Why Are Better Marriage Rates Essential to Improved Birth Rates?

 Families grow stronger as they can “build” upon prior generations. Whether it is faith or wealth, parents can strengthen the next generation by what they say or do, and strong families strengthen communities, states, and nations.

Babies are necessary to build families. Any time that a couple decides not to have children, they are decreasing the size of their family for all future generations. If a couple has two children and one of the two children does not marry and have children, the posterity for that family is cut in half. If the pattern continues in future generations, it will not take long for the family to disappear. Family continuance is one reason that birthrate matters.

Another reason birthrate matters is national security. As the birthrate drops, there are fewer individuals willing to defend the country. A third reason birthrate matters is care for older generations. If there are no younger generations, who cares for the elderly? There are other reasons, but all of them deserve study and better understanding.

The important thing to take from this essay is that the birth rate continues to fall in the United States, and this is not a good thing. In her article published in The Daily Signal, Rachel Sheffield

explained “The Real Reason America’s Birth Rate Keeps Falling.” 

Birth rates in the U.S. continue to fall, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. birth rates have been steadily declining for more than a decade now, and the total fertility rate (the number of births a woman is projected to have over her lifetime) has continued to hit new lows for several years.

The preliminary data released this month from the CDC suggest the downward trend in fertility continued in 2025. The birth rate dropped from 53.8 births per 1,000 women in 2024 to 53.1 in 2025, and the total number of births declined by 22,534.

Some media outlets and scholars say the drop in birth rates is good news, and that it is driven by declining teen births as well as by women in their 20s delaying relationships and motherhood until they are more financially and emotionally prepared. They argue births will be made up for down the road.

The reality is not so rosy, though. Teen births did decline, but the overall drop in the birth rate is driven mostly by a declining share of Americans marrying and forming families at all. Declining births among women in their 20s are not being made up for later on either, as marriage is delayed ever further into the life course.

Examining the change in birth rates by age:

·       Birth rates among teenage young women dropped, particularly among older teens (ages 18-19).

·       The largest decreases in birth rates were among women in their 20s.

·       Birth rates among women age 30 and over increased, or in some cases remained steady (among women ages 45-54).

Yes, it is true that teen birth rates fell, which is good news, particularly when we are talking about minor-aged teens. But teen births are too small a share of total births these days to move the needle of the overall birth rate much at all. This is especially the case if you look only at births to minor-aged teen women, the group we should be most concerned about.

Teen births peaked in the early 1990s, after rising for several years. Since then, they have declined drastically, a positive and remarkable reversal. Today, teen births are a small fraction of U.S. births.

In fact, if we had only seen the declines in teen births while the birth rates among other women had remained stable (no decreases among women in their 20s and not even increases among women ages 30 and above), the overall birth rate would have remained nearly stable.

What is happening is that an ever-increasing share of people are failing to marry and have children when they are in their prime childbearing years. With every passing year, the age of marriage increases, fewer people are marrying, and that leads to fewer children being born. Delayed marriage reduces the likelihood of ever marrying. Researchers project that roughly one-third of Gen Z will not have married by age 45 and may never marry at all.

Married couples are much more likely to have children. The average number of children born to married couples has been steady for about three decades, although with some dip in the last few years. The drop in the birth rate is primarily driven by a decline in marriage rates.

While there has been a bump in births among women ages 30 and older – indicating that some of the decline in births to young women are delayed births rather than births foregone – the increase in births among women 30 and older are not enough to make up for the declines in births among younger women.

There are more consequences to declining marriage than fewer births, too.

Marriage is a good in itself. Marriage is one of the strongest factors associated with adult happiness and is also connected with increased household income, better health, and greater psychological well-being for adults.

Children raised in married-parent families also do better on these outcomes, as well as several others: greater educational attainment, lower delinquency rates, reduced likelihood of abuse.

While there are some silver linings in the new birth rate data then, including declining teen births, the underlying story is much bleaker. It’s a story of declining marriage and family formation. This comes at great cost – including a shrinking future generation.

 

Why Should Couples Have More Babies?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns the foundational causes of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (or life, liberty, and the opportunity to own property.) Life begins at birth – but birth rates have fallen for America and for nations worldwide.

To save our nation, we must reject the culture of comfort and embrace the growth of families, according to the Blaze Staff. This simple fact is shown by data compiled by the Financial Times, which “reveals birth rates among progressives and conservatives over the past nearly 50 years,” something that does not look good for the left. 

Conservative birth rates have fallen, but conservatives are still reproducing at replacement rates, while progressives are barely reproducing at all.

“What we need is … a turning point, if you will, where we are not just going the same rate of speed as the doctrines of demons, but we are going in the opposite direction,” Blaze TV host Steve Deace says on the “Steve Deace Show.”

