Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is a demographic dividend? Why is it important to the economy?

W. BRADFORD WILCOX: Traditionally, a “demographic dividend” has been defined as the economic advantage that countries transitioning from a high-fertility regime to a low-fertility regime gain when the children that were born during the high-fertility years have entered their prime working years (15–64) but are not having many kids of their own. This allows countries to focus their human and financial capital on education and the market economy, rather than raising children, and — assuming policy conditions are right — enjoy a spurt of economic growth.

Economist David Bloom argues that more than 25 percent of the per capita GDP growth associated with the East Asian economic miracle of the late 20th century can be laid at the feet of the dramatic demographic changes that swept over East Asia in the last half century, when the total fertility rate fell from about six children per woman in 1950 to well below two today in most East Asian countries. These demographic changes freed up time, energy, attention, and capital on the part of men and, especially, women that could be focused on the economy.

In the short term, this demographic dividend can work out brilliantly, as the East Asian miracle attests. But in the long term, this dividend can turn into a demographic liability as birth rates fall well below replacement and a society ceases to produce enough people to work in the economy and pay for the welfare state. This is what is now happening in Japan, and a similar fate may befall other leading economies in the region — from Taiwan to South Korea.

In fact, just last month, a leading South Korean think tank predicted that the South Korean economy could face a major downturn within the next decade, because the country’s workforce is now poised to shrink as a consequence of long-term low fertility in the country. The bottom line: In the short term, low fertility can bring increased economic productivity and growth, but in the long term, low fertility may undercut growth if population trends prove unsustainable to the economy and the welfare state.

Labels: Asia, children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, Marriage, men, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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Marriage, quite literally, is the lifeblood of the economy, according to a new report released Monday by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The report, "The Sustainable Demographic Dividend," examined demographic data, such as census records and consumer expenditure surveys, and concluded that economic growth is dependent on healthy marriages.

The University of Virginia researchers found that when people get married and have children, seven sectors of the economy experience tenable growth. The specific sectors are: child care, life and personal insurance, household products and services, health care, food, home maintenance/home services, and pets and toys. By contrast, those industries suffer when marriage and fertility rates are low.

Since the recession hit, marriage and fertility rates have been waning. In 2009, the number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 2.3 percent. Young Americans want to get married and have kids, says Brad Wilcox, lead researcher on the report, most just can't afford to do it given current unemployment, and underemployment, rates. ...

You seem to go back and forth in the report on the impact of women’s work outside the home on fertility; you suggest that it can both increase and decrease fertility. What’s your conclusion?

Historically, there was a very real tension between work and fertility for women. And that’s still the case; in most modern economies, women who do not work full-time in the labor force tend to have more kids. It’s also the case that the developed countries that have the highest fertility rates are ones where they give women more flexibility to combine work and family. I’m thinking here of places like Sweden. In the United States there aren’t a lot of public policies that help women to combine work and family but what’s exceptional about the U.S. economy is that it’s a lot more flexible when it comes to women moving into and moving out of the work force, as compared to many European countries where it’s hard both to move in and to move out of a job easily and quickly … For both of those different reasons, Sweden and the U.S. have comparatively high levels of fertility as compared to countries like Germany, Spain and Japan that haven’t had as strong a tradition of creating a flexible work-family culture for their women … The takeaway here is that from both the corporate end of things and the public policy end of things, we should pursue policies that allow families, including obviously women and especially mothers, to make the best choice for them and their family, and not to have a one-size-fits-all policy that would either favor stay-at-home parents on the one hand and households with both kinds of work on the other hand. ...

What can be done to encourage more stable marriages?

At the corporate level, companies do have a lot of power when it comes to shaping their internal culture; creating a culture that’s friendly to families, that makes it as easy as possible for people to work around their family schedules. Are they, for instance, offering their employees family plans that may be helpful to them as a couple and as a family, and make them better employees as well? They have even more influence when it comes to advertising. To go back to P&G again, it’s one of the biggest advertisers in the United States; are they thinking intentionally about how the message that’s embedded in their advertising does or does not encourage a family-friendly ethos?

On the public policy side of things, I would endorse things like efforts to increase the child tax credit, and keeping it fully refundable, which would put more money in the pockets of working-class and poor families. It would help to fill out, to some degree, the economic foundations of family life in many working-class and poor communities. But also it would be helpful to middle-class families. This idea of increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000, and limiting that to kids who are in the household, would not be discriminatory but I think it would make family life more economical and it’s a concrete idea.

