Failing families

So how is America doing under Trump? As we approach Independence Day, the Washington Examiner magazine takes a look at three aspects of the United States: How its standing in the world has shifted; whether government is performing better or worse; and how the health of the family has changed.

Trump said “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.” Here’s a look at whether members of the administration have listened, and what they decided to do with what they heard.

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How is America doing?

If you were to look at the current political debate, you’d conclude we are doing horribly. We are divided, angry, vengeful, and apparently not in possession of excellent reading comprehension skills.

If you look at the economic headlines, you’d conclude we are doing marvelously. Unemployment is flying as close to zero as ever, the stock market is near record highs, wages are rising, and a new microbrewery pops up every 12 hours, it seems.

These measures are, at best, only proxies for what matters. An unhealthy politics at most reflects a deeper malady. A strong economy at most approximates the ease of living a good, fulfilling life. When it comes to the things that truly matter in a person’s life — happiness, health, family, and community — the picture is far more complex and nuanced.

Looking into these deeper things we find some topline numbers that are generally good. Under the surface, though, there’s a cultural rot.

The good news

First, the good news.

We are living longer, for one thing. In 1960, life expectancy at birth was less than 70 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2015, the average life was more than 10 percent longer, nearly 78 years.

America is more educated than ever before, as well. More than one third of the U.S. population has a bachelor’s degree. In the late 1960s, that number hovered around 10 percent.

Family strength and family stability is a key condition of the good life. Most measures of that show steady improvement since 1980 or so.

You have probably heard the statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce. This “data” point is as persistent as the notion that every piece of gum you swallow sticks to your ribs for seven years. Divorce, in fact, has been on a steady decline since the late 1970s.

The U.S. Census Bureau measures the divorce rate by number of divorces per 1,000 married women. In 1979, that rate was 22.8. Divorce hit a 40-year low in 2015, with 16.8 divorces per 1,000 married women.

Teen motherhood was, in the 1990s, an infamous symbol of a declining morality bringing down the quality life, and spurring intergenerational poverty. In 1991 about 6 percent of all teenage girls had a baby. For black and Hispanic teens it was worse.

By 2015 (the most recent data), the rate had dropped by more than 50 percent, falling to close to 2 percent. Every ethnic group saw a dramatic drop. Today, with the teen birth rate among blacks right around 3 percent and Hispanics below 4 percent, these demographics are now better on this score than whites were a generation ago.

This drop in births isn’t due to abortion, or even simply to birth control. The fact — which would surprise the scolds of the 1990s — is that young people are having much less sex. Everyone is. Americans born in the 1990s (millennials and those even younger) were twice as likely as older generations to report having had no sexual partners in their early 20s. Overall, American adult sexual activity fell by 14 percent from the 1990s to the 2010s. Fewer high schoolers are having sex, according to CDC data: 41 percent in 2015, down from 48 percent in 2007.

Longer life spans, less teen pregnancy, less divorce: Over all markers of family health suggest America has been trending towards greatness already. Yet, even in those numbers, you can find more ominous hints.

The bad news

In getting pregnant less, American teenagers are no different than their older compatriots. The fertility rate in the U.S. hit its lowest level ever in 2016. Then last year, the rate dropped another 3 percent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, down to 60.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

That’s a massive one-year drop, and it meant that even though there are more women in their childbearing years than there were a decade ago, we got half a million fewer babies than in 2007.

The baby bust is happening alongside a marriage swoon. Nearly two-thirds of all adults over 25 were married in 1990.

In 1960, 72 percent of all adults were married. Today, only half are married. Much of that shift is a delay in marriage — 18- to 25-year-olds don’t get married nearly as much as they used to. But that move away from young marriage doesn’t explain all the change. Record numbers of adults over age 25 have never been married: 23 percent of all men in 2012, compared to 9 percent in 1970, according to Pew Research.

This drop isn’t even across classes, and it’s not a case of Wesleyan alumnae who write for HuffPo swearing off marriage as a tool of the patriarchy. The retreat from marriage is mostly a working-class thing.

Look at adults over 25. The highly educated have long had a higher rate of marriage in this age cohort, but the gap has grown. In 1990, the college educated were about 9.5 percent more likely to married compared to those who never went to college. By 2015, the gap was 30 percent, according to Pew data.

And it’s in that same working-class demographic where the portion of babies born out of wedlock is rising the fastest.

When a working-class woman has a baby in America today, the odds are, she’s not married to the father. That is, among babies born to mothers who never went to college, a clear majority are born out of wedlock (58 percent). This portion has been skyrocketing over the past generation.

Among babies born to mothers who went to college but never earned a degree, the out-of-wedlock rate is 44 percent. It’s only 10 percent for college-educated mothers.

The disappearing American family

As recently as 2000, a majority of households in the U.S. were married couple families, according to the Census Bureau. That portion has fallen a tiny bit every year from 51.7 percent in 2000, down to 48.2 percent in the most recent American Community Survey.

This is part of a longer trend. A household with married parents and their minor children at home comprised 40 percent of all households in 1970. Today it’s half that.

The family, which has historically been seen as the building block of American society, is becoming just another lifestyle choice—and a minority one at that. American culture is moving into a post-family era.

To be more precise, non-elite American culture is moving into a post-family, post-marriage era.

When it comes to putting “family values” into practice, the divide is not along ideological lines. Liberal elites are practicing what the Religious Right has long preached: Finish school, get a job, get married, have kids, and stay involved in their kids’ lives. Conservative elites, and many communities of religious conservatives live this family-centric model with traditional timing of schooling, marriage, and children.

The Republican Party, as it becomes increasingly a working-class white party, has become decreasingly the party of married, intact families. The most obvious sign of this shift is in the Oval Office: a thrice-married serial adulterer as president. While President Trump still plays to his Religious Right base, with solid judicial appointments and serious efforts on the pro-life causes, the GOP is decreasingly a bastion of the traditional family. That leaves churches (with their shrinking memberships) as the only major institutions defending the intact family as a necessary building block of society.

We are left, then, with a society where intact families are not the norm, but are something of a luxury good. That’s hardly a healthy foundation.