“And I think the enemy feared that leaders like Charlie were putting us on such a trend line, especially with their effectiveness towards the youth, and that’s why ‘they’ – demons like to call themselves that – that’s why they murdered him,” he continues.

“And now our hope is that like we’ve seen in the past with martyrs, strike one down and an entire movement comes up behind them,” he adds.

While the left, Deace says, has jumped on the “highway to hell and it’s ‘YOLO,’” conservatives are simply in the slow lane, still heading down the same road.

“We’re traveling the exact same direction. That has to stop. And I think in the younger generations, they sense that. The younger generations on our side…. The hope is we can last long enough to hand it off to them to prove it to us one way or the other,” he tells producer Todd Erzen.

“I mean, if you will not have babies and consecrate them to the Lord, we’re just not serious about the faith we claim to have. This is my lament about the people on the cul de sac and you really just can’t tell in any way a difference between, quite frankly, the families that are happy with the grooming going on and those who claim to believe otherwise,” Erzen says.

“You see all the time: Christian families talk about how expensive kids are. Well, all these families, if you’re paying attention, they’re going on vacation. They have their hobbies. They’re certainly not working, you know, three jobs, man. It’s a choice,” he continues.

“Our excuse-making factories for why our comfort as Christians is going to come before having children and having that be our primary legacy. Giving to the Lord human beings who will worship Him and carry the next generation forward in His name. I mean, it’s a choice,” he adds, “but good luck with that.”

Pollsters are not the only people looking at the decline in the birth rate. In May 2023, President Dallin H. Oaks, then-First Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke about making more babies to a global gathering of young single adults between age 18 and 30. The Salt Lake Tribune reported his comments as follows. 

Oaks, the 90-year-old first counselor in the faith’s governing First Presidency and next in line to lead the worldwide faith of 17 million, said church leaders are concerned about the tendency of U.S. citizens, including some young Latter-day Saint men and women, to postpone entering committed relationships.

“Marriage is central to the purpose of mortal life and what follows,” said Oaks. “We are children of a loving Heavenly Father who created us with the capacity to follow his commandment to multiply and replenish the earth.”

The power of creation is “one of the most precious gifts we have in mortal life,” he said, but “central to that gift is the law of chastity, the commandment that our powers of procreation be expressed only within marriage between a man and a woman.”

Delaying childbearing, he said, “means fewer children born to grow up with the blessings of the gospel.” …

“Our concern includes the causes, such as the shortage of homes young marrieds can afford to buy and the growing amounts of student debt,” said Oaks, still recommending that such families go “forward with faith, and do the best you can in housing market circumstances less favorable than I and your grandparents encountered in our early years. And, especially, work to minimize student debt.”

Sister Kristen Oaks echoed the words of her husband in saying that marriage “is a gift. Not only does marriage give us the opportunity for children, it gives us the opportunity and incentive to begin a journey of growing with one another.”

Both President and Sister Oaks encouraged young adults to date more and develop better dating skills. “For many years, the church has counseled our youth not to date before age 16… Perhaps some young adults, especially men, have carried that wise counsel to excess and determined not to date before 26 or maybe even 36.” Sister Oaks waited until she was 53 and then married then-apostle Oaks after his first wife, June, died of cancer in 1998 at age 65. However, most people will not be marrying apostles.

My husband and I are the parents of six children, a large family for young parents at that time. However, it is a small family compared to my parents’ twelve children. Only one of our children has six children, the other five have fewer children: zero, four, four, four, one, and six. Fewer children in the case of many families is not a matter of choice. For instance, our oldest daughter had difficulty carrying pregnancies, and the wife of our youngest son was diagnosed with brain cancer when their only child was one year old. I do not know the reasons for the other smaller families.

Among my siblings, none of us had twelve children, although some came close. I have an average number of children: three, nine, eight, five, three, four, one (adopted), six, nine, seven, ten, and five. From my experience as a daughter and then as a mother, I can see that families are becoming smaller.

My only grandchild who is a parent may have only one child due to problems with the birth of my only great-grandchild. My other two married grandchildren have been married for less than two years. If the trend continues, my grandchildren will have families with two or three – or fewer – children.

For both national security and eternal families, America needs couples who will have more children.

What Kind of Marriage Do You Want?

Marriages and families are stronger with a certain kind of marriages. There is a statistic that says that “there is a 50% divorce rate in our society,” but that statistic does not mean that marriage is a “50-50-coin toss.” Jason Carroll, a prominent marriage counselor and researcher with more than 30 years of experience in studying marriage and family life, says that it depends on the type of marriage that you are discussing. 

What I have learned from over 30 years of researching marriages is that different kinds of marriages have different profiles of strengths and risk factors, and because of this, the divorce rate varies greatly across couples with different types of marriages.

We don’t always explicitly distinguish between different types of marriages….