We could [also] do a lot better job in this country of improving our vocational educational system to bring it up to par with a country like Germany. That might seem kind of far afield, but the point is that I think one of the reasons we’re seeing marriages fail to form in the first place, and break down in the second place, is that many working-class and poor Americans don’t have the skills and training that they need to get a decent-paying job, and that has implications for their capacity to get and stay married.

Labels: cohabitation, corporate responsibility, culture, demographics, economics, education, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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...In his work on European family life, UCLA demographer Patrick Heuveline finds that

in most [European] countries children born to cohabiting families are two to four times more likely to see their parents separate than are children in married households.

Even in Sweden, children are worse off when mom and dad cohabit. Demographers Sheela Kennedy and Elizabeth Thomson find in their recent study that children born to cohabiting parents are 75% more likely to see mom and dad break up, compared to children born to married parents.

So, in part because cohabitation does not offer the same rituals (a big ceremony), norms (commitment), and practices (fidelity) to partners, their family and friends, and their communities as does marriage, my bet is that cohabitation is not soon likely to deliver stability to kids in the way that marriage does–even in fair Sweden.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Europe, Marriage, Sweden, unmarried parents, W. Bradford Wilcox

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It's been proclaimed from pulpits and blogs for years — Christians divorce as much as everyone else in America.

But some scholars and family activists are questioning the oft-cited statistics, saying Christians who attend church regularly are more likely to remain wed.

"It's a useful myth," said Bradley Wright, a University of Connecticut sociologist who recently wrote "Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ... and Other Lies You've Been Told."

"Because if a pastor wants to preach about how Christians should take their marriages more seriously, he or she can trot out this statistic to get them to listen to him or her."

The various findings on religion and divorce hinge on what kind of Christians are being discussed.

Wright combed through the General Social Survey, a vast demographic study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that Christians, like adherents of other religions, have a divorce rate of about 42%. The rate among religiously unaffiliated Americans is 50%.

When Wright examined the statistics on evangelicals, he found worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees.

Labels: Christianity, culture, divorce, evangelical Protestantism, Marriage, religion, W. Bradford Wilcox

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W. Bradford Wilcox, Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, weighed in on marriage and infidelity in an interview with me for the Providence Journal this Sunday. Here are findings that may be surprising. ...

Bradford Wilcox, Ph.D., a sociologist, and director of the Marriage and Family Project at the University of Virginia, tells me that there are three bright spots when it comes to marriage: “Divorce is down since the early 1980s. This is partly because people are rediscovering the virtues of lifelong commitment.

“Second, marriage is getting stronger among college-educated Americans. They have seen the biggest decrease in divorce, and their kids are now more likely to grow up with Mom and Dad, compared to two decades ago,” he said.

Third, Dr. Wilcox, also an associate professor of sociology, added: “Infidelity has come down modestly since the 1990s. Americans are more likely now to express disapproval of infidelity than they were in the 1970s.”

Citing the General Social Survey, financed by the National Science Foundation, he said that 22 percent of ever-married men and 14 percent of ever-married women said they had had an extramarital affair over their lifetimes. Also infidelity overall has not increased over the last 20 years. [The most recent study even noted a slight decrease in infidelity from previous years.]

Labels: adultery, class, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Cohabitation is now an increasingly attractive option to many Americans — including middle-aged and older adults who have recently lost a spouse to divorce or death. We can debate about whether cohabitation is good for the adults involved, especially given the financial penalties often associated with marriage for low-income and older couples.

But a growing body of social scientific evidence strongly suggests that cohabitation and children don’t mix, even though more than 40 percent of American children will spend some time in a cohabiting household.

Compared with children in married step families, children in cohabiting homes are more likely to fail in school, run afoul of the law, suffer from depression, do drugs, and — most disturbingly — be abused. (Note that children in intact, married homes do best on all these outcomes.) In the words of a recent Urban Institute study, “cohabiting families are not simply an extension of traditional married biological or blended families.”

Indeed, a recent federal report [https://www.nis4.org/nishome.asp] on child abuse found that children in cohabiting stepfamilies were 98% more likely to be physically abused, 130% more likely to be sexually abused, and 64% more likely to be emotionally abused, compared to children in married step families.

Why is cohabitation so risky for children? There are at least three reasons....

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, remarriage, stepparents, W. Bradford Wilcox

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..."We cannot afford to be a nation where marriage is a luxury good," W. Bradford Wilcox and Chuck Donovan wrote last week in Christianity Today magazine.

It's not enough to repair the nation's economic house, they wrote. Renewing marriage must become a national priority — in fact, it needs "something on the scale of a Marshall Plan for marriage," Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Donovan wrote, referring to America's massive rebuilding efforts in Europe after World War II. ...

