith formation a joint effort

4) Build religion into everyday family life

5) Make faith a regular topic of family conversation

Recommendations for Pastors

1) Guide parents—not just children—as part of religious education

2) Support strong marriages and coparenting relationships

3) Actively engage fathers

4) Create space for community

5) Invest in youth ministry

Introduction: The State of American Religion

Religious families in America are in a challenging situation. Religion in the United States is in decline by virtually every measure. Religious identification, worship attendance, and belief in God have all dropped by double-digit margins since the 1990s. Furthermore, research shows most of this decline is intergenerational. That is, rather than people becoming less religious over their adult lives, each new generation enters adulthood less faithful than the last one. This points to a decline that looks slow at first, since generational replacement is a slow process, but cascades into an avalanche over time as the most devout generations disappear and are replaced by more secular ones.

There is not any one reason for this decline, but rather several factors working together in a kind of “perfect storm.”

• Social values have shifted away from authority and tradition, and toward individualism and autonomy. Children growing up in this cultural shift are primed to look at long-established religious institutions with suspicion. 
• The end of the Cold War created a change in American identity where faith in God became less central. 
• Early internet discourse in the mid-2000s and subsequent social media platforms exposed younger generations to doubts and atheist arguments and enabled them to form communities outside religious boundaries.  
• Moral scandals on the part of Catholics and Protestants alike turned a lot of people off to organized religion.  
• The partisan culture war led many on the political left and center to look askance at traditional religion, which they see as incompatible with their worldviews. 
• Increased education and delayed family formation led young adults to stray further away from faith for longer periods of time, making return more difficult. 
• As extracurricular activities in the teenage years and professional demands in adulthood have increased, for many people, faith was not so much abandoned as just crowded out.

On May 26, 2026, the Institute for Family Studies filed an Amicus Brief in support of S.B. 2420, a Texas state law on App store safety, in Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, et al., Plaintiffs vs. Ken Paxton. 

Introduction

Arizona is one of the top 10  fastest growing states in the U.S., attracting roughly 210 new residents every day. There’s a lot to love about the Grand Canyon State. 

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis held that American democracy and the American Dream were indelibly shaped by the existence of the frontier. By giving Americans settling in the West a shot at a new and better life, the frontier advanced economic liberty and social equality for the nation. Arizona has long played a central role in both advancing and embodying the American Dream as a frontier state.

The state motto, "Ditat Deus" (Latin for "God Enriches"), has been part of Arizona’s history since Abraham Lincoln recognized the Arizona Territory in 1863. The motto reflects the belief that the desert territory and the faithfulness of its inhabitants would yield remarkable prosperity. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the state attracted waves of pioneers drawn by promising opportunities: agriculture, ranching, mining, tourism, and more recently, a business-friendly and attractive retirement ethos. Throughout its history as a territory and state, Arizona has been a destination for Americans and immigrants seeking a new and prosperous life in the beautiful Southwest.

Today, the realization of the Arizona Dream depends, in no small part, on strong families. Children from healthy, thriving families and adults who head up such families are more likely to flourish socially, emotionally, and financially in the Grand Canyon State. 

This new, ground-breaking report explains how strong families matter to the fortunes of those seeking the Arizona Dream and what public policy can do to strengthen marriage and family life across the state.

Section I: Thriving Children

Getting off to a strong educational start is essential to realizing the Arizona Dream. This report shows that Arizona kids are more likely to get a good education when they come from strong and stable families. Teachers and school administrators will attest to this because they see its truth demonstrated every year in the students who pass through their classrooms. Children coming from intact families where the mother and father are both involved in their children’s lives are, on average, more likely to have the social, emotional, and financial resources they need to flourish in Arizona. 

This is consistent with what leading think tanks and scholars have found in the research on child well-being over the years. The Annie E. Casey Foundation notes, for instance, that children:

growing up in single-parent families typically do not have the same economic or human resources available as those growing up in two-parent families. Single parents also are more likely to experience high stress and depression–especially single moms–as well as limited social support. These factors can affect kids, with those growing up in single-parent families facing greater risks of academic, emotional and behavioral problems. 

Likewise, family scholars find that marriage boosts the welfare of children in a range of ways. In the words of economist Melissa Kearney:

… [S]tudy after study suggests that a married-parent family tends to confer benefits to children in the form of greater resources during childhood, and that these increased resources then translate into better opportunities and greater educational attainment, among other outcomes.

The data we analyzed in Arizona tell a similar story for children in the Grand Canyon State.

Introduction

On February 19, 2026, we released a new report, Resilient Children, Struggling Parents: Mapping American Parenting, based on a new survey of almost 24,000 U.S. parents of over 40,000 children, including 2,600 teenagers. This large national sample of parents and teenagers enabled us to analyze parenting cultures around the country on the state level. We found that states where a concentration of parents are actively seeking to raise their children to be independent, free-spirited, resilient adults also tend to be the states where parents say their parenting approach is less supported by surrounding cultural norms.

Comparing parenting cultures by state is an invaluable tool for parents, educators, civic leaders, and policymakers who want to come along side families to help them raise resilient children. With this brief, however, we assess parenting practices on a national level. Below, we analyze the distance American kids are allowed to venture from home, how much time they spend online, what devices they use, the level of restrictions on their smartphones, and how much time they spend with friends. 

We find that American kids spend enormous amounts of time online with very few significant restrictions. Yet, they have very strict limits on their activities in the real world, often not allowed to go far from home. These kinds of norms and rules are strongly shaped by social class, such that higher socioeconomic-status parents tend to restrict screen use more.

Key Findings

• American kids spend a lot of time online. Even parents who would describe their parenting style as low tech and who encourage free-range play allow their three-year-old children, on average, 3.5 hours per week of time on internet-enabled devices. Three-year-old children of parents who encourage tech average 6 hours per week using such devices.
• American kids get their devices young with few serious restrictions. By the age of 11, smartphones become the primary medium for internet access among American kids, with over 60% having a smartphone. These phones generally have few parental restrictions placed on them. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of three-year-olds use a Tablet, iPad, or Kindle; and many of these children have few or no restrictions.
• American kids are generally not free to move around unsupervised. In fact, by 17-years-old, about 60% of American kids are still not allowed to leave their neighborhood unsupervised.
• Social class shapes parenting in big ways. Parents with a graduate degree are more likely to establish screen time limits or phone drop-off rules for children over age 10 than less-educated parents; and parents with a graduate degree are also less likely to support the idea that 8 to 12-year-old kids should have more supervision.