But the truth is that different couples marry for different reasons, have different priorities and have different patterns of interaction. Spouses also enter marriage with different values, virtues and communication skills.

In my marriage preparation course, I encourage my students to deeply consider the question, “What kind of marriage are you going to strive to have?”

While high divorce rates in our society often get the headlines, the truth is that many marriages have strong foundations that make them incredibly resilient and enduring.

Strong and beautiful marriages are found in every faith tradition and in many different life philosophies.

For Latter-day Saints, their aspiration for loving and lasting marriages center around covenants a couple makes with God and with each other. We teach our young people to aspire to and seek after a “temple marriage” – reflecting our aspiration for them to marry in a temple, which is a holy sanctuary where we enter into sacred covenants with God.

Unfortunately, for some, the term “a temple marriage” has become simply a way to describe where they were married. But, a true temple marriage is meant to be a kind of marriage, not simply the location of a marriage. Such a marriage reflects a pattern or a design for creating a particular type or kind of marriage. To borrow President Russell M. Nelson’s phrase, a true temple marriage is a “higher and holier way” to be married.

Happily, the most important factors that contribute to an enduring and flourishing marriage are controllable and fall within the scope of our personal agency. As Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught a few years back: “A fulfilling and happy marriage is not found; rather, it is created by a covenant-keeping man and woman…. You can do it with the Lord’s help.”

A true temple marriage is a different kind of marriage because it has unique preparations, unique patterns, unique priorities, and unique promises.

Unique preparation

The foundation of lasting marriage begins long before a couple is married. It begins with personal preparation by both spouses well before they have even met one another and continues throughout their dating and courtship.

For Latter-day Saints, this unique preparation involves each of us coming closer to Christ in our own lives by faithfully keeping our baptismal covenants and deepens as each of us expands our covenant relationship with God by making and honoring the covenants of the temple endowment.

Now, does this type of spiritual preparation really make a difference in everyday marriages? The answer to this question is an unequivocal yes! ….

Unique patterns

Another way that a temple marriage is different is that it involves unique patterns of daily living. A covenant marriage relationship invites spouses to love, serve, interact and communicate with one another differently than most other marriages in our culture today.

The Proclamation on the Family teaches that “Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”

Of course, the defining feature of temple marriage is that it involves each spouse entering “the new and everlasting covenant of marriage” with God and with each other.

The Proclamation on the Family also states that husbands and wives “are obligated to help one another as equal partners.” …

The Family Proclamation also teaches that marriage covenants involve spouses honoring their marital vows with complete fidelity, and spouses faithfully fulfilling family responsibilities.

Again, do these patterns really make a difference in everyday marriages? There are literally hundreds of studies that confirm that flourishing marriages are indeed founded on patterns of shared decision making, devoted commitment, patterns of mature love, sincere forgiveness and the shared religious devotion of spouses….

Unique priorities

Compared with other types of marriage, a temple marriage involves unique priorities – centering around the formation of an eternal family, which gives marriage a deep and sacred purpose that transcends personal or worldly pursuits….

Research from the social sciences also strongly supports the ways that prioritizing having children and forming a family promotes personal and collective wellbeing. This is important to point out, because the findings from the relationship sciences about the joys and benefits of parenting are not typically shared in the media and online discussions.

As Jenet Erickson, a Wheatley Fellow, has beautifully stated, “We are not designed for isolation and pleasure-seeking autonomy. We are deeply relational beings, designed not for independence but for radical dependence and connection…. We are designed for family. We are family. The eternal family.”

Unique promises

… In a recent general conference leadership training session, President Nelson said: “It is incumbent upon us that we do much more to help our people understand the power of covenants. The moral and spiritual power that our people need right now and for the days ahead is the power of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.”

I am in awe of the promises connected to a true temple marriage that allow us to access the power of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. This is very different from a fifty-fifty coin toss! The promises of the temple are indeed awesome – in the truest root meaning of that word.

Adapted from a talk, “A True Temple Marriage” given Sept. 25, 2025, at the BYU Conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Family Proclamation, “Experiencing Jesus Christ Through the Family Proclamation.”

  

How Does Natural Marriage Strengthen Families?

Individuals are stronger when they are part of healthy families, and stronger and healthy families strengthen their communities, states, and nations. Twenty-five years ago on September 23, 1995, a new document titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” was introduced to the world.

This proclamation on the family begins with these words: 

We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of his children.

The counsel contained in this proclamation has strengthened millions of families, inside and outside of the Church of Jesus Christ. The document ends with a warning and an urgent message:

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.

Marriages and families have been falling apart for more than sixty years, according to social scientists as well as personal knowledge. In writing about this topic, this site declared, “Fatherless homes are a growing problem in the United States.” 