Even the emotional satisfaction of marriage is ebbing for the less-educated. When spouses aged 18 to 60 were asked if they were "very happy" in their marriage, almost 70 percent of the highly educated spouses said yes — the same number as in the 1970s.

But for moderately educated Americans, the number of "very happy" spouses slid from 68 percent in the 1970s to 57 percent in 2000s. The least-educated spouses also lost ground, falling from 59 percent "very happy" to 52 percent. ...

The roiling of marriage has stemmed from a "decline in marriage-friendly values" and a disconnection from religious attachments, Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Donovan, senior research fellow at Heritage Foundation, wrote in their Christianity Today article. As faith and pro-marriage values have faded, so has the "marriage mindset."

The solution is to realize that America's economic prosperity, well-being — and in my view, even happiness — is directly tied to the depth and breadth of its marriage culture. Family breakdown costs the nation $112 billion a year, according to one analysis. Father absence costs $100 billion a year, says another.

There are many ways to strengthen marriage, from tax breaks to relationship classes to strengthening job prospects for young men who didn't go to college. A bill with $75 million apiece for marriage grants and responsible fatherhood grants is awaiting President Obama's signature.

Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, National Marriage Project, religion, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Putting the 'hopeless' in hopeless romantics, a new study of more than 1,400 spouses concludes that one of the flimsiest foundations for a marriage is, incredibly, love.

It seems a heretical claim to make at a time when two-thirds of the population believes in soulmates — those rom-com-anointed pairings viewed as "meant to be." But researchers find marriages based on that ideal, although happy, are so fragile as to be 1 1/2 times likelier to end in divorce than unions steeped in traditional values — think child-bearing, fidelity and interdependence. ...

Simply honouring the "institution of marriage," however, doesn't promise a happily ever after, either.

Tradition-focused couples that toe the line without the support of shared social networks and religious participation actually fare the worst in terms of marital quality. That is, even though they stay together, they aren't happier for it.

The study, which appears in the September issue of the journal Social Science Research, finds that the highest-quality marriages combine the "new" and "old" approaches, leaving neither entirely behind at the altar.

This hybrid is defined by an embrace of the traditional norms of marital permanency and gender roles, coupled with a focus on the expressive dimensions of married life seen in soulmate partnerships. The caveat is that both spouses need to be embedded in shared social networks and religious institutions.

"You can't underestimate the importance of social support," says Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology. "Even for people who aren't religious, it's important to be involved in voluntary organizations, community groups or networks that both spouses enjoy, that acknowledge them as a couple and that support their marriage."

Labels: culture, divorce, gender, Marriage, religion, W. Bradford Wilcox

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In "The Switch," coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, "The Back-up Plan" and next month's "The Kids Are All Right." Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out "all right" with donor dads.

Hollywood is not the only industry peddling the story line that flesh-and-blood fathers are an optional accessory in today's families. Plenty of academics—from New York University sociologist Judith Stacey to Cornell psychologist Peggy Drexler—also have been arguing that mothers can do just as well raising children with donor fathers as they can with real ones.

In her book, "Raising Boys Without Men," for instance, Ms. Drexler claims that "maverick moms," including single women who rely on donor insemination, are just as successful raising boys as mothers who opt for the older model of marriage and motherhood. All that is needed for parental success, according to Ms. Drexler, is a "caring and supportive" model of mothering.

Until recently, there was one primary challenge to the intellectually fashionable view that fathers are fungible. It came from scholarship showing that children did better—e.g., were much more likely to finish school, avoid teen pregnancy and stay out of prison—in intact, married families than in homes headed by a single parent, most of whom are women.

Yet scholars such as Ms. Drexler were able to retort that much of the research relies on a comparison of middle-class married families with poor single mothers, so that differences in how children fare might be largely the result of socioeconomic differences. In their view, middle-class women who have a decent income and a good education can do just as good a job as a middle-class married mother and father.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, single parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox

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...Robert Stein, a conservative economist who served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic analysis in George W. Bush's administration, says the tax code is unfair to one particular group of Americans: parents.

He argues that parents invest thousands of dollars in raising members of society who eventually fund programs such as Social Security and Medicare, but retirees who chose not to raise children get the same old-age benefits as those who did. ...

Stein would replace this system with a $4,000-per-child tax credit. That parental tax credit would be funded in part through Stein's other big idea: Simplify the personal income tax to two brackets -- one that taxes 15 percent of income and the other 35 percent. He estimates that few people now in the 10 percent bracket would pay more if they move to 15 percent, because of the child exemption. ...

