Listening to Parents on Paid Leave | Institute for Family Studies
Last month, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) summed up the conventional wisdom among too many Republicans when it comes to family policy.| Institute for Family Studies
Last month, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) summed up the conventional wisdom among too many Republicans when it comes to family policy.| 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
by Wendy Wang (@WendyRWang) A kiss-cam moment at a recent Coldplay concert went viral: a tech company CEO was caught on camera embracing a woman who was not his wife, an HR executive at the same company. The story spread like wild fire, and that public display of infidelity stirred up many conversations on men, women, and cheating—raising questions that are worth exploring with data. How common is cheating today? Are men with higher status jobs more likely to cheat? How does work stat...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) Can Hungary Roll Back the Sexual Revolution? Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative What the Latest Studies Say About Marriage/Dating Trends in the U.S. Ayesha Rascoe, NPR Repopulating the Playground Emma Waters, World 2025 National Council on Family Relations (NCFC) Annual Conference Nov. 19-22, 2025 | Balitmore, MD Parents in Positive Relationships With Their Partner Have Children With Stronger Friendships Australian Institute of Family Studies| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Autumn Zeoli, Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) and Ken Burchfiel (@KBurchfiel3) It’s not liberal but conservative women who are embracing the ‘Supermom’ ideal made popular by second-wave feminism at the end of the last century. This is the woman who can cook, clean, care for her children, and embrace a big career, all without breaking a sweat. The kind of woman celebrated in the 1979 Enjoli perfume ad who sang, “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never, neve...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) Recently, I was asked to be part of a Wall Street Journal piece that looked at “GOP girlbosses” who “have it all”—ostensibly because, as a mostly-conservative-identifying mother of three who works full time, I fit the mold. But the result—a piece that mostly highlighted members of the Trump Administration and heads of DC think tanks who are working outside the home while raising young children—ultimately failed to tell the whole story about women...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), enacted in July 2025, included numerous changes to child-related policies. Most notably, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) maximum benefit was increased from $2000 to $2200, that new value was indexed for inflation going forward, new “Trump Account” investments were established for children born 2025 and later, caps on employer-provided dependent care assistance were raised from $5,000 to $7,500, and the claimable percentag...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Scott Yenor (@scottyenor) More conservatives are embracing traditional sex roles but often with little clarity about what tradition means. Tradwives contrast to modern feminism’s independent woman, whose identity rests in gaining emotional and economic independence from family life. As I’ve argued before, tradwives come in three types. Trad-tradwives mind the household without working for pay. An “eras” tradwife works before having children and then after the children leave t...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Erica Komisar (@EricaKomisarCSW) Two very different portraits of modern conservative women appeared recently in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. In one, a former “tradwife” influencer, Lauren Southern, recounts a harrowing personal tale of retreating from the online battlefield to the kitchen—only to find herself isolated, demeaned, and financially vulnerable. In the other, high-powered conservative mothers—White House staffers, governors, senators—offer a model of ...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Maria Baer Editor's Note: This week, we are running a symposium on mothers and work, in response to the Wall Street Journal's recent article, "The Conservative Women Who Are 'Having It All.'" What does it mean to "have it all" when you are a married mother with young children like some of the women featured in the WSJ article? Is it even possible? And what do most married moms actually want went it comes to the ideal work-family arrangement? First up is journalist and mom, Maria Baer. Othe...| 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
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) The Consumer Culture of Marriage Bill Doherty, The Doherty Approach Home Visiting Recruitment and Uptake Evidence Review Annie Davis Schoch, et al., Child Trends Marriage Rates and Outcomes: What’s Education Got To Do With It? Iowa State University News Print Beats Digital for Preschoolers Madeline Strauss, Michigan State University Meeting Partners Online is Related to Lower Relationship Satisfaction and Love: Data From 50 Countries Marta Kowal, et al., Telema...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Aaron M. Renn (@aaron_renn) One of the best things you can do is try to reframe problems as opportunities. This isn’t always easy or possible, but in most cases, we can do it. A great way to do this is to see disruptions or problems as an opportunity for you to demonstrate what you are made of to your family. We recently took a long weekend family visit back to New York City, where we used to live. Everything went great on the trip. We got to Laguardia for our flight home, made it throu...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
by Leah Libresco Sargeant (@LeahLibresco) Could a decline in U.S. divorce rates, as recently reported here at IFS, be bad news? A couple entering into their first marriage in the 1990s had about a 47% chance of splitting up, while newlyweds today are estimated to have only a 40% chance of divorcing. It’s still far from what we would desire for an institution intended to be “till death do us part,” but the decline in divorce is a small ray of hope for the 88% of Americans who fa...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
The age of AI lovers is here, and it will have consequences for us all.| Institute for Family Studies
by Nadya Williams (@NadyaWilliams81) Recently, my husband told me a story he heard about another family. The parents, both working demanding jobs, found themselves dropping the ball (figuratively) on getting the kids to and from their many activities and keeping up with their other responsibilities. At last, they splurged on a nice smart calendar for their kitchen, which synchs with their phone calendars and now offers them much-needed organizational structure for doing all they need to do. P...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
It's disappointing that Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is still captured by the prejudices of her own time.| Institute for Family Studies
by Bill Coffin (@billcoffin) More Teenagers Use AI for Friendship CBS News Most Young Adults Have Not Achieved Key Adulthood Milestones Paul Hemez & Jonathan Vespa, U.S. Census Bureau Webinar: From Adversity to Resilience: A Framework for Hope August 13, 2025 | 4:00 PM EDT, The Dibble Institute Risk Factors of Military Spouse Suicide: An Exploratory Analysis Grace E. Seamon-Lahiff, Marcie Goeke-Morey, The Military Psychologist Interventions in High-Conflict Divorces/Separations from Children...| Institute for Family Studies Blog
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
Mandatory national service, during a gap year, builds resilience in adolescence.| Institute for Family Studies
In a recent study, Bethany Gull and Claudia Geist identify two paths leading to men's increased housework participation—one nonreligious and egalitarian, the other religious and family-centered. Their results surprised them, as they had expected conservative religious men to have lower housework participation due to their traditional gender ideologies.| Institute for Family Studies
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has directed agencies within his department that hand out competitive grants to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”| 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
The political and legal fallout of Donald Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels has not only complicated his run for the presidency, but it has also raised a deeper concern: Has the Republican standard bearer’s marital misbehavior eroded our collective commitment to the values and virtues that sustain the institution of marriage?| 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
