Who Is Promoting Marriage and Families?

Parents who teach the “success sequence” to their children will strengthen their family, community, state, and nation. I introduced the “success sequence” to my readers in October or November, so I was aware of it prior to reading an article by Jonathan Butcher in The Daily Signal recently. Butcher tied the “success sequence” to the national fertility rate. 

The “success sequence” is simple: graduate from high school, get a full-time job (or enter a training program or university), and get married prior to having children. Butcher indicated that Republican Texas State Rep. Matt Shaheen “has introduced a proposal to include the ‘success sequence’ in K-12 schools” in Texas. He hopes that his proposal will provide a solution to the declining birth rate in the United States.

… Social scientists began using the term “success sequence” more than a decade ago to describe three crucial choices that can dramatically improve the likelihood that young adults would avoid poverty and other negative life outcomes: finish high school, enter the workforce or some form of technical or postsecondary education, and get married before having children….

Research shows that among young, working-age Americans today (from the millennial generation), 97% of those who followed the success sequence avoided poverty when they reached adulthood. Such findings remained consistent across demographic and economic cohorts in the literature on the topic.

Furthermore, married parents have higher incomes and lower poverty rates than nonmarried parents. Children raised by married parents are more likely to earn higher grades in school and graduate from college than their peers. At a more basic level, married individuals report higher levels of happiness than unmarried individuals – in fact, married adults are more than twice as likely to report being “very happy” as unmarried adults.

Avoiding poverty is a worthy goal, and so, too, is attaining the high quality-of-life outcomes that accompany the success sequence.

Who is sharing this information with students today?

Butcher indicated that the federal government is not promoting families and neither are interest groups, such as teacher unions. In fact, they are promoting policies and creating lessons that block adults and students from learning the importance of marriage and families.

Parents who wish to help their children to avoid poverty and achieve success should teach them about the success sequence. By doing so, they can strengthen their family, community, state, and nation as they promote marriage and families.