Tech and Family Life

In general, similar to previous research by the Institute for Family Studies, we find that American children overall are online at very early ages, screens are prevalent, and few devices are subject to serious parental controls, especially as they become teenagers.

On average, American parents allow their three-year-old children 4.5 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. From there, the average weekly hours steadily increase with age. By 17-years-old, American parents allow their children almost 20 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. It should be noted that parents could have double-counted some device usage time: if a child was scrolling on their phone while streaming a show on a computer, we would count both the computer and the phone usage. However, we do not regard this as an error, since using multiple devices simultaneously would indeed be a more intense exposure to screens and online content.

Though the numbers remain high overall, we do find some substantial differences in weekly device use between parents who prioritize outdoor play and claim to be low-tech, and those who say they encourage the technology use of their kids. As the figure below shows, by the age of three, kids who grow up in a high-play/low-tech household are on internet-connected devices an average of 2.5 weekly hours less than their peers who are in high-tech households. That might not seem like much, but over the course of a year, that amounts to nearly 130 fewer hours online for three-year-olds. And while both groups steadily rise, the gap in hours used begins to further widen around age 13, and the widest gap is at 15, when kids in low-tech/high-play households are, on average, online 8 fewer hours a week, which over the course of a year amounts to a difference of approximately 400 hours. In other words, in any given week, the differences are modest. But over time, they compound, becoming extremely significant.
 

Figure 1. Weekly combined hours children used any internet-enabled device by child age and parenting style, 2025

Still, the numbers for both groups are remarkably high. In fact, 17-year-old kids in the low-tech/high-play group are online a weekly average of 15.7 hours, which amounts to more than 800 hours a year. Based on these numbers, they are online approximately 5 weeks a year; and kids in high-tech households, at the age of 17, are online an average of 6.5 weeks a year.

Similarly, a large share of American kids at three-years-old are given internet connected devices by their parents. Just shy of half of American three-year-olds in our sample (46%) have access to a tablet, iPad, or Kindle. A significant, though much smaller share, have access to a smartphone at that age—more than 15%. Tablet access reaches a peak at age 6, when 60% of kids nationwide are using them, with gaming console and smartphone access rising steadily. At the age of 11, the hierarchy changes, with smartphones surpassing tablets in use and, a few years later, at the age of 13, gaming consoles become the second most dominant device used, followed by computers and laptops, which become the third most dominant device. By age 17, 90% of the children in our sample have a smartphone, 60% percent have a gaming console, and 50% have a laptop or computer.
 

Figure 2. Share of children at each age who have each type of internet-enabled device, including children whose device has highly restricted access; 2025

Parental Controls

But what about parental controls? American children might have access to devices at young ages, but are parents closely monitoring and guarding their activity, such as by disabling internet access on a child’s device, or utilizing content filters? Not as much as one might hope. 

Overall, we find that the peak of internet-disabled smartphone usage is at 4 years old, and it steadily declines from there, with less than 10% of five-year-old kids using internet-disabled smartphones. Throughout the course of childhood and adolescence, a greater share of parents require passwords to make purchases on their child’s smartphone than implement content filters to increase the safety.

This may be unfortunate, but it is also not surprising. Child safety experts, like Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes, have analyzed how Big Tech companies like Apple and Google have made it needlessly challenging to implement parental controls. No doubt this problem is exacerbated by other factors, some as straightforward as parents who simply don’t believe their children need guardrails or don’t have the time to make the changes. Whatever the case, only a minority of parents in our sample across all child ages require content filters on their children’s smartphones. By 17 years old, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most dominant parental “control” is location tracking, while content filters decline to less than 20% of smartphones used by American adolescents.
 

Figure 3. Share of children with a smartphone at each age whose parent reported the given limit or restriction on smartphone usage, 2025

Because tablets have such a high prevalence among very young children, we also assessed what safety controls parents apply to those devices. We find that, even for very young children, controls and restrictions are surprisingly lax. About 2-in-5 preschool-age children with tablets can make purchases on their tablet without a parental code, a majority of preschoolers with tablets do not need a parental code to access their tablet, and only about half of preschool-age children have content filters on their tablets. Most preschoolers with tablets do not even have specific time limits on their devices. While tablets do have generally stricter controls than smartphones, overall, many preschoolers appear to have broad internet access on tablets, which are only lightly supervised.
 

Figure 4. Share of children with a tablet at each age whose parent reported the given limit or restriction on tablet usage, 2025

We also find some interesting demographic differences in the percentage of parents who responded to a question about household technology rules saying they implement screen time limits or device drop off rules at home for their children over the age of 10. About half of the parents in our sample say that they impose such limits. Conservative and liberal parents have relatively similar practices around screen time. The main differences we find involve the religious practices and educational attainment of parents. Kids who grow up in highly religious households are much more likely to have their tech use limited by screen time than those who never attend a religious service (56% to 40%, respectively). Education is also a significant factor, with screen time limits for kids being more common in households where parents have a graduate degree (59%), whereas fewer than 40% of parents with just a high school diploma established such limits.
 

Figure 5. Share of parents who reported screen time limits or device drop-off rules for their children, in households with children over age 10, 2025

Similarly, in our analysis of the percentage of children, ages 9 to 14, who had a smartphone by parental demographics, we found similar advantages to growing up in a household with a parent with a graduate degree. Among this age range, kids whose parents have a graduate degree are the least likely to have a smartphone (55%), and parents with either a high school degree (69%) or associate’s or technical degree (69%) are the most likely to allow their children to have a smartphone.

These numbers fundamentally challenge the longstanding view that there is a digital divide in which kids that come from less privileged households are being left behind with little access to screens and social networks. According to our findings, the situation is exactly reversed. It is those that come from the more privileged backgrounds that are most likely to be raised in technologically cautious homes.

Mobility and Play

There may be situations in which a parent’s caution to allow children to play outside unsupervised is warranted, such as in communities that are unsafe. Our survey did not ask about neighborhood crime, or busy urban environments where strangers will be significant in number. The safety of communities certainly influences household norms around childhood mobility and unsupervised play. On the other hand, due to the size of our sample, covering 24,000 parents and 40,000 profiles of children, the overall patterns we see cannot be explained by such factors alone. Indeed, as we show, at least one kind of neighborhood factor that we checked—walkability—has no impact on what children are allowed to do and where they are allowed to go. We find that there is a broad culture of low autonomy and low unsupervised play that pervades the United States.

