by John Henderson Our law office receives hundreds of divorce inquiries each year. Some of the cases are wild, but most follow similar patterns that highlight the primary divorce risk factors that many couples face. Certain behaviors dramatically reduce the risk of divorce. Conversely, too many people make predictable mistakes that end up destroying their marriages. In my experience, the following five habits reduce the risk of ever needing a divorce lawyer. The tricky part is that each of...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) Taylor Swift entered her 30s with a new gusto for progressive politics, campaigning against Donald Trump, leaning into her childless cat lady era, and lamenting “1950s sh-t.” At the age of 35, though, Swift is literally singing a different tune. Engaged and happy, Swift is like many Millennial women who flirted with rebellion but eventually succumbed to tradition. One only needs to listen to some of the songs on her new album to hear it, as the pop qu...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Richard V. Reeves (@RichardVReeves) Grant Martsolf and I are in strong agreement on a vital point: it would be good to encourage more men into the HEAL professions, especially healthcare and education. It would help these professions to fill vacancies, create a more representative workforce, and provide more job opportunities, including for working-class men. A win-win-win. Liberal economist Paul Krugman joins us, writing recently: "What would a real solution to men’s economic problems ...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by The Editors Growing Share of Americans Say Fewer People Having Kids Would Negatively Impact the U.S. Rachel Minkin, Pew Research Center What Ever Happened to Getting to First Base? Molly Langmuir, The Atlantic Mean Age of Mother at First Birth, 2023 Krista K. Westrick-Payne & Wendy D. Manning, National Center for Family & Marriage Research Fertility Declines Are a Cultural Problem Josh Appel, City Journal ACF Awards Over $100 Million to Promote Healthy Marriage, Responsible Fatherhood Admi...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Ken Burchfiel (@KBurchfiel3) Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini have become very popular for both programming and writing. Because much of my professional and personal life is spent writing, coding, and analyzing data, I would be a prime candidate for many of these applications. However, I have concluded that not using AI1 is the best decision for me, both professionally and personally. I don't want to lose the intrinsic enjoyment I derive from my work, and ...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Grant Martsolf (@GRMartsolf) Starting in the late 1970s, the U.S. economy underwent a sharp shift away from manufacturing, a sector that had long offered stable, well-paying jobs to men without college degrees—a group often identified as “working class.” As manufacturing declined, especially in regions like the Rust Belt that were hardest hit by deindustrialization, job growth concentrated in the service sector. In my hometown of Pittsburgh, for example, civic leaders responded to in...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) Talk to any young couple considering having a child and one thing is almost certain to come up: the housing situation. Family-suitable housing is increasingly out of reach for young American families, and fertility is suffering as a result. In prior research, we laid out this affordability problem. But there’s a second problem facing many families: not only are the “starter homes” they would prefer either unaffordable or unavailable, but there aren’t ev...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Nicholas Zill Are American women abandoning marriage and parenthood? Some prominent commentators fear they are. Others worry about a future like that portrayed in the 2006 movie, Idiocracy, where college-educated women and men are discouraged from reproducing. A recent report from the Census Bureau provides clues about whether these fears and worries are justified. The Census Bureau report contains a 2024 national survey reading of how many American women have reached ages 40 to 50 w...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) The State of American Men: 2025 Equimundo Moving Beyond Moynihan: A New Blueprint to Revive Marriage and Rebuild the Black Family Delano Squires, The Heritage Foundation ACF Vision, Mission, Values, Priorities, & Guiding Principles Administration for Children & Families, U.S. DHHS South Korea's Baby Bust Threatens Its Demographic Future Lee Jong-Wha, The Japan Times Building Evidence to Strengthen Families: Charting a Research Agenda Melissa Kearney, Alden Q. Bars...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Sophie Anderson, Jared Hayden and Michael Toscano As the debate over the proper role of Artificial Intelligence in schools continues to escalate nationwide, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) is working to ensure that the potential effects of A.I. on children and families are considered, and that the rights of parents are protected. To that end, IFS submitted a public comment on August 20 in response to the U.S. Department of Education’s Proposed Rule on “Advancing Artificial Int...