The “American dream” is a “better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank,” wrote the historian James Truslow Adams over a century ago.

Yet with ordinary Americans succumbing to “deaths of despair” at alarming rates, rates of happiness hitting record lows and way too many men and women stuck in poverty across generations, it’s probably no surprise that a growing share of Americans say the Dream is out of reach.

A 2024 Wall Street Journal poll found that only one in three U.S. adults believe the American dream still “holds true” compared to half of men and women in 2012.

This could not be more relevant for the state of Ohio.

Ohio ranks third in deaths of despair — deaths related to suicide, drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning. A staggering one in six Ohio children are poor, according to the 2024 State of Poverty in Ohio, putting the state in the top third of states for child poverty.

And the state ranks in the bottom quintile for hope, according to the Brookings Institute.

These are long odds for too many Buckeyes who aspire to a “better, richer and happier life.”

A new report from the Center for Christian Virtue and the Institute for Family Studies argues that one essential element to reviving the American dream in Ohio is strengthening and stabilizing family life across the state.

The Hope and a Future report finds that Ohio ranks 29th when it comes to its Family Structure Index, which is based on state trends in marriage, family stability and fertility.

For instance, just 47.6% of Ohio children are raised in intact, married families for the duration of childhood, well below the national average of 53%. This below-average standing matters because strong, stable families are a powerful predictor of upward mobility.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights have underscored the connection between upward mobility — the classic rags-to-riches trajectory from childhood into adulthood — and family structure.

His 2014 study found that the strongest community-level predictor of mobility for poor kids was the share of two-parent families in a community. In other words, poor children have a markedly higher chance of achieving the American dream if they grow up in places with a higher share of two-parent families.

Chetty’s work could not be more relevant for the Buckeye State.

The share of children living in a single-parent home varies a great deal across the state. It ranges from 5% in Holmes County and 8% in Geauga County to 34% in Lucas County and 38% in Cuyahoga County.

After analyzing Chetty’s Opportunity Insights data, we found that these regional trends are tied to the average adult household income of children raised in poor households (whose parental income was below the 25th percentile) across Ohio.

For poor children born in 1992, as the share of two-parent households within a county increased, their average household income as adults also rose. Specifically, poor children who grew up in Ohio counties with lots of single-parent families only reached about the 40th percentile in household income as young adults. However, poor children who grew up in communities where 85% or more of the households were headed by two-parent families typically reached above the 50th percentile as young adults.

For example, poor children raised in Holmes or Putnam County, marked by high numbers of two-parent families, reached close to the 60th percentile as 27-year-olds, compared to poor children raised in Cuyahoga or Hamilton County, which have more single-parent families, who reached just under the 40th percentile at the same age.

In other words, children born poor in Holmes or Putnam County had above-average household incomes as adults. These figures suggest the American dream is much more alive in communities across Ohio where strong and stable families are the clear norm.

So, Chetty’s data is clear.

Two-parent households are essential for upward mobility in Ohio.

The problem, though, is that too many communities across the state do not have enough of the kind of strong and stable families that foster this kind of economic mobility — not to mention minimizing deaths of despairand maximizing happiness for ordinary men and women.

That’s because the Buckeye State is below the national average when it comes to family stability.

The challenge, then, facing Ohio leaders is to take steps to strengthen marriage and family life across the state.

Policymakers should ask public schools to teach the Success Sequence(which underlines the importance of education, work and marriage), get behind Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed child tax credit designed to help ease the financial challenges facing working- and middle-class families and ensure that state policies do not penalize marriage.

And religious, educational and civic leaders should do more to foster the values and virtues that make for stable and happy marriages and families across the state. In other words, if they are intent on reviving the fortunes of the American dream in Ohio, public and private leaders must work together to elevate the faltering fortunes of the family in the Buckeye State.