Executive Summary
What is the state of marriage in America? On the one hand, as a culture we seem fixated on marriage, from the extravagant $50 billion we spend annually on weddings to our active debate about same-sex marriage. Yet we are also witnessing a striking exodus from marriage, especially among high school but not college educated young people, for whom raising children amid unstable cohabiting relationships and serial partnerships is in danger of becoming the new norm. This rapid decline of marriage among the almost 60 percent of the nation who are high school educated but not college educated, those whom we might call “Middle America,” has been dramatic. As recently as the 1980s, only 13 percent of the children of moderately educated mothers were born outside of marriage. By the late 2000s, this figure rose to a striking 44 percent. And in marked contrast to past calls for attention to changing trends in family structure, today almost none of our political and social leaders are talking about this dramatic change.
Why should we care? Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage fosters small cooperative unions—also known as stable families—that enable children to thrive, shore up communities, and help family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times. Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, a change that strikes at the heart of the American Dream.
Yet in the face of today’s marriage challenge, most of what we hear even from political and social leaders who think marriage is important is silence, tentativeness, or worse, despair. Even those who believe marriage matters seem to think that nothing can be done.
We beg to differ. We come together to offer America’s leaders, including our president, a marriage agenda. These proposals for federal and state policies and cultural change include eliminating marriage penalties and disincentives for the poor, for unwed mothers, and for older Americans; tripling the child tax credit; helping young men to become marriageable men; ending anonymous fatherhood; preventing unnecessary divorce; providing marriage education for newly-forming stepfamilies; investing in and evaluating marriage and relationship education programs; engaging Hollywood; launching social media campaigns about the facts and fun of marriage; and modeling how to talk about our shared marriage values despite our differences. As we explain, even small, incremental changes that improve the health of marriage in America will reduce suffering for children and their families and will yield significant cost savings for taxpayers.