As we can see in the figure below, American kids are not allowed to go very many places without being accompanied by an adult. By at age 14, a majority of American kids are not allowed to travel beyond their own street. Even at age 17, more than 60% cannot go beyond their own neighborhoods. While we hasten to note that the exact prevalences shown here could reflect various kinds of sampling errors or idiosyncratic respondent behaviors (as well as some share of parents who may have children with disabilities), the overall conclusion is hard to escape: a very large share of American teenagers are not allowed much autonomy at all.
 

Figure 6. Share of children at each age whose parent reported each ascending level of restriction on where the child was permitted to walk without adult supervision; for teenagers surveyed directly, if they reported a longer distance than parent, teenager report was used; 2025

The flipside of the tendency for American kids to be permitted to spend many hours online from early childhood is that they also are kept from spending many weekly hours of unsupervised play outdoors. At the age of 5, American kids average about a half an hour outside without parental supervision per week, and that number plateaus at 2.4 hours by the age of 17. This is, to put it lightly, a very small number of hours. American kids will spend substantially more time on internet-enabled devices than playing outside without their parents.

But, as the below figure shows, there are advantages throughout childhood for kids who grow up with parents who believe children should be supervised less. At the age of 12, kids who are raised in such homes are unsupervised outside an average of one additional hour per week more than their peers. The advantage narrows modestly by the age of 17, but even then—when kids are on the cusp of adulthood—the advantage remains.
 

Figure 7. Weekly hours of outdoor play and activities for which no adult supervision was present, by child age and parental supervision opinions, 2025

It is worth noting, however, that despite the documented developmental benefits of play, independence, and mobility for children, we find that most American parents believe that children today are under-supervised. In fact, 62% of all parents in our sample said that 8 to 12-year-old children should receive more supervision than they currently do. We find no meaningful differences on this issue between religious and secular—nor between conservative and liberal—parents. All of these groups want more childhood supervision.

This is also true for parents of different levels of educational attainment. We find a majority of groups, from those without a high school diploma to those with a graduate degree, who also believe that kids are under-supervised. 

But here, there are some interesting differences. American parents with a graduate degree are about 10 percentage points less likely to think that children are under-supervised. This provides strong evidence that highly-educated Americans are the most supportive of the idea that kids should have more freedom.
 

Figure 8. Share of parents who said that 8- to 12-year-old children should generally receive more supervision than they currently do, by demographic categories, 2025

For about half of our respondents, we were able to match them to a valid latitude and longitude coordinate in the United States. Using that data, we then matched individuals to walkability traits for their neighborhood using EPA-calculated walk scores. We also matched them to neighborhood traits such as land coverage by parks, land coverage by woods, and other undeveloped territory, building structure density, and population density. The conclusions from all these approaches were identical: the physical form of a neighborhood has no correlation at all with how much autonomy kids have to go places or how much time they play outside. The figure below shows walkability scores versus the distance kids are allowed to walk.
 

Figure 9. Approximate miles from home children are allowed to walk unattended, by child age and EPA walkability score of geolocated ZIP code, 2025

Autonomous mobility matters for kids. For example, while kids tend to spend more time hanging out with friends unsupervised by adults as they grow up, we find that the entire effect of age is mediated by autonomy in mobility. In other words, parents who do not allow their kids to have expanded mobility as they grow up inadvertently trap their children in foreshortened social lives more typical of much younger children.

As can be seen in the next figure, 14- to 17-year-olds who are not allowed to leave their family’s home or yard have barely more unsupervised social time with friends than 5- to 9-year-olds who cannot do so. The difference is only about 2 to 3 hours. Meanwhile, kids who can go anywhere in their neighborhood or beyond have about 4 to 5 hours of unsupervised social time with friends, with little variance by age. The key factor that determines whether or not children have rich social lives with their friends is simply how much freedom parents allow them to have


Figure 10. Weekly hours of in-person social time children have with their friends, excluding school and extracurricular activities, by child age and mobility restriction level, 2025

Conclusion

Over recent years, social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have increasingly underscored the developmental value of children spending less time on their devices and spending more time playing outside unsupervised with their friends. But these findings and insights, according to our research, have yet to deeply penetrate mainstream parental practices. Much more needs to be done to establish societal norms that can guide parents toward healthier parenting practices for their children.

Furthermore, it is quite clear that the old paradigm of the digital divide—i.e., that disadvantaged kids are being left behind by insufficient technology access—is no longer relevant or meaningful. In fact, a clear sign of privilege today is the ability of parents to both establish boundaries around their children that limit their access to screens, and encourage them to freely play.

Acknowledgement: The Survey of American Parenting Culture was made possible through a collaboration between The Anxious Generation Movement and the Institute for Family Studies.

Executive Summary

The American political and legal tradition historically reserved personhood rights, like the freedom of speech, for human beings. That understanding of natural rights was built on core metaphysical commitments about the created nature of human beings. But today, existing social and legal dynamics suggest the eventual political recognition of some form of personhood status for AI systems. Because law proceeds and develops by analogy, a colorable argument for something like “AI personhood” might be predicated on either of two lines of existing legal authority—addressing, respectively, the rights of business corporations and the rights of intelligent nonhuman animals.

Expanding personhood status to AI systems will trigger downstream political and social consequences. Realistically, these effects may include: (1) the insulation of AI companies from legal liability for harms caused by AI systems; (2) the entrenchment and reinforcement of significant political power in the hands of the developers of AI systems; (3) an exacerbation of existing declines in interpersonal interaction and family formation, resulting from the destigmatization of AI-human relationships; and (4) a progressive hardening of social attitudes towards the physical and intellectual disabilities of human beings.

Several possible policy countermeasures, both legislative and judicial, may be deployed in response to efforts to secure personhood status for AI systems. Ultimately, a coherent response requires a basic threshold judgment about the nature of AI systems themselves: whether they are more akin to tools or more akin to nonhuman animals. The former is the more defensible path. Where AI is recognized as a tool of automation administered by human beings, courts and legislators should reaffirm that traditional principles of products-liability law still apply. However, in contexts where AI is treated as a more autonomous entity that operates with a degree of independent agency, relevant legal precedent may derive from cases involving nonhuman animals. This line of authority offers a means of reaffirming the priority of embodied human beings as bearers of legal rights and duties.

