This is just a single poll and doesn't show what the trend is, but it's interesting nonetheless:
Nearly all Americans believe that financial goals—money, retirement, homeownership—are essential to the American Dream. But only about 60% say the same about marriage and kids.
I don't know how that compares to the past, but I'll bet it's down significantly.
I am old fashion and find see this finding as sad.
At an individual level, people should and do make choices that reflect their desire set. As a society level, the data shows that a decline in marriage and parenthood is likely not positive.
For example, the the correlation between two parents (note that is not the same as marriage ) and positive outcomes for child development are strong.
"Compared to children who are raised by their married parents, children in other family types are more likely to achieve lower levels of education, to become teen parents, and to experience health, behavior, and mental health problems. And children in single- and cohabiting-parent families are more likely to be poor."
I am old fashion (sic)
No surprise there. Given every other post on this blog that you’ve made, it’s obvious you’re either (1) a troll like Justin or (2) approximately 80 years old.
Are you saying there's something wrong with being 80 years old and that the opinion of people that age are not valid?
No, he's just acknowledging that the elderly's opinions and views are quite distinct from those of younger Americans. The elderly are more Republican, less welcoming of immigrants, less accepting of LGBTQ people, more likely to be OK with white supremacy, etc.
On the topic of marriage, middle's likely advanced age is relevant.
If I may, I'd like to interrupt this thread for a moment to correct the record.
I'm not elderly, but I am a boomer and old enough to make the oldest cohort (65+) on this chart.
I find the misconceptions about boomers and other "olds" to be widespread. Younger people assume older people are the problem. Which can be convenient for younger people, since they don't then need to look at their own generation.
But the split on Harris and Trump supporters in the poll shows that among men, the olds (65+) support Trump (slightly) less than any other age cohort, and among women, the olds (65+) support Harris more than other age groups, except for those 18 to 29.
The biggest support for Trump is from the 45-to-64 group. Mostly those are Gen Xers. That's where the biggest problem lies.
Thank you; you saved me from possibly posting a blistering rebuttal about assumptions.
👍👍👍👍👍
Please do the rest of us a favor and spend some time poking around the website of Pew Research. The statement that the elderly have very different political beliefs from the young is not an assumption: it is an observation based upon reams and reams of data.
Austin sorry to burst your bubble, but I am not close to 80 years old. As for your second assertion, I guess opinions vary.
Just curious, have you seen creditable data and shows a decline in marriage or parenting as positive societal patterns? The social science data I have viewed, mostly, supports the opposite point of view.
historically, traditional families resided in small towns with large extended families nearby to help with child rearing and old age
while society writ large may have arguably been better off under that model, homo economicus has observed that "society" doesn't sit up all night taking care of a sick kid or paying for their upbringing
a classic tension between macro and micro
Nothing in this one chart says anything about single- vs. two-parent households.
"the data shows that a decline in marriage and parenthood is likely not positive."
The data doesn't show what you say it shows, at least not in the way you think it does.
What we have here is a failure to understand statistics.
Having kids today is a pain in the ass. Nothing - and I mean nothing - in our society is structured to make having kids easier than not having kids. So it’s not surprising that - with all the incentives pointing the other way - the only people having kids are either (1) really wanting to have kids despite all the disadvantages or (2) accidentally getting pregnant and having them in an unplanned fashion, again despite all the disadvantages that come with them.
That's capitalism and the obscene focus on short term results. Kids don't have any money and they are 18 years away from generating revenue for employers. Some of their parents may have money and the system is set up to extract as much of that money as possible (anything for children, especially babies, is twice the cost).
With the money arm of America only focused on quarterly results and year over year growth, supporting the rearing and nurturing of children is only relevant to the point that it injects money into the system.
Housing is a big factor in this, there are a lot of young people putting off having kids because they don't have stable housing and have no hope of being able to buy at today's prices.
In the early 90s I worked in France. I visited a prof in Northern Italy, and he and his family took me out to dinner. They had two small children (one a baby). When we entered the restaurant, -every single woman- in the place made a beeline to the baby carriage to ooh and aah. B/c there were no other babies there. My colleague informed me that the birth rate in Italy was very very low, and that was part of why all the women in range were congregating around the baby: they all wanted kids, but couldn't afford to have them.
Around the same time I read France had a quite robust birth rate, b/c the state subsidized day care, nursery schools, kindergartens, so that mothers could continue working.
I mean, this isn't rocket surgery (sic). You want higher birth rates? There's only two ways to do it:
(1) oppress women, remove their reproductive autonomy, make them chattel to their male kin and husbands
or, y'know, (2) deploy the economic power of the state to make childbearing and -rearing cheaper and easier.
Even in societies where men are starting to shoulder more of the domestic labor burden, if you don't make childrearing cheaper, you're not going to increase birth rates, b/c shifting the domestic labor burden around doesn't make it go away, doesn't make remove the need for childcare outside the home, etc.
Exactly, but there is no will to do this on one side of the fence. They'd rather take away reproductive autonomy. It would be interesting to see the results of nationwide polling of taxpayer support for free childcare and pre-school.
Housing is a different problem.
Pro-natalist policies have a mixed, mostly very limited record of success around the world. There is stuff to study out there about what policies actually may sorta work and those which have no discernable effect.
Oh, and the current French fertility rate of 1.8 is pretty much the same as that of the USA (1.7), so at first look, all that French stuff is not making a material difference in that regard (although it is a nice thing to do independent of birthrates)
You got in ahead of me. The French birth rate is not even up to replacement rate. It is, however, quite a bit higher than Italy's 1.3, so France's pro-natalist policies may be having the desired effect, even if the effect is not as large as desired. (I say "may be" because obviously there are other differences between France and Italy that could account for some or all of the difference in birth rates.)