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Ron and Nan Deal In our new book The Mindful Marriage, we share a story of the morning I asked my wife, Nan, if she would like to go to a concert that evening. Feeling pursued and valued, she enthusiastically said yes. I immediately felt good that she was happy. That is, until my next question. Thinking that she would love to share the experience with some close friends, I asked, “Who else could we invite?” But her posture immediately sagged, telling me she had gone from joyful to hur...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Laurie DeRose Back when I was in college, my grandmother (born in 1914) warned me not to get too serious with any young man if I wanted to finish my education. In their recent work on education and adolescent fertility in Latin America, Ann Garbett and her coauthors found solid evidence that the world still works the way my grandmother thought it did, but there have been other social changes that matter for age at first birth. Garbett and her colleagues framed their work as solving a dem...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Erica Komisar (@EricaKomisarCSW) In a cultural landscape often inundated with narratives portraying marriage and parenthood as restrictive burdens, a groundbreaking report from The Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute presents a compelling counter-narrative: married women, surprisingly, report significantly higher levels of happiness than their unmarried counterparts, regardless of whether they have children. This finding directly challenges the prevailing societal view...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
We can all do practical things to prepare and protect our children online.| Institute for Family Studies
Pennsylvania State University sociologist Paul Amato has had a vital impact on my own research. I spent the first decade of my career studying the divorce cycle, the tendency for divorce to run in families. This work culminated in my 2005 book, Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages. When I began my research, Paul was already an established expert on the consequences of growing up with divorced parents. He started writing about the intergenerational tr...| Institute for Family Studies
As of 2022, 15% of U.S. teens reported a major depressive episode1(up from 8% in 2007).2 The suicide rate has increased by 38% in the last 20 years, an all-time high.3 The vast majority of Americans agree that we are facing a mental health crisis. It’s worth considering, how did we get here? What is driving the huge increase in mental health problems facing our nation?| Institute for Family Studies
Among journalists who write about education, the stock explanation for student underachievement and school discipline problems is poverty. Yet there are examples in every school system of students from impoverished family circumstances who do well academically, as well as instances of students from affluent families who get D’s and F’s or wreak havoc in class. When poverty is overemphasized as a cause of instructional ills, other aspects of family life—such as conflict between parents o...| Institute for Family Studies
A new IFS research brief highlights new evidence that family factors are as important as ever to student success.| Institute for Family Studies
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) Finding Solace in Grief: Holding Close, Letting Go, and Healing Together Lexi DeHart, Decide to Commit Video: When AI Feels Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Empathy American Enterprise Institute Family as the Foundation of Republican Democracy Robert P. George, Democracy Project NYU Law Rebuilding the Domestic Church: Why Housing Affordability is a Pro-family Cause Jason Adkins, OSV News Was It All Smoke and Mirrors?': How Adult Children Are Affected by Gr...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Daniel Darling (@dandarling) In the spring of 1965, a little-known assistant secretary of labor, policy, planning, and research in the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson issued an explosive report that would prove to be both controversial in the moment and unquestionably correct half a century later. The report became a lightning rod. The Left, led by radical feminists and others, decried his emphasis on the two-parent family. Moynihan, who later became a US senator, was hung out to ...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Scott Yenor (@scottyenor) and Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) America’s partisan divide is manifest in attitudes toward family life and in actual family practice. Democrats increasingly seem to be the party of single women and the childless. Republicans, by contrast, are increasingly the party of those who value marriage and children. This partisan divide on family is growing around the world. In the United States, counties that supported Donald Trump for president in 2024 had significant...