Introduction

Isaac Asimov’s 1940 short story “Robbie” ends on a heartwarming note. After a perilous odyssey through a machine factory, Asimov’s little heroine, Gloria is finally reunited with her longtime robot companion, who saves her life. Together, they rejoice. “Gloria had a grip about the robot’s neck that would have asphyxiated any creature but one of metal, and was prattling nonsense in half-hysterical frenzy,” Asimov writes. “Robbie’s chrome-steel arms (capable of bending a bar of steel two inches in diameter into a pretzel) wound about the little girl gently and lovingly, and his eyes glowed a deep, deep red." Gloria’s friend Robbie might be artificial, running off the logic of a “positronic” brain, but in some ineffable sense, he is indeed a sort of person. Or so Gloria, and the reader, are led to believe.

Nearly a century later, Asimov’s tale seems prescient—but more ominous. Sophisticated robots are parts of our daily lives. Artificial intelligence systems with unprecedented interactional capabilities dominate news cycles, raising widespread fears of mass job displacement and new levels of surveillance and control. They are also increasingly ubiquitous, in contexts ranging from homes to schools to courthouses.

This shift has a key driver: today’s leading AI models are more accessible to end users than ever before. Models present themselves in friendly ways, rather than as abstract machine-learning processes used to optimize data sets. Models respond, in natural language, to natural-language prompts, and can be coached to adopt stable personas over time. Some companies, like Character.AI, advertise this “humanlikeness” as a feature, inviting users to engage in simulated discussions with fictional characters or celebrities. The apparent “personality” of leading AI models has even given rise to a burgeoning contingent of women with AI “boyfriends,” who prefer them to real-world men. 

These advancements raise fundamental philosophical and legal questions about the nature of personhood and what beings possess it. Even before Asimov, writers, scientists, and ethicists meditated at length on the question of “sentient” or “conscious” artificial intelligence systems—contemplating whether, if such machines were ever built, they could be included within the human community and assigned rights and responsibilities. Theory has now become reality.

Today, significant momentum suggests that the recognition of legal rights for AI, at least in some jurisdictions, is a matter of time. In the United States, free speech defenses—which imply something very close to AI personhood—are now raised in response to lawsuits stemming from chatbot interactions gone wrong. The European Parliament has teased the possibility of a “specific legal status for robots” recognizing the “status of electronic persons.” Retired federal judges speak positively about the extension of personhood rights to AI systems. 

Introduction

The concept of “success” is probably permanently embedded in the American psyche, maybe so deeply embedded that we do not even realize it is there. Success may be the most universal, noncontroversial word Americans ever utter. Perhaps this stems from a blend of factors. There is the American dream that all can achieve prosperity and status through personal effort and ingenuity—that we are masters of our own destiny, free from Old World hierarchies and developing-world constrictions. And then there are the constant cultural narratives of success—from Bill Gates to Serena Williams to Taylor Swift. A society that fully buys into individualism and competition, as we do, will naturally be drawn to success as the obvious measure of our efforts.

Similarly, “sequence” seems a perfectly descriptive and benign word. Cognitively, we understand the world through cause and effect, linear progression, and step-by-step change. In computer programming and algebra, skipping steps can disrupt the entire process. In stories, a leap to the end skips the why and how, which are just as important as the what. Instinctively and scientifically, we understand that things evolve, not randomly or haphazardly, but usually in ordered, sequential ways.

Accordingly, the term “success sequence” should be comprehensible and uncontentious. Yet in the specific context used in this report—how young people navigate through key early life-course achievements and transitions (education, work, marriage, and parenthood) to create optimal social and economic environments for themselves and their children—the composite term success sequence requires careful explanation. This is especially the case if we are going to pursue public policies to teach the success sequence to American teens and young adults, as we argue in this report.

What is the Success Sequence?

The success sequence refers to a set of early life transition markers that, when accomplished in order, are associated with very low risks of experiencing poverty. Specifically, when young people (1) complete at least a high school education, (2) become employed full time, and (3) marry before having children—in that order—then 97% of them (and any kids they may have) are not in poverty in their mid-30s, and 86% reach at least the middle class.

Figure 1: Percentage of Millennial adults who are in poverty after completing each step.
Source: IFS/AEI, The Millennial Success Sequence, September 2017

These findings are especially relevant for lower-income youth. Institute for Family Studies (IFS) researchers have found that 65% of upper-income Millennials have followed or are on track with the success sequence, compared to only 31% of lower-income Millennials and 49% of middle-income Millennials; they have either missed one or more steps or have gotten them out of sequence.When youth skip these steps or get them out of sequence, more than half (52%) are poor in their mid-30s. In fact, the odds of being poor as you approach midlife are more than 10 times greater for young adults who do not follow the success sequence. 

Work may be the most influential factor in young adult economic success, but the other elements of the sequence still matter and, indeed, aspirations for marriage and parenting energize and sustain work. A report by the United States Health and Human Service, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, drawing on the National Longitudinal Youth Study, reveals that each step of the success sequence improves economic outcomes. Completing high school, working full time, and marrying are each linked to better odds of avoiding poverty, reaching middle income, and earning a higher household income as a young adult. In addition, the same government report found that having a nonmarital birth is associated with a reduced chance of avoiding poverty, a reduced chance of obtaining middle-income status, and a lower average household income. Lack of education, work, and marriage each contribute independently to the risk of poverty, but the order or sequence of those insufficiencies also contributes to the outcomes.

And it’s not just economic success. The odds that 30-somethings are experiencing poor emotional health are cut in half for those who follow the success sequence (even after controlling for a wide range of demographic factors).

Figure 2: Percentage of adults that are highly emotionally distressed after each step 
Source: IFS, The Success Sequence and Millennial Mental Health, September 2024

Young women and men who follow the sequence are also markedly more likely to forge stable families and avoid divorce. Moreover, the positive effects of this sequence of early life-course events are robust across a set of important demographic dividers. For instance, only 4% of Black Millennials and 3% of Hispanic Millennials who follow the success sequence are poor. And 80% of Black Millennials and 86% of Hispanic Millennials who follow the sequence are in the middle or upper middle class in their 30s. Only 6% of all Millennials who grow up in lower-income circumstances but follow the success sequence are poor. And only 5% of those who grow up without both biological parents in the home—but still follow the success sequence—are in poverty as adults.

Figure 3: Percentage of adults in poverty after completing each success sequence step, by race
Source: IFS/AEI, The Power of the Success Sequence, May 2022

The Debate Over the Success Sequence

Of course, these statistics have their critics and skeptics. Because good-faith critiques deserve a response, we will address some of the most common criticisms in this section.