Much of the energy from conservatives went to promoting marriage as a cultural virtue. But Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, argues that it is important to highlight the economic benefits of marriage. ...

"We need to appreciate that marriage is more than an emotional connection between two people," Wilcox said. "There are kids; it's a kind of economic cooperation, a form of social insurance."

Wilcox says churches, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions would have to embrace this view of marriage, not just the government. He proposes federal funding for public-service announcements and other social marketing to promote marriage, modeled on anti-smoking campaigns.

And to discourage divorce, he says, states should change marriage laws so spouses who are being divorced against their will and have not engaged in abuse or adultery would be given preferential treatment by family courts in determining alimony, child support and custody of children.

Labels: culture, demographics, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Judging by recent press reports, the family fallout associated with the Great Recession has been severe. Take the Bachmuth family, profiled last month in the New York Times. After Paul Bachmuth lost his job at a Texas electric consulting firm in December of last year, his life and marriage took a turn for the worse. Often dejected, he would spend hours surfing the Internet or watching television.

Paul and his wife, Amanda, fought over money. She also resented the part-time job she had to pick up at a day-care center to keep the family solvent, especially since she continued to shoulder the bulk of the family's cooking, cleaning and laundry. "She kind of had something in the back of her mind that it was partly my fault I was laid off," Mr. Bachmuth told the Times. The couple is now seeing a counselor.

The Bachmuths' experience is by no means unique, according to "Money & Marriage," a report released this week by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values. As the report notes, the financial pressures associated with the Great Recession can lead to a downward spiral of marital recriminations, tension and conflict as spouses struggle to pay bills, adjust to the loss of a job or find themselves forced out of their home. This downward spiral is especially likely to unfold when a husband loses his job—a particularly salient reality in the current recession, where more than 75% of the job losses have fallen on the shoulders of men.

In some cases, this spiral leads directly to divorce court. In recent years, couples who report disagreeing about money matters once a week are about twice as likely to divorce compared with couples who disagree about money less than once a month, according to the report.

But there may be a silver lining in all this financial pain. For most married Americans, the Great Recession seems to be solidifying, not eroding, the marital bond. The divorce rate is actually falling. It declined to 16.9 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2008 from 17.5 divorces in 2007 (a 3% drop), after rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 (a 7% increase).

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, National Marriage Project, W. Bradford Wilcox

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In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan of California made what he later admitted was one of the biggest mistakes of his political life. Seeking to eliminate the strife and deception often associated with the legal regime of fault-based divorce, Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce bill. The new law eliminated the need for couples to fabricate spousal wrongdoing in pursuit of a divorce; indeed, one likely reason for Reagan's decision to sign the bill was that his first wife, Jane Wyman, had unfairly accused him of "mental cruelty" to obtain a divorce in 1948. But no-fault divorce also gutted marriage of its legal power to bind husband and wife, allowing one spouse to dissolve a marriage for any reason — or for no reason at all.

In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union followed California's lead and enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. This legal transformation was only one of the more visible signs of the divorce revolution then sweeping the United States: From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled — from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s.

In the years since 1980, however, these trends have not continued on straight upward paths, and the story of divorce has grown increasingly complicated. In the case of divorce, as in so many others, the worst consequences of the social revolution of the 1960s and '70s are now felt disproportionately by the poor and less educated, while the wealthy elites who set off these transformations in the first place have managed to reclaim somewhat healthier and more stable habits of married life. This imbalance leaves our cultural and political elites less well attuned to the magnitude of social dysfunction in much of American society, and leaves the most vulnerable
Americans — especially children living in poor and working-class communities — even worse off than they would otherwise be.

Labels: divorce, poverty, W. Bradford Wilcox

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With Father’s Day almost upon us, expect a host of media stories on men and
family life. Some will do a good job of capturing the changes and continuities
associated with fatherhood in contemporary America. But other reporters and
writers will generalize from their own unrepresentative networks of friends and
family members, try to baptize the latest family trend, or assume that our
society is heading ceaselessly in a progressive direction. So be on the lookout
this week for stories, op-eds, and essays that include these five myths on
contemporary fatherhood and family life.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Fathers, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Earlier this month, Bristol Palin turned herself into a poster child for the nation's continuing effort to prevent teenage pregnancies. She made the rounds on the morning TV show circuit and spoke at town hall meetings to drive home the point that other teens shouldn't make the same mistake she did. Ms. Palin's campaign could not have come at a better time. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. -- after witnessing a 14-year decline in teenage childbearing from 1991 to 2005 -- saw the number rise from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, about 450,000 adolescents gave birth.

Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, W. Bradford Wilcox

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