The site listed several reasons why children are growing up without the presence of their fathers in their homes. Those reasons included events, such as death, divorce, and separation. Other reasons include incarceration of or abandonment by fathers and marriages that never took place.

Single parents, specifically single mothers, accomplish much without the help of the other parents. The site shared these key statistics:

·         24.7 million children (33%) in the United States live in fatherless homes.

·         Children living in fatherless homes have increased by 25% since 1960.

·         45.6% of Black children lived with their mother only in 2021.

·         85% of children with absent fathers get involved in crime.

·         70% of children in fatherless homes have dropped out of high school.

·         Children living in fatherless homes are 4 times more apt to live in poverty.

·         Girls raised in fatherless homes are 8 times more apt to become a teenage mother.

·         85% of all children living without a father experience behavioral disorder.

·         Teenagers with positive and nurturing fathers are 80% less apt to go to prison.

·         20.2% of fathers are considered absent fathers according to 2019 data.

The Heritage Foundation released a new report last week “stressing that marriage must be the foundation of efforts to revive the black family.” 

The report, released during an event at Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington, D.C., featured experts and community members who cast the family as a civil rights issue, described how culture shapes relationships, and emphasized the role institutions play in strengthening marriage in Black America.

Delano Squires, a research fellow at Heritage, authored the report and moderated the event. He said he has been thinking about this issue since he was 15, when he witnessed its impact on his own community.

Squires’ call to action: “Black leaders in religion, politics, media, entertainment, education, culture, and industry must be at the forefront of any effort to revive marriage and breathe new life into the black family.” …

Pastors P.M. Smith and Tommy E. Quick opened the event by emphasizing the church’s role in the solution. Their conversation was grounded in the belief that God created the family, and when His design is corrupted, the consequences are catastrophic. Both pastors have dedicated their lives and their ministries to the restoration of the family.

“Family is the basic building unit of every neighborhood and every nation. Family is the smallest unit of government,” said Smith.

Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, discussed marriage and family success. He described “the success sequence,” a series of decisions that, if followed in order, lead to at least 97% of individuals avoiding poverty and lead to most entering the middle class. The success sequence includes earning at least a high school diploma, securing a job, then marrying and having children.

“These are the decisions within your control,” Rowe said. “You have the ability to execute within your life.”`

A recurring theme throughout the afternoon was that marriage is a cornerstone – not a capstone – of life. Panelists urged attendees to marry, raise children, and model healthy relationships within their communities….

Squires’ report arrives 60 years after the publication of the highly controversial Moynihan Report, which provided an early description of the deterioration of the black family.

Squires highlighted what he says are two indisputable truths: “The family is the foundational institution in every society” and “households built on the foundation of natural marriage – the union of one man and one woman – are the ideal environment for raising children.”

Twenty-five years ago, latter-day prophets and apostles saw the danger coming to families, and now other sources recognize that families are being destroyed to the detriment of children. The “success sequence” of high school diploma, full-time job, marriage, and then children works to keep families out of poverty and even move them to the middle class.

The family proclamation states that the family is “central” to God’s plan for our happiness. Squires called the family “the foundational institution in every society.” I call the family the “core unit” of society.” Whatever the term, we can see that strong families strengthen their communities, states, and nations.

Do Marriage and Motherhood Lead to Happier Women?

Families are stronger when mothers are happy with their situation and circumstances, and strong families strengthen their communities, states, and nations. Jenet Jacob Erickson, a fellow of the Wheatley Institute and a professor in Religious Education at Brigham Young University, authored an article about women, mothers, marriage, and happiness. 

Erickson explained that a young married woman about to graduate spoke with her about careers, motherhood, the effects of motherhood on careers, and how children affect the marital relationship. Erickson authored her article to share information with others who have similar questions. She gave the following key points for her article.

·         A growing number of young women look upon parenting warily, while 74% see job and career as a source of a fulfilling life.

·         Yet national surveys repeatedly show that married women with children are happier – up to twice as much – compared with women who are single or childless.

·         Married women also report high levels of physical touch (e.g., kissing, cuddling, holding hands), more than double the rates of other women.

·         Even as motherhood transitions women into greater exhaustion and less “me time,” this often corresponds with an increase in meaning, purpose and happiness.

·         Only 1 in 5 single mothers say they are connected with a local community group, compared with 38% of married mothers – highlighting a need to provide additional support.

Erickson closed her article with good counsel. She first explained that nothing in her article “should obscure the realities that make motherhood difficult” and it “takes a village to raise a child.”

Yet many mothers today find themselves without that village and social connections. This is especially true for single mothers….

These findings shouldn’t obscure the importance of women’s personal development and essential contributions in spheres outside of nurturing children. Cultural narratives that define mothers as needless, wantless, desireless humans whose lives are defined by others’ needs undermine the agency and power of women to choose the privilege and sacrifice of giving and nurturing life, and the unparalleled development that comes with it.