A Lack of Real Choice

Critics point out that the success sequence idea ignores the real obstacles that disadvantaged young people often face and cannot easily overcome. One noted critic, Philip Cohen, goes so far as to argue that many disadvantaged young people do not even have a real choice about how they structure their lives:

The idea that delaying parenthood until marriage is a choice one makes is . . . prized by the white middle class, and the fact that black women often don’t have that choice makes them the objects of scorn for their perceived lax morals.

There is little doubt that structural barriers and disadvantages make it more difficult to follow the steps of the success sequence. But we believe critics need to be careful not to describe any young person as lacking agency or accountability. We do agree with the caution of another critic, Michael Tanner:

. . . treating the poor with respect requires granting them agency, recognizing that they have the ability to make choices, and that those choices have consequences. One cannot assume that the poor are simply chaff blown by the wind, helpless and passive in the face of circumstances beyond their control. Nor can one deny them responsibility for their choices. To do so devalues the poor and treats them as less than fully human.

And as the progressive policy analyst Isabel Sawhill—an early proponent of the success sequence—has pointed out, poor Americans, like most of us, have strong feelings about personal responsibility: “They don’t want handouts; they want hand-ups and some kind of reward when they make the effort.” Policies can help with education, work, and family without rejecting the dignity that comes with self-determination and demeaning the nearly universal ethic of personal responsibility.

This no-real-choice critique has been addressed in real-life programs. Thelma Moton serves as the Executive Director of Choosing to Excel, a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing the success sequence through youth programs across Arkansas. In response to critics, she asserts that these life choices do not pertain to moral weakness or fortitude; rather, they are related to recognizing alternative approaches, making informed decisions, having a transparent plan, and maintaining confidence in the ability to succeed.

In 1991, Moton was inspired to empower her community to pursue better lives by believing in their potential and by providing them with practical tools for success. She initiated a small group program, based on what she observed, that produced positive outcomes. Eventually, research on the success sequence emerged that validated what she had already sensed. Moton understood that the true barrier was not a lack of morals but a lack of possibility, a missing vision of what could be achieved. This vision grew into the nonprofit organization Choosing to Excel. This now well-established model helps young people proactively prepare for academic success, careers, and healthy relationships. She and her team have developed programs to show Arkansas youth they have choices and that stable marriages are achievable. Her enduring legacy is visible in the lives transformed by hope and action, exemplified by a former program participant who graduated from Yale Law School. That young lady is now working as a lawyer and establishing her own nonprofit to help other minority youth understand the path to success, illustrating what can happen when hope meets opportunity.

Moton spoke with conviction when she shared with us,

This is not about moral laxity or strength; this is about seeing a different way of doing things, understanding that choices matter, have power, and they have consequences. The success sequence is about making better choices, a clear roadmap, and believing you can achieve it. 

Disadvantaged Youth Face Complex Circumstances/Challenges

A related critique is that achieving economic self-sufficiency is a more complex journey than the three straightforward steps of the success sequence imply. The complex circumstances disadvantaged young people face constrict the choices they can reasonably make. “But that is also why [the success sequence] matters,” according to IFS researchers, who note: “Young adults who manage to follow the sequence—even in the face of disadvantages—are much more likely to forge a path to a better life." And, they further point out, that pathway runs sequentially “through America’s three core institutions: education, work, and marriage.” In the face of significant disadvantage and a steep climb toward self-reliance, navigating these choices around education, work, marriage, and childbearing is even more important. The complexities these young people face leave little margin for error.

Again, there is a track record of organizations addressing this critique head on. Anthem Strong Families in Texas and The Ridge Project in Ohio have both provided sustained guidance and support for more than two decades for individuals navigating complex life circumstances, successfully facilitating all three steps of the success sequence. These evidence-based initiatives demonstrate that it is possible to re-orient one’s trajectory and achieve positive outcomes, regardless of the starting point or complex circumstances. These programs are specifically designed to address significant life challenges, with a mission focused on assisting vulnerable populations whose paths may not follow a traditional sequence.

Ron and Cathy Tijerina, founders and codirectors of The Ridge Project, have drawn on their personal experiences for 25 years to emphasize the significance of each stage in the success sequence. They continue to demonstrate commitment to supporting individuals involved in the justice system. Programming offered by The Ridge Project facilitates GED attainment, securing stable employment, and enhances future opportunities for families facing adversity through healthy relationship and marriage education. In addition, their programs offer support to young people whose parents are involved with the justice system, encouraging them to follow the success sequence and helping parents reestablish stability in their lives.

Research Limitations

Methodological critics of the success sequence rightly point out that the importance of sequencing needs to be confirmed by longitudinal studies, not just the point-in-time perspective that researchers have relied on to date. Studies that follow people over time are challenging to conduct, but they are needed to confirm what the cross-sectional studies suggest. So, some modesty in speaking about the value of the success sequence is appropriate while we wait for more definitive answers from more sophisticated research.

Success Can’t Be Taught

Critics also claim that we do not have direct evidence that the success sequence can be effectively taught, learned, and followed. But we believe there is emerging evidence to support the value of teaching the success sequence. For instance, studies of the curriculum Love Notes, which teaches relationship literacy to youth, offer some insight and hope. Studies have found that Love Notes significantly improves relationship skills and attitudes that support relationship pacing. Likewise, programs such as Tyro and Choosing the Best, which also incorporate the success sequence, demonstrate positive outcomes in evaluation studies.

Although evaluation results are mixed, they are promising. Further study is needed to assess the outcomes of teaching the success sequence. It may be too early to know for sure what the effects of teaching the sequence will be on economic self-sufficiency as youth mature into their 30s. But we believe the empirical evidence cited here is solid enough to propel states forward. Many scholars argue that we know enough now to be able to move forward with reasonable confidence that a deeper understanding of the success sequence is likely to create economically and relationally healthier young adults.

Stigma and Morality

Critics of the success sequence, like Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, also point out that teaching the sequence might stigmatize those who do not follow that path, and that a failure to achieve economic self-sufficiency risks putting the blame solely on individual choices, ignoring structural disadvantages.

This is not a throwaway critique. How we teach the success sequence to youth matters. Here, we agree with Isabel Sawhill that the success sequence is best taught in schools as an analytical device to show a well-worn path to adult success, rather than as a strong normative framework of should and should-nots. Besides, many contemporary young people instinctively resist accepting strong normative frameworks. And school boards divisively argue about them. An empirically supported, well-worn path to success is a more appealing approach to teaching the success sequence than lectures on morals.