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Frank DeVito When someone has a powerful influence on the world, different factions will always clamor to claim that person as their own. This impulse is even stronger in death. So, in the wake of the shocking and horrible murder of Charlie Kirk, it is unsurprising that various groups on the right have begun to eulogize him and to claim him as one of their own. Conservatives claim Kirk as a witness to conservative, common sense values. Free speech advocates, from libertarians and classic...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Joseph Holmes (@NormalGuy8) It probably shouldn’t be surprising that 2025 would feature a major movie release with big Hollywood stars about open relationships. Acceptance and endorsement of open marriages, polyamory, and generally looser marriage arrangements—particularly among the wealthy and educated—have been on the rise, as discussed in pieces like The New Yorker’s How Did Polyamory Become So Popular, and The Atlantic’s Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad. It was o...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Michael Toscano and Ken Burchfiel (@KBurchfiel3) Congressional leaders and White House officials have been developing competing legislative priorities on how to shape generative A.I. Some have recently expressed concern that A.I. chatbots might be dangerous for kids; others are concerned that over-regulation of A.I. companies could hamper a critical industry from growing and achieving its fullest potential. In the former group, we have, for example, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Senator...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) and Maria Baer “We have so many bad philosophies, ideologies, politics … his was basically just good. He talked about family … go ‘get married’ … it sounds old fashioned when you think about it, but he’s right.” President Donald Trump paid tribute Friday to Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, who was assassinated at an event at Utah Valley University last Wednesday. Kirk was 31, a married father of two young children, and was build...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) Before They Can Read Robert Pondiscio, AEI Lifetime Trends in Happiness Change as Misery Peaks Among the Young Alex Bryson, David Blanchflower, Xiaowei Xu, The Conversation The Cost of Homeownership Continues to Rise U.S. Census Bureau Portfolio of Research in Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency—FY 2024 OPRE, Administration for Children and Families Polling Gen Z: The Great Divide on What Defines a Successful Life Emily Zanotti, National Catholic Register| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Wendy Wang (@WendyRWang) It’s no secret that the United States is not the happiest country on earth. For years, countries in Northern Europe—Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—have dominated global happiness rankings. But a new lens on well-being, one that looks beyond happiness to assess overall human flourishing, places the U.S. behind even countries like Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria. Led by Byron Johnson at Baylor and Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard, and partnered with Gallup, the Gl...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Peter McFadden If you’re unhappy in your marriage, should you stay together for the sake of your children? This question is often thought to have only two possible answers: prioritize your personal happiness and divorce, or continue to suffer in your marriage. Based on my experience working with more than 5,000 couples over the past 20 years, I would suggest that, for many couples, there is a promising—but often overlooked—third option: learn how to have a happy marriage. Don’t l...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Jean Twenge (@jean_twenge) Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted from Rule #2 of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World (the full chapter also includes how-to tips). When Diana Park’s daughter was in 7th grade, she got her first smartphone. The middle-schooler knew she was not supposed to be on her phone after bedtime. But then, late one night, Diana heard her daughter talking and went to investigate. Her 12-year-old was FaceTiming with a friend at midnight—a good three...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Jedd Medefind Martin and Lily Silva* adopted Marci and Marlene from Guatemala. Although they had two biological sons already, the thought of welcoming children in need of a family inspired them deeply. Adoption was costly and complicated, but the Silvas’ faith and the example of several families from their church tipped the scales. Nearly 50 people were waiting at the airport to welcome the family when they arrived home. The years that followed were full of joyful moments—birthday pa...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Rosemary L. Hopcroft (@rlhopcro) A not infrequent caricature of evolutionary psychology in social media and elsewhere is that men are genetically hardwired to always mate with multiple women, particularly younger women, and that there are alpha males out there (so-called “chads”) that dominate all sexual activity. Everyone has heard the stories of the highly promiscuous alpha males (and sometimes alpha females): the rock stars, professional athletes, etc. My favorite is one I heard...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) Reimagining Fall Learning: Playful, Purposeful, Engaging Sweta Shah, Brookings Institution Engaged Fathers, Flourishing Children Interview: Steven Davis, Brad Wilcox, Ian Rowe Economics Applied, Hoover Institution The Pains and Joys of Marrying Young in Singapore Deborah Lau, Nikki Yeo, Channel News Asia California Bishops, Marriage Ministry Partner to Strengthen Family Life Gina Christian, OSV News The Country Where Men Raise Babies—and Love Every Minute of It ...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
