When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he was alarmed that the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers had risen from 16% in 1940 to 24% in 1963. But that turned out to be the canary in the coal mine of a national trend. The percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers has risen from 15% in 1990 to 28% today. Overall, 40% of all children born in the United States today are born outside of marriage.
This rise in unwed births should not be surprising. More adults live in unmarried households today than at any other time in the nation’s history. Fewer Americans are getting married, and they are doing so at a later age. What was once the gateway to adulthood is now just another choice on the menu of life.
Why is this distressing at all to Moynihan then, or to us now?
Decades of research has found that, after controlling for race and income, children born to married parents end up better educated, more likely to be employed, wealthier, and healthier than children born to unmarried parents.
Marriage is also beneficial to the married spouses themselves. Even after controlling for income, married people are healthier, wealthier, and happier than their single counterparts. Married couples have more (and better) sex, too.
More important, perhaps, is that marriage appears to be a public good that benefits entire communities. According to Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children raised in neighborhoods with a high percentage of single parents are far less likely to move up the economic ladder than those who live in neighborhoods with a high percentage of married fathers.
The most common modern alternative to marriage is cohabitation. As the number of married couples has fallen, the number of cohabiting adults has risen. Among adults ages 18 to 44, the share who have ever cohabited (59%) is now larger than the share who have ever been married (50%). So, why does marriage have benefits that cohabitation doesn’t?
Cohabitation, despite its superficial similarities to marriage, offers far less relationship stability than marriage does. More than half of all cohabiting relationships end in breakups within just 12 months, and only 10% last longer than five years. The average marriage, in contrast, lasts almost 20 years, and nearly half of them last until death do them part.
Marriage provides better relationship stability for two reasons: First, most cohabiting couples have mismatched expectations about both the current and future status of their relationship. Marriage unites these expectations.
Second, marriage is a promise made in public, usually in front of family and friends. This larger community shares an understanding of behavioral expectations for the married couple, including fidelity, sharing, and lifetime commitment. These friends and family then help each partner live up to the promises they have made to each other.
It is this increased stability that also makes marriage the best environment for raising children. Children thrive in environments where they can form strong emotional attachments to specific people. The chaotic environment of serial cohabitation is not conducive to the healthy development of children. Two-thirds of cohabiting parents split before their child’s 12th birthday, compared to just 25% of married parents. Researchers have also found that married fathers are more involved and spend more time with their children than unmarried fathers.
In fact, it is this relationship — the bond between mother, father, and child — that sets humans apart.
Monogamy is rare among primates, but it does exist in some species. By recruiting fathers as a second caregiver, our female ancestors were able to add substantially to the daily calories needed to feed our growing brains. Human babies are born with less than 2% of their adult brain’s eventual white matter. This post-birth development is actually a bigger burden on mothers than pregnancy. With our bigger, monogamy-supported brains, our human ancestors spread to every corner of the world. And we lived in highly egalitarian, monogamous bands until the dawn of agriculture changed how marriage was practiced around the world.
It is difficult for Americans in the 21st century to comprehend, but for almost all of recorded history, humanity has been dominated by polygamous empires. The Babylonians, the Mongols, the Vikings, the Mali, the Aztecs — name any large civilization throughout human history on any continent, and it was ruled by a highly polygamous elite.
The Catholic Church set the Western world on a different path when it made mutual consent between husband and wife the cornerstone of Christian marriage. This meant no more arranged marriages, which were very often cousin marriages designed to cement dynastic power.
By encouraging new couples to break from their extended families and form their own households, the church helped create the non-clan-based mediating institutions that would prove crucial to the eventual evolution of representative government. Merchant guilds, universities, and charter cities are all uniquely Western phenomena that were enabled by the turn away from dynastic family power and toward civil society.
But if the benefits of monogamous marriage are so great, then why did the percentage of young blacks who were married fall from 65% in 1950 to just 23% by 1980?
Both the timing of the decline and the population it first affected are key to understanding why the institution is falling apart.
Welfare, as we think of it today, started in 1935 with the Social Security Act, which included the Aid to Dependent Children program. From the beginning, the only families eligible for this benefit were those in which the father was dead, absent, or unable to work. Since states were responsible for part of each welfare payment, many states sought to disqualify families in which there was a “man in the house” to provide income for the children.