Our study also confirms the critical role of marriage in motherhood. Many of the health benefits of motherhood for women, such as less loneliness and better mental health, apply primarily to married mothers. Marriage to a caring spouse offers the stabilizing and supportive context that lifts the burdens of motherhood and strengthens mothers’ experience of happiness, connection and meaning.

Single mothers are often the unsung heroes among us and should be strengthened in every way within our communities.

We really are relational beings. The cultural narrative shaping our perceptions may lead us to believe that happiness is found in pleasure-seeking autonomy. But the core relationships of life – marriage and parenthood – are designed to enable the flourishing we yearn for.

Motherhood offers an unparalleled opportunity for connection, meaning and intimacy. Believing that in today’s culture may take faith. But it is a faith worth acting on.

Happy mothers and fathers lead to happy families in most cases. Happy families are stronger families, and strong families make stronger communities, states, and nations.

 

Does Living and Practicing Faith Strengthen Marriage?

Marriages are stronger when spouses live their religion and attend church meetings regularly, and strong marriages create a firm foundation for strong families, which in turn strengthen communities, states, and nations. In his article published at The Daily Signal, Timothy Goeglein reported on a survey recently completed by Focus on the Family with more than 3,800 participants. The survey questioned “how faith impacts personal decisions about marriage and recorded married respondents’ self-assessments of their unions.” 

The good news is that 74% of all married couples described their marriages as “healthy.” But even more encouraging is that convictional Christians – those who actively live out and practice their faith – scored higher on all 32 aspects of marriage that speak to matrimonial health – whether it be taking responsibility for mistakes, having compassion toward each other, trust, or financial management.

The difference between convictional Christian marriages and non-Christian marriages comes into focus, so to speak, when one digs deeper into the research findings. The study found that 25% of non-Christians surveyed said their marriages were in crisis, while only 13% of convictional Christians said so. And among those who profess faith, but not as strongly as convictional Christians, 22% of nominal Christians and 17% of born-again Christians said their marriages were in crisis.

Thus, when it comes to marriage, faith really does matter.

But don’t just take Focus on the Family’s word on it. Other researchers have found the same thing. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that couples who regularly attend church services are about 30%-50% less likely to divorce.

This statistic also holds true across racial groups. Research done by Kenneth Pargament and Annette Mahoney of Bowling Green University’s Spirituality and Psychology Research Team found that marriages are stronger and happier when husbands and wives understand there is a deeper spiritual significance to marriage beyond feelings or economic security.

Unfortunately, over the past several decades, the understanding of marriage as a sacred bond between a man and a woman has been lost as faith has diminished and our society becomes more about personal happiness and “self-fulfillment.” [Is it] any wonder why divorce has become so prevalent in our culture, as faith – the glue that keeps couples together – loses influence in our society?

Or as the late esteemed social scientist James Q. Wilson put it, “Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.

And sadly, because of these factors, many young people, as the Focus on the Family study finds, are less interested in getting married, with only 56% of single, non-married respondents saying they want to be married someday.

Thus, the renewal of faith in our culture is essential to solving the breakdown of marriage and the family – the two bedrock institutions that affect both present and future generations either positively or negatively. It is this same renewal of faith that will make marriage an institution to be desired, rather than one that has come with the negative emotional baggage of separation and divorce for so many young people.

And those of us in healthy marriages need to come alongside those who are struggling to offer support and encouragement. We also need to model what a biblical marriage looks like, through our words and actions, so people will be drawn to what we have, rather than be repelled by what they see when marriages take a wrong turn and head down the wrong road to dissolution….

To restore the commitment of marriage and the family and begin to reverse the tragic trends of the past 60-plus years, our efforts must start with the renewal of faith and the restoration of the family. By doing so, we will reap benefits beyond just stable families…

As Goeglein stated, stable families bring about stability in other areas by successfully addressing other issues, such as “unwed pregnancy, drug addiction, income inequality, and government dependence – that plague our society.” A healthy society benefits everyone, both married and single. Thus, strong marriages and families strengthen communities, states, and nations.

Do Men Need Marriage and Fatherhood for Success?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when men take their rightful of positions as husbands and fathers. “America’s men are not OK,” according to a growing consensus of progressives and conservatives. According to an article by Brad Wilcox and Maria Baer published in The Deseret News, men are moving rightward politically to correct their situation. This direction was shown by the numbers of Black and Latino men who moved into the Republican camp during the 2024 presidential campaign. 

This isn’t exactly a political phenomenon – although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a “vibe shift” in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift, Cowen noted the falling fortunes of males were driving men, including Black and Latino men, “into the Republican camp.” ….