It should become the exception for schools and other groups to use children as free marketing material.| Institute for Family Studies
In light of new numbers just released by the CDC indicating that fertility fell again last year, American fertility rates remain at or near record-low levels even as a growing chorus of politicos on the left and the right call for increased government aid to families. The United States has seen below-replacement-rate fertility for nearly a decade now, meaning that the average woman who reaches reproductive age is expected to have fewer children than is necessary to maintain a stable populat...| Institute for Family Studies
The pandemic disrupted American life in many ways, but one trend remained the same: rising sexlessness. A growing share of younger Americans are living without sex. The new 2021 General Social Survey can be used to track these trends over time. As Figure 1 below shows, since 2010, there has been a sharp rise in the share of males and females ages 18 to 35 who report not having sex in the prior year. This trend, which has been described in detail in prior IFS reports, continued in 2021.| Institute for Family Studies
A recent terrorist attack in Toronto, which left 10 people dead, has brought global attention to the “incel” movement, which stands for “involuntarily celibate.” The term refers to a growing number of people, particularly young men, who feel shut out of any possibility for romance, and have formed a community based around mourning their celibacy, supporting each other, and, in some cases, stoking a culture of impotent bitterness and rage at the wider world. In a few cases, this rage h...| Institute for Family Studies
In this post, I analyze data from the past four waves of the NSFG, spanning the years 2011 to 2019, exploring both year-long celibacy for men and women, and longer intervals of sexlessness for women.1 These data are compared to the more familiar estimates from the GSS. Year-long celibacy is defined as the absence of any oral, anal, or vaginal contact and therefore extends to both same-sex and opposite-sex encounters. Data limitations relegate the measurement of long-term celibacy to the incid...| Institute for Family Studies
For me, the release of the 2022 data from the General Social Survey (GSS) could only mean one thing: what’s going on with the sex recession? Back in 2021, I examined the previous decade of data from both the GSS and the National Survey of Family Growth. I tried to get a handle on whether the sex recession had worsened over the previous 10 years. The answer was equivocal: there wasn’t strong evidence of a decadal trend in celibacy, although celibacy had definitely spiked in 2017-2019.| Institute for Family Studies
It’s well established that Americans are having less sex. In a recent post for IFS, I explored whether this trend has been gathering steam—if the sex recession was turning into a great sex depression. The results were equivocal: 2018 was a bad year for sex in America, but there’s little evidence that more Americans have foresworn sex over the past decade. My post examined sex data from two national data sets. Much of the research to date on the sex recession has been based on the Gene...| Institute for Family Studies
by Robert VerBruggen (@RAVerBruggen) Watching too much TV. Looking at porn. Playing too many video games. Talking to strangers. Staying inside all day in a bad mood. Developing body-image issues. Parents have worried about these things for decades—far longer in some cases. And yet, when smartphones offered to put all of this and more directly into kids’ pockets, 24/7, for some reason, we just let it happen. Today’s kids are getting full Internet access in middle or even elementary scho...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Angela Rachidi (@AngelaRachidi) An underappreciated trend in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—formerly the Food Stamp Program—over the past two decades is the shift in participation toward childless households, particularly single-person households without children. In FY 2023 (the most recent year of data), almost two-thirds of SNAP households were childless, and 60% were single-person households. This represents a sharp contrast with two decades ago, when the majo...