In 1968, however, the Supreme Court struck down these state rules, since they did not fit the definition of “parent” under the Social Security Act. Mothers could now have a boyfriend in the house helping to pay bills. But as soon as the couple got married, he would become a “parent,” and the family would be ineligible for benefits.
Also during the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society significantly expanded the means-tested welfare state, including Medicaid, food stamps, and housing. This meant that a mother on the edge of qualifying for each program had to choose between a steady government benefit or a husband who might not be able to compete as a reliable provider.
Unfortunately, this is where race does play a role in the story. Because of the discrimination black men faced in the 1960s and 1970s, they had significantly higher levels of unemployment. And even when they were able to secure jobs, they were paid less than white men. This meant that, on average, black men were less reliable economic providers than their white counterparts.
So, it was the confluence of these two factors that caused the black family to disintegrate in the ’70s — a welfare state that forced mothers to choose between marriage and benefits and a relative shortage of reliable black male providers due to discrimination.
Since then, the number of means-tested welfare programs has exploded to include the Affordable Care Act, the earned income tax credit, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. One study found that a working-class family with two children making $44,000 a year would face a $10,500 penalty from government programs if they chose to get married. Is it any wonder why so many working-class families aren’t tying the knot?
Even as more people are using means-tested government programs, the earning power of low-skilled men has fallen. This means the number of women facing a choice between steady government benefits and an economically unreliable husband has risen.
In 1960, 75% of all households included a married couple, and 44% of all households included a married couple with children. The married household was the foundation of the nation. Today, just 49% of all households include a married couple, and just 19% of them include a married couple with children. Marriage is falling apart.
But it is not falling apart equally. Among adults with the lowest incomes (the 20th percentile and below), only 26% are married. Among working-class adults (those with incomes between the 20th and 50th percentiles), 39% are married. And among middle-class and high earners (the top half), 56% of adults are married.
In other words, marriage is still working just fine for those who don’t depend on means-tested government programs.
Not everyone bemoans this state of affairs. Scholars at influential think tanks such as the Brookings Institution claim that marriage is hopeless and that we should just funnel more money into government programs to help single-parent families match the positive results achieved by married households. The New York Times’s David Brooks agrees, even going so far as to call the nuclear family a “mistake.”
These voices are dangerously wrong. Humans have innate needs for emotional and physical intimacy, and only monogamous marriage has a proven track record of delivering them on a widespread basis. An America where only the wealthy are married would be a highly unequal and undemocratic place. As G.K. Chesterton said, “The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself. … There is no other way of organizing mankind that can give this power and dignity, not only to mankind, but to men.”
Fortunately, there are things we can do to turn the tide. First, we need to stop punishing marriage. We need to reform our safety net programs so that couples are not punished when they want to enjoy the stability and intimacy of marriage.
Second, we need to do everything we can to slow and reverse the decline in low-skilled men’s wages. This could mean trade policies that prioritize domestic wages, immigration policies that foster a tight labor market, and tax policies that incentivize work.
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah has proposed the “Family Security Act,” which takes some steps in this direction. His legislation would end the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and the child tax credit in exchange for a new child allowance and a reformed earned income tax credit that doesn’t punish marriage. Ideally, conservatives would champion legislation that more thoroughly removed marriage penalties from a broader range of programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and food stamps, but the Romney bill is a good start.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Senate candidate J.D. Vance of Ohio have taken more direct approaches, offering outright bonuses for married couples.
Hawley’s parent tax credit would offer working families (those with earned income higher than $7,540 a year) a $6,000 fully refundable tax credit for single parents and $12,000 credit for married parents. That is an explicit $6,000 bonus for married households. And since it is fully refundable, many lower-income parents with no net tax liabilities would receive a check from the government every month.
Vance has proposed giving government loans to married couples that would be completely forgiven if the couple stayed together and had children. A similar program has proved effective at promoting marriage and increasing births in Hungary.
These are all fine policy ideas, but conservatives need more. Beyond merely promoting marriage through policy, they ought to rethink every policy area that has an impact on marriage and family formation to prioritize them. Whether the issue is taxes, trade, immigration, antitrust, healthcare, copyrights, energy, crime, or agriculture, conservatives shouldn’t be asking only whether or not a policy grows the economy faster or causes the stock market to go up. They should be asking whether this policy makes it easier or harder for people to get married and start a family.
If we are going to restore America, we must restore the American family. And that must start with the acknowledgment that marriage matters.
Conn Carroll is the Washington Examiner’s commentary editor.