Changing political preferences isn’t necessarily a sign of crisis. But the fact that a growing number of American men are clearly dissatisfied with the male status quo has forced some otherwise progressive thinkers to admit something’s changing….

Until very recently, it may have been considered sexist – or at least politically tone-deaf – to suggest American men are suffering….

But the data paint a different picture; and it’s getting much harder to ignore.

In his landmark 2022 book “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves chronicled the falling fortunes of America’s young men. He found that men aren’t attending college at the same rate as women – higher ed is now about 60% female. In elementary and high school, boys make up two-thirds of the worst-performing students. And we know that 1 in 4 men without college degrees are not employed full-time.

Most importantly, men are between two and three times as likely as women to suffer “deaths of despair” – death by alcohol, drug use or suicide. Hundreds of thousands of men have died from deaths of despair in the past two decades.

Half a century ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead memorably argued that a healthy nation must have a place for its men…. Men need a mission. When they can’t find it in family life, societies flounder.

This couldn’t be more visible for our kids. Our research at the Institute for Family Studies has demonstrated the catastrophic social consequences of absentee fatherhood and family breakdown. When children are raised outside of an intact family, those children are markedly more likely to struggle in school, to tangle with the law and to struggle in the workforce. The data show a clear “two-parent advantage” for kids, especially boys. Our most striking finding is that boys raised outside of an intact family with two biological parents are more likely to go to prison or jail than they are to graduate from college. By contrast, boys raised by their two married, biological parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as they are to land in prison.

But there’s another surprising discovery in the data. Stable marriages don’t just benefit kids. Married fatherhood greatly benefits the men in those marriages, too.

First, the obligations of family life motivate men to work harder and smarter; fathers literally make more money when they have kids, provided that they are married to the mother of their children. But the benefits of marriage and family life transcend economics. The data suggest being a married family man also protects men from self-destruction. Deaths of despair, for instance, are markedly lower in places where more men (and women) are married, economist Jonathan Rothwell at Gallup recently found….

Protecting and providing for a wife and children exacts a high cost from men. When married dads rise to the occasion, they no doubt value their own lives more highly than they might otherwise. Men need to feel needed, and our country needs more men who know that they are on a mission to serve their families. In fact, the anthropologist Nicholas Townsend has observed that, for most men, “marriage, work, and fatherhood” go together as a “package deal.” …

Heavenly Father has a plan for the eternal happiness of His children. His plan includes marriage between one man and one woman and their children living and loving together. Strong biological families are best for fathers, mothers, and children, and strong families strengthen their communities, states, and nations.

What Are Teens Saying About Marriage and Family?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when individuals understand the value of marriage and children. Lois M. Collins, a long-time Deseret News reporter on special projects and family issues, reported on a recent Pew survey. “The online survey of 1,391 teens ages 13 to 17 was conducted Sept. 18 to Oct. 10, 2024, by Ipsos.” 

One of Collins’ key points in her article was that teens do not consider marriage and children as “a huge aspiration.” A second key point is, “Boys and girls see different routes to a happy, prosperous adult future.”

They survey asked teens what they want to do after high school and found they have a lot of aspirations in common, said Parker, who with Kiley Hurst cowrote the report. As adults, they hope to have jobs they really like, lots of friends and plenty of money.

Marriage and becoming parents did not move the desire needle nearly as much, she said, adding that adults seem to have prioritized those two things less in surveys, too, over time. Among the teens in this survey, those who are Republican or lean that way prioritize marriage and kids more than do Democrats and those who lean more to the left.

But the routes these young people expect to follow after high school are different: More girls than boys plan to pursue a four-year college degree (60% vs. 46%). Boys with different plans than college say they’ll attend vocational school (11% compared to 7% of girls), work full-time (9% vs. 3% of girls) or join the military (5% vs. 1% of girls).

The survey and Collins’ article covered other subjects, but they do not apply to strengthening families. Therefore, I am not including them. However, the lack of desire for marriage and family is troubling. The number of foreign-born people living in the United States is steadily increasing, while the birthrate of America-born people has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. The following information comes from the Center for Immigration Studies. 

The government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey (CPS) shows the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025 – both new record highs. The January CPS is the first government survey to be adjusted to better reflect the recent surge in illegal immigrants. Unlike border statistics, the CPS measures the number of immigrants in the country, which is what actually determines their impact on society.

Without adjusting for those missed by the survey, we estimate illegal immigrants accounted for 5.4 million or two-thirds of the 8.3 million growth in the foreign-born population since President Biden took office in January 2021. America has entered uncharted territory on immigration, with significant implications for taxpayers, the labor market, and our ability to assimilate so many people.

The survey contained much interesting information, but I will include only the highlights from the January 2025 data.

·         At 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population, the foreign-born share is higher now than at the prior peaks reached in 1890 and 1910. No U.S. government survey or census has ever shown such a large foreign-born population.