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Leonard Sax (@unfragilekids) What personality traits during childhood or adolescence best predict an individual’s health, wealth, and happiness many years later—say, at 35 years of age? Is it their grade point average? Popularity? Emotional stability? No, the traits that best predict future well-being are actually honesty and self-control. Psychologists combine honesty and self-control into a single personality trait called “conscientiousness.” In fact, I devote two chapters of m...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) Child Welfare System: Myths vs. Facts Brett Drake, American Enterprise Institute Reflections of the Nation’s Former Marriage Czar—Dr. Wade Horn Stronger Marriage Webinar, Utah Marriage Commission Promoting Positive Coparenting Nicolas Favez, and Mark E. Feinberg, National Council on Family Relations Watch: "The Emerging Marriage Renaissance" Carl Caton, NARME Plenary 2025 Maintaining Relationship Safety While Promoting Relationship Health Dev Crasta, et a...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Betsy VanDenBerghe and Alan J. Hawkins A few weeks ago, at a professional conference for marriage and relationship educators in Washington, DC, a speaker asked, “What can we do to make marriage cool again?” to which Alan responded, “Get Taylor and Travis to put a ring on it.” This wasn’t (exactly) a joke, but a reflection of the desperation pro-marriage advocates feel with U.S. marriage rates tanking, and demographers estimating that one-third of young adults will never ma...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Amy Morgan When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Tuesday, public response was immediate. Pictures went viral, newscasters gushed, and social media exploded with likes. Even President Trump offered warm congratulations. More than celebrity gossip, the moment transcended cultural warfare and politics to touch something deeper in the American psyche—a longing we've been feeling but haven't quite been able to put our finger on. Why does Taylor’s music so res...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Autumn Zeoli The internet is abuzz with some of the biggest news of the year. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged, announcing the news on Instagram with the perfect caption: "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married." As a long-time Taylor Swift follower (yes, I skipped school to buy tickets and attend the Eras Tour), to me, her engagement is a moment of maturation. Just like for Gen Xers or Boomers, who are reminded of their age when a beloved celebrity of their...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Samuel Wilkinson and Stephen Cranney Suicide is a pressing public health challenge in the United States. In 2023 alone, almost 50,000 Americans died by suicide. Unfortunately, this number has been growing for over two decades. Dating back to Emile Durkheim, marriage has long been known to be protective against suicide. However, given that many facets of marriage and culture have changed considerably over the past decades, we sought to examine whether this well-documented protective asso...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Sophie Anderson I still recall the first time I heard a young woman express her disinterest in marriage and children. Early in my time at college while chatting with some friends, I made a comment that I couldn’t wait to find my husband and have children. It was met with melodramatic scowls from each of my new girlfriends who were amused by my optimism. It wouldn’t be the last time I heard that sentiment. My initial shock eventually turned into dismal expectation as I received simila...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
If you live in the First World, there is a simple and highly effective formula for avoiding poverty: Finish high school. Get a full-time job once you finish school. Get married before you have children. Researchers call this formula the “success sequence.”| Institute for Family Studies
Americans are having a record low amount of sex, especially young adults.| Institute for Family Studies
The drains on our face-to-face relationships are baked into modern life. But we are not helpless.| Institute for Family Studies
Even though President Biden's| Institute for Family Studies
The causes of the epidemic of mental illness in children and adolescents are multi-variable. The solution is a puzzle with many pieces and many players. There is a narrative that our children are doomed, and all is lost, but as a social worker, psychoanalyst, and author of parent guidance books, I believe in a more hopeful narrative. I spoke recently at The Alliance For Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London on this more hopeful narrative that will require every player in soci...| Institute for Family Studies
What would represent genuinely encouraging news about marriage in America is to see the divorce rate decline while marriage rates rise.| Institute for Family Studies
The age of AI lovers is here, and it will have consequences for us all.| Institute for Family Studies
It's disappointing that Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is still captured by the prejudices of her own time.| Institute for Family Studies
