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August 15, 2024

Women Want More Children Than They’re Having. America Can Do More to Help

national conversation, with good reason. The fertility rate has hit a record low in the United States, with the average American woman now expected to have just 1.6 births in her lifetime,…

July 29, 2024

The Rise of ‘Marriage Deserts’ and What We Can Do About Them

…neighborhood adjacent to Gottman’s Love Lab, the picture-perfect Laurelhurst community alongside Lake Washington in Seattle, has some of the strongest families in the nation, with nearly 90% headed by two…

June 13, 2024

The Family-to-Prison-or-College Pipeline: Married Fathers and Young Men’s Transition to Adulthood

nationally representative surveys: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). The NLSY97 follows a sample of Americans born…

June 13, 2024

Why Married Fathers Matter

…say about family breakdown on this topic. And yet data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health tell us that being Black elevates a young man’s odds…

May 15, 2024

The American heart is closing to marriage and family. Can red states change that?

The American heart is closing. The signs, including dramatic drops in dating, marriage, and childbearing, are all around us.   The falling fortunes of marriage and family across the nation can be traced back to cultural shifts…

May 1, 2024

The closing of the American heart

…our nation’s retreat from this core institution since the 1960s was harming children. And at that point, the share of children residing with their married, biological parents had fallen to about 65%,…

April 18, 2024

Back from the brink: The intellectual tide is turning on marriage and civil society

…often have discounted the importance of the nation’s houses of worship. One recent New Yorker article, for instance, suggested faith left Christian men tortured by “guilt and shame that makes…

March 4, 2024

As the family goes, so goes the state. Utah gets this

When it comes to realizing the nation’s most important ideals — from the American dream to the “pursuit of happiness” — Utah has a well-deserved reputation for leading out. The…

March 4, 2024

The state of the union isn’t strong because of the state of our unions

Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, is justly famous for underlining the importance of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for our new nation in the Declaration of Independence….

February 15, 2024

Sacred Sex

…sense of sacredness leads not to depression and divorce court but to strong and satisfying unions—outside and inside the bedroom. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at…