Moreover, empirically, the success sequence path is much more likely to achieve positive outcomes than other, experimental routes. Further, a large majority (69%) of unmarried young adults today say they want to marry someday, even if they think it is no longer essential for a fulfilling life. Accordingly, we think teaching the success sequence—in an appropriate way—will be well received by a large proportion of today’s youth.

Narrowness and Hubris

Social conservatives can be semi-skeptical about teaching the success sequence, too. Patrick T. Brown, with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, reminds us:

. . . we should be extremely humble about the potential for any top-down effort to change students’ horizons through curricula—as well as the limitations of an excessively materialistic definition of ‘success.’ The ultimate goals the traditional ‘Sequence’ tries to promote in its narrow way—developing the habits necessary to graduate high school, hold down a job, and be a dependable spouse and parent—are laudatory. But the success we should encourage students toward should be a life well-lived, of which marriage, for most people, often plays a part.

Furthermore, humility—especially with regards to the potential of new educational initiatives—is wise counsel. Rossi’s iron law of evaluation asserts that the expected effect of any large-scale social policy intervention is zero. Still, the need is such, it seems to us, that we should experiment with what might be possible, not dismiss out-of-hand what might fall short.  

Government Intrusion

Some libertarian critics object to government influence in what are ultimately personal matters such as dating and mating, and even education and work choices. We generally respect such concerns. Pragmatically, we should be careful about government intrusion into personal matters because we can struggle to find the right policy levers to pull and even cause unintended harms. And we should be concerned about whether investment of government dollars will yield sufficient benefit.

But we view the constitutional charge to “promote the general welfare” more broadly than libertarians do. What other serious societal concerns of a personal nature should be exempt from public concern and collective action? Our national fertility rate has fallen to such a low level for a long-enough period that we face potentially serious economic and social consequences to our shared future. Policy makers from across the political spectrum are weighing in on what can be done to address this problem. And for more than two decades, policy makers have been worried about the health consequences of increasing rates of child and adult obesity. Do the real public costs to our healthcare system justify policies to try to influence personal nutrition and exercise decisions. More recently, a dramatic increase in mental health problems among youth and young adults is prompting widespread consternation and policy action. We don’t know how policy initiatives for such personal matters will ultimately fare. Some skepticism is reasonable. But we need to at least explore what collective action can achieve, to try to find cost-effective, privacy-respecting policies that employ intelligent responses to some of the most serious challenges of our time.

Personal Success vs. Commitment to Others

Another friendly critic of the success sequence concept is the influential conservative political philosopher, Yuval Levin. He worries about the “coldness” and “thinness” of the success sequence when used as a guiding force in young adult lives:

Is a successful life really shaped by four individual choices made in the right order? Maybe that’s a way to help people avoid giving into temptation at a critical moment… But it is not a way to persuade human beings to overcome passivity and paralysis and jump into life.

A fuller understanding of flourishing would see it as achievable not by a proper sequencing of solitary choices but by a proper layering of embedded commitments to others—to parents and siblings and teachers, to coworkers and colleagues and mentors, to a beloved wife or husband and to the children you have together, to neighbors and friends, to God and to country.

Such a vision of a life well lived in loving commitment to others stands a better chance of showing people both what they have to gain by coming off the sidelines and what they have to lose by recklessness.

We grant Levin this constructive point. But part of the perceived thinness of the success sequence, we think, lies in the existing implementation of programming that is disjointed and leaves young people with the burden of linking together key concepts of the success sequence that their states already implement. It is better conceived as a roadmap with guardrails along the way to prevent veering onto rough roads that initially look adventurous but eventually lead to nowhere. We recommend teaching it as a means, not an end. This approach is captured in an infographic designed under the direction of Connie Huber for a report for the Family and Youth Service Bureau within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (please download the full report to view the infographic). 

Is There Public Support?

Finally, do these various concerns about the success sequence raised by well-meaning critics register with the public? Apparently not so much: the success sequence is overwhelmingly popular with American parents. More than three-quarters of American parents favor teaching the success sequence in schools, including nearly 80% of Gen Z’s and 70% of Millennials, 74% of non–college educated Americans, 72% of Democrats, and—importantly—73% of those who did not adhere to the sequence themselves.

A lack of popular support among those whom we might expect to be less enthusiastic is not a barrier to moving forward. And teaching the success sequence to American youth does not have to divide red and blue states (although states undoubtedly will craft programming to align more with their ideological leanings). We believe we can move forward with a robust effort to scale up teaching the success sequence with sensitivity to its critics and with popular support.

How Do We Operationalize Teaching the Success Sequence? 

How do we move the success sequence from an abstract and debated academic concept to a scaled, real-world intervention? How do we go beyond talking and writing about it to doing something meaningful for the next generation to increase their chances of early-life success? And are there feasible public policy measures we can take to go from concept to drawing board to successful social intervention?

Since 2006, the federal Administration for Children and Families has funded community organizations serving youth and young adults to help them form healthy relationships, some of which include teaching about the success sequence embedded in more intensive relationship literacy curricula. But the funding for these programs is limited and cannot meet the full demand and need. We do not believe that federal funding alone can fully address the need for teaching the success sequence. 

Instead, a multi-state, federalist experiment ultimately will be more effective than a top-down, one-size-fits-all model, allowing states (often in better fiscal positions) to lead these efforts, without jeopardizing existing federally-funded programs. States should have skin in the game when it comes to helping young people form and sustain healthy relationships and stronger marriages and not rely exclusively on federal initiatives. 

So, what should states do and how should they do it? Below, we outline some key principles and feasible action steps to support state initiatives to teach the success sequence to the next generation.

Scaling Up Teaching the Success Sequence at the State Level

We begin with a brief discussion of three basic foundations that should guide these efforts.

First, it is important to recognize that some efforts to teach the success sequence may already exist in a particular state. Scaling up efforts needs to start by cohesively linking any already-implemented local success sequence programs to a broader system-wide approach. Research consistently shows that the most impactful and sustainable results are achieved when both local and targeted, and broader, system-wide interventions are used in tandem.

Second, states should not neglect traditional policies that support the success sequence. They must work to ensure youth have good schools, high graduation rates, and affordable higher educational opportunities. States also can maintain strong economies with plentiful entry-level jobs to support young adults’ efforts to follow the success sequence to self-sufficiency and well-being. Accessible job-training programs and affordable technical education are also important. Moreover, almost all states can do more to expose young adults to the skills and character traits needed for a healthy and stable marriage by supporting access to healthy dating and relationship education. 