Why shouldn't adults climb trees and play?| Institute for Family Studies
The proportion of babies born to college-educated women increased by nearly 40% over two decades from 2002 to 2023.| Institute for Family Studies
Parentification seems like the latest iteration of the “expert class’s” efforts to undo the family through psychology.| Institute for Family Studies
America’s birth rate is falling far below what is needed to maintain economic growth, and below what women themselves say they want. But while this demographic decline is easy enough to describe, solutions are harder to come by. Quick policy fixes, like more parental leave or financial incentives, may have some effect but are likely to be quite expensive relative to their modest impact on birth rates. A large part of the decline in birth rates can be directly accounted for by a factor unlik...| Institute for Family Studies
What do we mean when we talk about being called?| Institute for Family Studies
Major shifts in family behavior are underway that indicate marriage is strengthening as the primary anchor of family life.| Institute for Family Studies
The Institute for Family Studies has been described by The New York Times and Bloomberg as a leader in formulating pushback to some of the excesses of Big Tech—providing research and policy to legislators, policy makers, and the media around what is happening in Silicon Valley, what it means for citizens, and how it is impacting the family. Much of this work has been led by our own Michael Toscano. We interview him here to find out what’s been going on.| Institute for Family Studies
Modern women can have it all—but not at the same time and not by denying their instincts.| Institute for Family Studies
Meaning in life plays a critical role in both mental and physical health. People who view their lives as meaningful are less likely to suffer and more likely to recover from mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety than those who do not view their lives as meaningful. They are also better able to cope with stress, disappointment, and loss and less inclined to abuse drugs and alcohol, as well as desire and attempt suicide. Not surprisingly, then, those who feel meaningful aren’t just ...| Institute for Family Studies
For young adult males, sexlessness has roughly doubled across all measures over the last 10 years or so. For young adult females, it has risen by roughly 50 percent.| Institute for Family Studies
What do the American people think of pronatal policies? A new survey provides a glimpse.| Institute for Family Studies
A new paper finds that divorce lowers children's future earnings, and increases teen pregnancy and incarceration..| Institute for Family Studies
Conservatives should insist on recognizing the importance of married parents in our social benefit programs, including a baby bonus.| Institute for Family Studies
Almost every morning, I sit with my 6-year-old daughter and practice spelling out words.| Institute for Family Studies
A new IFS analysis suggests something most parents already know—life is actually more enjoyable with kids.| Institute for Family Studies
Parents are not generally moving towards states with the preferred family policies of progressives. They are moving out of these states, including Democratic states, like New York, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon, all well known for their liberal family policies. Blue states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 lost 213,000 families with children in 2021 and 2022 (a 0.7% net decline), while red states that voted for President Trump in both elections ga...| Institute for Family Studies
Focusing on making life better for families will be a better use of time than trying to prescribe how they should live their lives, or what kind of house they have to choose from.| Institute for Family Studies
The App Store Accountability Act represents a significant step forward for protecting kids in the digital age.| Institute for Family Studies
Our minds seek a single clean solution for falling birthrates. But that’s just not how fertility works.| Institute for Family Studies
Social media and mainstream media are replete with stories suggesting marriage and parenthood are not fulfilling, especially for women. Not surprisingly, many Americans now believe the key to being happy is a good education, work, and freedom from the encumbrances of family life—not getting married and having a family. These cultural developments raise an important question answered by this Institute for Family Studies research brief: Are single, childless women and men truly the ha...| Institute for Family Studies
App stores are the digital gatekeepers of our children’s lives, and yet they routinely treat kids like adults.| Institute for Family Studies
A new policy model from NARME calls on states to fund voluntary, high-quality educational resources to help individuals and couples form and sustain healthy relationships and stronger marriages.| Institute for Family Studies