·         The current numbers have rendered Census Bureau projections obsolete. Just two years ago, the Bureau projected the foreign-born share would not reach 15.8 percent until 2042.

·         The 53.3 million foreign-born residents are the largest number ever in U.S. history; and the 8.3 million increase in the last four years is larger than the growth in the preceding 12 years.

·         The above figures represent net growth. New arrivals are offset by outmigration and deaths in the existing immigrant population. Our best estimate is that 11.5 to 12.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settled in the country in the last four years.

·         Although some immigrants are missed by government surveys, our preliminary estimate is that there are 15.4 million legal immigrants in the January 2025 CPS, an increase of more than 50 percent (5.4 million) over the last four years in the survey.

·         In the last four years, Latin America accounted for 58 percent (4.9 million) of the increase in the foreign-born, India 12 percent (958,000), the Middle East 8 percent (690,000), and China 7 percent (621,000).

·         Of all immigrants, 60 percent are employed. As in any human population some work, but others are caregivers, disabled, children, elderly, or have no desire to work.

·         Since 2000 the number of immigrants working has increased 83 percent and stood at 31.7 million in January 2025 – 19.6 percent of all workers.

·         We estimate that 10.8 million illegal immigrants worked in the January 2025 data, accounting for some 6.7 percent of all workers. Illegal immigrants in particular are heavily concentrated in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs, typically done by those without a bachelor’s degree.

·         The rapid rise in immigrant workers has coincided with a significant increase in the share of U.S.-born (ages 16 to 64) men without a bachelor’s degree not in the labor force – neither working nor looking for work – from 20.3 percent in 2000 to 28.2 percent today.

The bottom line as I see it is that Americans need to have more babies to offset the increasing numbers of foreign-born people coming to our nation. We want people in our nation who love America and who have American values. When foreign-born people come into our nation and gather in their enclaves, continue to speak their foreign language, and hate American values, the United States of America becomes weaker. People who marry and have children will strengthen their families, communities, states, and nations in many different ways.

How Important to Children Is a Two-Parent Home?

Families, communities, and nations are stronger when individuals understand the importance of getting married and staying married. In a recent week, I wrote about the Success Sequence, which was discovered by social scientists. Through numerous studies, researchers discovered a correlation between a certain formula and the chances of reaching the middle class or higher.

The Success Sequence includes the following: get an education (at least graduate from high school), work full time, and get married before having children. To be successful, steps must be taken in the correct order: education, a full-time job, and marriage before children.

I recently listened to a presentation given by Melissa S. Kearney, a self-described “hardheaded – albeit softhearted – MIT-trained economist.” I liked her talk so much that I ordered her book titled The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Her message is the same message given by the Success Sequence: marriage is important to success. Here is a sample of information found in her book:

Some might argue that placing marriage at the center of a conversation about children is antiquated and unhelpful: marriage is in many ways less fashionable than it was four decades ago. Marriage rates have fallen significantly in the US, including among adults who have children. It’s important to recognize that these changes in marriage patterns are not without consequence for how children are being raised. Data show conclusively that parents are not cohabitating without marriage in a way that remotely accounts for the decrease in two-parent married households. These kids are more often living with one parent. What’s more, data show that these trends are highly correlated with the parent’s education: The share of children living in two-parent homes is 71% when the mother has only a high school degree and 70% when she does not have a high school degree. A much higher share, 88%, of children of mothers with a four-year college degree live in a two-parent home.

Why does this issue matter for kids’ outcomes? Because children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do. That is not to say that children who are raised by a single mother can’t go on to achieve great things. Of course they can, and many do! But there are also mounds of social science evidence that shows how the odds of graduating high school, getting a college degree, and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in a single-mother home. The odds of becoming a single parent are also substantially higher for children who grow up with a single mother, again illustrating the compounding nature of inequality. It is not only that lacking two parents makes it harder for some kids to go to college and lead a comfortable life; in the aggregate, it also undermines social mobility and perpetuates inequality across generations.

The forces that drive inequality are contributing to these demographic changes at the household level. Meanwhile, these household changes are exacerbating inequality. It is a vicious cycle. It has become increasingly difficult, for example, for someone without a high level of education or skill to achieve economic security and success in the US. Adults who have lower levels of education and earnings are less likely to get married and raise their children in two-parent homes. Their kids grow up with fewer resources and opportunities, and they don’t do as well in school as their peers from married, higher-income families. Boys from disadvantaged homes are more likely to get in trouble in school and with the criminal justice system; girls from disadvantaged homes are more likely to become young, unmarried mothers. These children grow up to have children who are more likely to be born into disadvantaged situations. Social mobility is undermined, and inequality persists across generations. It is an economic imperative for the United States to break this cycle, and doing so will require coming at the problem from all dimensions.