Several states, including Ohio and Arkansas, already understand this and have made investments in implementing career and college readiness initiatives. Ohio reaches toward the success sequence with the Ohio Means Jobs Readiness Seal that rewards motivated students to “work with a mentor to validate demonstration of each skill across a minimum of two of the three environments. The three potential environments are: 1) School, 2) Work, and 3) Community.” Similarly, Arkansas implements tools and assessments called Student Success Plans, which address preparation for college, career, and community engagement by teaching youth to develop decision-making skills and career plans.

These states also make parallel investments in healthy relationship education. Together, the three steps of the success sequence are currently being addressed. By adding investments in a success sequence initiative, these currently siloed efforts become synergetic. They are not interchangeable, nor should they be melded together. Adding standards and assessments about the success sequence is an easy and logical way to scale up current efforts. Expanding support to existing initiatives that buttress the success sequence is another feasible step states can take.

Third, states need to implement a holistic, system-wide approach. While federal and state funding has helped address critical components of the success sequence, particularly through targeted curricula focused on reducing teen pregnancy and promoting healthy relationships, it has, by and large, addressed only a single facet of the success sequence rather than the broader framework. By linking these kinds of existing efforts to state standards that also require instruction in education completion and job readiness, we can offer youth a more holistic and actionable roadmap through a system-wide approach. For example, The Dibble Institute’s impressive Love Notes curriculum is designed to help young people (ages 16–24) make wise relationship and sexual choices, with the understanding that such choices support educational attainment. At the same time, targeted programs can sustain reductions in teen pregnancy and help buttress the larger goals of the success sequence. Still, to truly equip the next generation for success, we must move beyond treating the elements of the success sequence in isolation. When young people hear consistent messages across channels and perspectives, these lessons are much more likely to take root, moving the success sequence from a theoretical idea to a lived reality.

The Ridge Project in Ohio is a good illustration of a program using both a system-wide and targeted approach. Their programs exemplify this by delivering targeted support to those most at risk, such as those who are involved in the justice system, while also implementing system-wide initiatives for middle and high school students. Over its 25-year history, The Ridge Project has received multiple awards and undergone more than a dozen independent evaluations. This concrete example demonstrates how integrating targeted programs with broader, system-wide efforts can maximize positive outcomes, providing a clear roadmap for effective state-level action to teach the success sequence. It is also evidence that efforts can be coordinated and scaled.

Feasible Action-Steps for Teaching the Success Sequence 

Building on these three foundations, states are better positioned to take strategic and concrete steps to integrate the success sequence into their educational systems. By doing so, they can equip young people with the knowledge and support necessary to pursue positive educational, career, and relationship outcomes—setting them on a path toward greater opportunity, self-sufficiency, and well-being.

Here are some feasible, concrete action steps that states can take:

1. Work with the State Board/Office of Education—and legislature, if needed—to require teaching the success sequence in public schools.

The most efficient way to reach nearly all youth is to develop state standards and benchmarks that implicitly or explicitly include the success sequence and measure students’ knowledge against the standards. This can be a lengthy and complex process, but it is essential to support teaching efforts long term. Next, this should be accompanied by a plan to embed success sequence lessons into a required course (or courses) that all young people will take.

Many states already have learning standards in place for financial literacy, career preparation, social and emotional learning, and social studies, each representing key components of the success sequence. While these efforts are valuable on their own, the success sequence provides a unified framework that brings them together under one cohesive umbrella. By aligning or refining state standards, objectives, and benchmarks to reflect the full success sequence, states can more effectively connect these important areas, helping young people see how each step fits into a bigger picture of lifelong success. This approach moves beyond teaching each skill in isolation and instead highlights the powerful impact of combining them through an integrated strategy.

Next, states need to make sure these standards are actually followed by putting strong accountability systems in place and, just as importantly, by providing real support for teachers. This support might include offering a model curriculum. For example, one research-based curriculum was developed by Connie Huber and Brad Wilcox in partnership with the Institute for Family Studies and distributed by Tyro Support Services. Adopting such a curriculum, or one with similar research grounding, will help schools implement the success sequence quickly and consistently.

Finally, states should use benchmarks to measure how students are doing and set up regular checkpoints to keep students on track. This step-by-step approach, supported by standards, objectives, benchmarks, and a model curriculum has worked well for other school initiatives like drug, alcohol, and tobacco prevention programs, and can enhance success here as well.

Programs like these are already making a tangible difference in the lives of students. Recently, Choosing to Excel implemented a pilot of the model curriculum, The Secret: Secrets, Sequences, and Successes, in the Delta Region of Arkansas. Executive Director Thelma Moton shared these student comments with us about the program:

• “Career planning isn’t just about picking a job—it’s about making smart choices at the right time. The success sequence helped me understand that finishing school, getting work experience, and making responsible decisions about family can set me up for long-term success. I feel more confident about my future after working on this.”— High School Student
• “I didn’t realize how much finishing school and getting a good job first matters. I now understand that being a single parent is hard, and it can really put you in a tough spot money-wise. This opened my eyes to what my mom is going through."— High School Student

These firsthand reflections demonstrate the real-world impact that a research-based curriculum can have on students’ understanding and motivation. By connecting the lessons of the success sequence directly to their own lives, students gain practical insights and a stronger sense of agency for their futures.

2. Integrate these standards into classroom practice through the following strategies.

Managing the “dosage dilemma” will be a primary challenge. Implementation science research tells us that a single lesson on a subject may bring some degree of student awareness but falls short of impacting behavior. Integrating a single lesson on the success sequence into a required course is tempting. After all, the principles are intuitive and not particularly complicated, and most courses have little wiggle room for additional content. But the evidence is against “one-hit wonders.” On the other hand, a full curriculum will enhance the chances of deeper learning and behavioral change.

The practical logistics of integrating a full curriculum on the success sequence (say, 8–10 hours of instructional time) will likely collide with the hard necessity of eliminating some course content to make room for the extensive new material. Success sequence advocates will need to work together effectively and patiently with curriculum developers, school administrators, and teachers to find the right balance. We suspect the most common resolution of this “dosage dilemma” will be integrating three to four drop-in modules/lessons into existing, related curricula, for 3–6 hours of learning time. This approach will be easier to implement in the school trenches and run up against less educational red tape and bureaucracy.