I would argue that US and France aren’t a good comparison given US has a larger conservative Christian polity who put a higher value to large families. Would be interesting to see French Urban and US urban birth rates to get a better picture. Italian and French birth rates are probably a better comparison as a direct whole of nation side by side.
I remembered reading that vast numbers of Americans don't even have three months' savings. I googled and found this: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/
"The vast majority (89 percent) of U.S. adults say they would need at least three months of expenses saved to feel comfortable. Despite that, only 44 percent of Americans actually have at least three months of expenses saved."
I mean, one of the things that keeps people from having kids, is economic precarity.
Financially it is a burden, that is true, and it is a lot of work and effort. But fortunately, life is about more than finances and avoiding effort. Most of the parents I know agree that having kids was the best thing that they ever did, money or not.
Yeah but as someone who became a parent by accident and considers it the best thing that ever happened to me I will say when I was on the other side the effort and costs where very unappealing barriers to cross.
I raised 4 and take it from me - kids have always been a pain in the ass. Especially when they grow up to be know-it-alls.
There are many kinds of tax breaks for people with children. Everybody pays property taxes (they show up in rent too) and other state and local taxes which support public education. Paying for K-12 education is not up to individual parents.
Does this make having children easier than not? Probably not - parents still have to do a lot of things for kids, although these things are supposed to have their own rewards (reproduction is instinctive, like eating, believe it or not).
Other countries may do more to encourage having children, such as providing free day care for pre-schoolers and paid parenting leave. But some of the countries which do this have even lower fertility rates than the US. Somebody (like Kevin?) should compare the support for having children with fertility rates.
Did governments provide more monetary and other support for having children in the past when fertility rates were much higher? I think not. Are fertility rates lower in poor countries which have little government support of any kind? I doubt if lack of government support is the key to declining fertility rates.
A child gets you a $2000 tax cut. That doesn’t even cover health insurance, so your first kid makes your take home pay go down.
I wonder if some of this the product of the definition of “the American dream.” TAD always struck me as being about material success and connected to the uniquely American prospect of moving up the economic/social/educational ladder. Marriage and children are personally fulfilling but maybe disconnected from what people think of as TAD. After all, people everywhere have kids.*
BTW I have two twenty-something kids and having and raising them has been hands down the best, most rewarding thing in my life. (And I’ve had way more material success than the vast majority of Americans.) If I’d been part of this survey I might not have said they were part of the American dream.
*I recognize that what we think of as TAD is really not at all unique to the US. If fact in recent decades that dream might be less realistic here than in several other countries.
The US surgeon general explains in the nytimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/surgeon-general-stress-parents.html
Many parents and caregivers I’ve met say it’s not easy to ask for help when everyone is grappling with hectic schedules, and when it feels like other parents have it all figured out. As hard as it is, we must learn to view asking for help and accepting help as an act of strength, not weakness.
There you go. It’s kind of funny, if true.
Asking for help is all well and good, but that only takes you so far. This is from the final paragraphs of the article (I read it start to finish): "This change must extend to policies, programs and individual actions designed to make this vital work easier." (end copy/paste)
Right after the above line, you get a paragraph laying out some things that should be put into place to help out parents.
New parents need not just time and friends and family to raise a child, but actual financial help.
Always happy to see people break free of evolution's programming / societal pressure.
If Kevin intends to subtweet JD Vance after every insane thing he says, Kevin is going to be a very busy man.
It's a baffling graphic, but what I take away from it is that things that are easier to make happen are felt to be less important, at least as components of the American Dream. It doesn't say that people don't want spouses and children, but they don't tend to think they're living the dream just from having those things.
Agreed with Jerry O'Brien. All the chart proves is that people find having enough to eat or being able to afford essential medical care, now or after retirement means no salary, is more important, without in the least denigrating other life goals. And sure, some will always always not have children. So what?
It also doesn't in the least justify Kevin's headline, and he himself states that he has no past data to point to a trend. It really is as if he'd rather back up Vance than stick to the facts.
You've hit the essential point - context. How would people have answered 30 years ago? Probably not all that differently. Beware of "things are going to hell" articles like this. They're almost always false.
Fertility rates have declined.
Please explain the relevance.
Thus expands the me-centric philosophy.
It flows downhill from our financial system and American national identity of independence, individualism, and freedom.
I've never been taught that kids or families had anything to do with The American Dream. This might be a case of presentation of the dream in history classes, not necessarily a rejection of family life.
"The trend was consistent across gender and party lines, but held more true for younger generations, who have been priced out of homeownership and saddled with high interest rates and student debt."
Ugh. When I bought my house in 1985 the going interest rate was 14.5%, so please spare me the hand wringing about the injustice of 6% mortgages on the younger generations. And in reality (not WSJ reality, but the, um...real kind) home ownership, adjusted by age, is as high as it has ever been.
Student debt is the one thing that has changed. (I won't tell you how much college tuition was when I attended.) This is not an unsolvable problem.
When my parents bought the house I grew up in in 1961, their mortgage interest rate was 6.5%.
These kind of stories are almost inevitably written by either: A) a grumpy old man complaining that things were so much better back when he was young, or B) a young person complaining that he has it so much harder than his parents. I've been reading these stories forever and they're always the same. Go back 50 years and you'll see the same stories being written, only the grumpy old man of today will be the young person.
I'm grumpy and getting old but my story is told for the purpose of indicating that mortgage rates today are no worse than they were 60 plus years ago; not better, but no worse.
I'm lost on the point of grouping "essential" and "important but not essential". One would think priorities could be further discerned if the two were separated.
Maybe that's why JD Vance is so obsessed with forcing women to spit out babies.
In a few decades the world population is supposed to peak and then decline. How will it do that but by reducing the importance of marriage and children below that of an annual vacation?