Fewer than 40% of American high schoolers have ever had sexual intercourse, a decline of over 15 percentage points since the early 1990s. The historic drop is one of the findings in the 2019 iteration of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a biannual survey administered by the CDC that tracks risky behaviors, including sexual intercourse, among America's high schoolers. Administered to high school students across the country since 1991, the YRBS offers one of the more detailed longitudina...| Institute for Family Studies
Utah has been at the forefront of a national conversation about how to grow and strengthen families, thanks in part to the leadership of Gov. Spencer Cox. I recently invited Gov. Cox to speak at the University of Virginia about Utah’s initiatives that enable strong families.| Institute for Family Studies
Is the blue-state family model working outside the halls of academia and the pages of The Washington Post—in other words, in the real world? There are mounting signs the answer is “no.”| Institute for Family Studies
Birth rates in the United States are near record lows, but not for everyone. Indeed, under the surface of the fertility decline since 2007 is a little noticed fact: fertility has declined much more among nonreligious Americans than among the devout. Data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 1982 to 2019, along with data from four waves of the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey (DIFS) from 2020 to 2022, point to a widening gap in fertility rates between more religious and ...| Institute for Family Studies
Comparing across relationship status, adults who are married are by far the happiest, as measured by how they evaluate their current and future life. In 2023, married adults ages 25 to 50 are 17 percentage points more likely to be thriving than adults who never married, up from 12 percentage points in 2009. The gap favoring those who are married is consistently large over the entire 2009 to 2023 period, though it ranges from a low of 12 percentage points to a high of 24 percentage points.| Institute for Family Studies
Demographer Lyman Stone has been awarded an Institute for Family Studies (IFS) senior fellowship to establish the Pronatalism Initiative. With governments around the world grappling for urgent solutions to a rapid decline in fertility, the IFS Pronatalism Initiative will pioneer new research to create a suite of policies to counteract global fertility decline. Stone, chief information officer of the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, joins the team at IFS where he was previously a res...| Institute for Family Studies
When NFL linebacker Ray Rice knocked his fiancée Janay Palmer unconscious in an elevator in 2014, it didn't initially get much attention. He was accused of domestic violence and suspended for two games. After a few weeks, he was formally charged, but he and Palmer were married the next day.| Institute for Family Studies
The rich countries of the world are not reproducing themselves. A total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 (the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime) is considered replacement fertility. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the TFR in the United States in 2022 was about 1.67. According to the World Fact Book in 2023, the TFR in Sweden was 1.67, in Germany 1.58, and in Japan 1.39. This means that without immigration, the rich countries of the wo...| Institute for Family Studies
The 1960s changed premarital sex. Prior to the sexual revolution, unmarried heterosexual sex partners tended to marry each other (sometimes motivated by a shotgun pregnancy); in more recent decades, first sex usually does not lead to marriage. Figure 1 shows how the odds of having only one lifetime sex partner have declined over the 20thcentury for married Americans. The biggest declines occurred for people born between the 1920s and the 1940s, the latter of whom came of age during the sexual...| Institute for Family Studies
Far from having too many children, many women in developing countries, like their peers in the rich world, are actually having too few: that is, fewer children than they’d like to have. This claim may seem strange: we’re used to hearing about the problem of excessively high fertility in Africa, or the unmet need for contraception. But while unintended or undesired pregnancies are indeed concerningly high in many developing countries, where contraceptive access could be improved, that...| Institute for Family Studies
The last few months of 2017 treated us to a whirlwind of news coverage on sexual harassment and abuse, with powerful men from Hollywood to Washington, D.C. falling because of sexual misconduct. It continues into the new year, with Missouri Governor Eric Greitens the latest to fall. And most of these men are married.| Institute for Family Studies
By basing their book on retrospective surveys of adults, Davis, Graham, and Burge overlook one essential descriptive fact about religion in America: most of the decline in religion is actually among children, and virtually all of it among people under age 22. Secularization, or what they call “dechurching,” is happening among children and then trickling upwards into the general population as those children age. This essential fact suggests that any story of secularization in America has t...| Institute for Family Studies