This book draws heavily on data and empirical research, including the economic interpretation of statistics from public sources. The thesis of the book and the conclusions I draw are solidly grounded in evidence and in my professional expertise, which is analyzing and interpreting data. My training as an economist also leads me to approach data and evidence with a particular theoretical framework, one that thinks in terms of resources and the cause-and-effect relationships between factors and outcomes. In this book, I apply that approach to the complex issues of marriage, childbearing, and raising children. (pages 8-10)

Kearney indicated that breaking the inequality cycle will take effort from several directions. However, it is obvious from the Success Sequence and Kearney’s book that getting married before having children and staying married is a crucial step to ending inequality and lack of success. Marriage is ordained of God because it blesses His children. Marriage before having children will strengthen families, communities, and nations.

What Is the God-Given Purpose for Marriage?

Marriage is for the benefit of the children, and married parents can strengthen their family, community, state, and nation. According to “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.” The document also states that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of his children.” Later in the doctrine, it states the following: 

The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to his eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ….

The above referenced proclamation was published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and signed by fifteen men who are sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators. That is one side of the discussion. On the opposite side of the discussion are the people and organizations who seek to deconstruct marriage and family.

Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussed the problem in an article published at The Daily Signal. He noted that “Center-left media outlets” look for interesting ways to find some “new ‘trend’ in the upper-middle-class mating scene.” In the past, such terms as “Ethical nonmonogamy,” “polyamory memoirs,” and “Couple to Throuple” gained respectful reviews. 

After all, once society has deconstructed marriage down to the point of meaninglessness, why should we have any compunction about celebrating such creative alternatives to bourgeois fidelity? If Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice want to go all in on creating a modern-day polycule, what difference does that make to us?

The push to unwind traditional social scripts around marriage, fidelity, commitment, and procreation hasn’t just been a question of individual fulfillment, but also has had widespread social consequences.

That’s the argument made by Washington Examiner commentary editor and former Senate staffer Conn Carroll in his new book, “Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy.”

Carroll takes the reader on a globe-trotting tour across the ages, dipping into evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and history to make the case that “monogamous marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care for each other and their children,” and that we tinker with that wisdom at our peril.

The casual reader’s mileage may vary on how much academic speculation about the mating habits of primates or our Pleistocene-era ancestors can tell us about the form and structure of what family life should look like today. But Carroll’s dissection of how modern liberals and leftists try to justify their preference for maximum autonomy by appealing to prehistoric biology and postmodern critical theory is worth taking seriously.

And the anthropological excursions are in service of a broader point: namely, that marriage is instituted for the well-being of children, not the two (or more) consenting adults that would enter into it. As former Heritage Foundation scholar (and my current boss) Ryan T. Anderson pointed out in 2013:

“State recognition of marriage protects children by encouraging men and women to commit to each other and take responsibility for their children. While respecting everyone’s liberty, government rightly recognizes, protects, and promotes marriage as the ideal institution for childbearing and childrearing … [yet] in recent decades, marriage has been weakened by a revisionist view that is more about adults’ desires than children’s needs.”

The cultural and legal skirmish that ended in Obergefell v. Hodges was just one form of attempting to redefine marriage around adult companionship, rather than being the institution properly ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children.

Marriage is no longer about how best to order society to support the children male-female romantic partnerships inevitably produce, and is instead about increasingly surpassing the bounds of tradition and biology in the name of autonomy….

Some left-wing activists don’t just want to abolish the gender binary when it comes to self-expression. They’d like to see the entire idea of the binary relationship at the heart of parenthood blown up and replaced with one of “chosen family.”

We see this in the push to replace or erase a child’s biological parents on birth certificates, robbing them of not just information about their biological ancestry, but potential information about their genetic predisposition to certain diseases….

The cultural trends that Carroll traces didn’t happen overnight. Restoring marriage may well take decades, if not longer, but can be accelerated through sound economic policies.

After all, the familiar wreckage he highlights from marriage decline – more children raised in unstable homes, depressed rates of economic mobility, higher levels of loneliness and social isolation, rising opioid deaths, falling birth rates – are too important to shrug our shoulders at.

Seeing marriage as something more than simply one life choice among others – that is, more than just serial cohabitation that starts with a blowout party on a Caribbean island somewhere – would go a long way to restoring a popular understanding of family as the cornerstone of a healthy society.

“Sex and the Citizen” is a welcome contribution to these discussions, and Carroll’s point – that marriage has an inevitable social dimension, not just an individual one – is one that more conservatives should understand and apply to debates about how to best to save America in the years ahead.

God ordained marriage for the benefit of children. In the words of the proclamation, God will hold us accountable if we “violate covenants of chastity,” “abuse spouse or offspring,” or “fail to fulfill family responsibilities.” The proclamation also warns that “the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”