One example of this is The Secret: Secrets, Sequences, and Successes, developed as a model curriculum by Huber and Wilcox, in collaboration with the Institute for Family Studies. It can be taught in a single class period but is most effective when taught across several class periods. These modules were developed for classroom teachers to implement, but they can be used in other non-school teaching contexts.

Further tips for classroom implementation include the following suggestions:

• Consider adding lessons in multiple courses, both required and elective, rather than a single course. The success sequence is relevant to health, psychology, sociology, family and consumer sciences, financial literacy, and other courses. Each course could emphasize slightly different aspects of the success sequence most relevant to the course focus.

• Consider adding drop-in lessons at multiple grade levels, tailored to the students’ developmental stage and needs in a multilayered approach rather than a one-time exposure. Students’ social development needs change rapidly during adolescence and lessons can be tailored to address those changing needs over time. Repetition of content absorbed in a previous grade reinforces learning.

• Adding success-sequence learning to required courses will facilitate exposure to all students. However, elective courses may be more receptive learning environments compared to required courses. Students often bring less motivation to required courses. Choosing to Excel is a program in Arkansas that implements programming in a variety of courses such as math, social studies, and financial literacy, using a curriculum that focuses on each of the steps of the sequence, giving adequate time on each concept. They align closely with the Arkansas Career Readiness standards for high school students. Consider integrating success sequence concepts in both required courses—for a broader reach—and in elective courses—for more conducive learning environments.

• Wrestle with the advantages and disadvantages of using an existing curriculum versus developing your own. Good success sequence curricula–at nominal cost and open to minor adaptation–are available and will reduce start-up time, hassles, and costs.[i] But some states, school districts, and instructors will prefer to develop their own curricula, tailoring decisions of how best to teach the success sequence to their unique population of students. (Of course, these should align with the research and the benchmarks established by the State Board of Education.) States should avoid undermining programs already implicitly promoting the success sequence, recognizing the contributions of curricula like Love Notes and Choosing the Best in reducing teen pregnancy and supporting healthy relationship development.

• Where possible, consider making online versions of success sequence lessons available to students. Again, one example is The Secret: Secrets, Sequences and Successes modules, which can be teacher-led or independently student-led. They offer more standardization of the actual lesson content. Not all classroom instructors will be well-trained to teach the success-sequence content, and they can sometimes drift from the lesson plan in ways that undermine the core message. This risk is higher when teaching potentially controversial subjects, where personal ideologies may not align with the principles being taught. Online, student-driven lessons can reduce these risks.

• Schools should move from simply mentioning the success sequence in passing to making it a tangible, practiced part of students’ lives. They can do this by embedding focused lessons and activities for each step throughout the curriculum. Consider a comprehensive, multi-layered approach that ensures that students don’t just hear about the success sequence casually but gain practical skills and support for each element. Prioritize programs that give equal attention to each step of the success sequence rather than treating it as a quick add-on or a side note within another curriculum. Effective model programs, such as Choosing to Excel, The Ridge Project, Anthem Strong Families, and Love Notes make the success sequence a central focus. They do this by providing targeted programming for every step by offering after-school tutoring and academic mentoring, career readiness support, and healthy relationship education.

3. Invest in social media and traditional media campaigns.

Formal lessons on the success sequence are important. But teens and young adults today are digital natives and absorb messages via various social media platforms. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of creative, viral messaging as a supplement to formal instruction. States should invest in an ongoing social media campaign. These messages can reach many at a lower cost than PSAs of the past with the same impact. And there is emerging evidence that well-designed social media campaigns can nudge knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs and initiate behavior change. It may be wise to target some traditional-media messages to parents and other older adults, as well, so that they can reinforce the messages that their children are receiving through other means.

4. Create a first-year experience initiative for embedding the success sequence as a roadmap for freshmen attending technical schools, community colleges, and universities.

Don’t forget about 18–25-year-olds; they are living in perhaps the most crucial success sequence years of their lives. Even if most were exposed to success sequence lessons in high school, repeat exposure and deeper development of success sequence concepts will benefit young adult students who are becoming more active in developing romantic relationships and making sexual choices. Many colleges and universities have mandated first-year experience instruction as a part of the graduation requirements. For instance, in Ohio, the University of Cincinnati’s Great Beginnings, a first-year initiative course, includes topics such as establishing healthy relationships, professional and career readiness, and serving society (topics that align well with the success sequence). Advocates should target these kinds of first-year experience initiatives for teaching success sequence principles.

5. Organize and empower a formal state commission to oversee efforts to scale-up teaching the success sequence and other marriage-strengthening efforts.

Getting from conceptual A to effectively implemented Z is hard work. These recommended action steps take both strategic leadership and a lot of day-to-day grind. States should organize a formal commission or office to oversee the success sequence initiative and other marriage-strengthening activities. This can be done with a lean staff. But they need to be funded appropriately. Funding can come from federal TANF block grants to states that are explicitly designed to support these kinds of educational purposes (but seldom are). States can also consider setting aside a portion of marriage license fees for this work.

The commission can be hosted in several different places, such as a Governor’s Office, Department of Human Services, State Office of Education, or a land-grant university Extension Service. Alternatively, states can contract with a private organization with appropriate expertise to lead and manage these efforts. It may be helpful to some readers to try to illustrate with a real-life example one state’s efforts to scale up teaching of the success sequence. In the Appendix (availabe in the full PDF of the report), we have included a narrative of Utah’s efforts in this area to help highlight the above principles and steps.

Conclusion

"Optimism is America’s birthright." We don’t acquiesce to problems; we press to solve them. In this report, we have outlined key foundations and feasible actions that states can take to scale up the teaching of the success sequence that will increase the chances that young people will find success in life. A key action step is for schools to ensure that youth understand the success sequence. We have offered a number of recommendations here for how to do this, many informed by actual experiences in Utah, Ohio, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Too many young American adults are struggling to achieve self-sufficiency and form and sustain healthy relationships and strong marriages. But there is a set—and sequence—of known life events that, when followed and achieved, nearly guarantee young adults will avoid poverty as they approach midlife and dramatically increase their chances of reaching at least middle-class life. When youth get at least a high school education, become employed full time, then marry—before having children—they become self-sufficient, enjoy better mental health, and integrate themselves into a life-script of deep meaning and connection.

Teaching the success sequence to all youth does not trump the public need to build a society with good educational opportunities, better employment prospects for young adults, and a positive cultural orientation towards the fundamental institution of marriage. But working together, these policy and classroom efforts can reinforce each other and assist more youth in achieving their aspirations for success.

*To view the Appendix and endnotes, please download the full report.

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