Latest news with #StephanieCoontz
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Our economy isn't built for the biological clock
Everyone should have the right to decide if and when they have children. Yet over the past 50 years, the United States has built an economy that increasingly works against fertility — demanding more years in school and longer hours at work for people, especially women, in the years when it is biologically easiest for them to have children, and concentrating wealth and income among those past their reproductive prime. As a result, American schools and workplaces are particularly ill-suited for supporting those who hope to start families earlier than average. 'If I were to complain about how society 'has wronged me as a woman,' it would be that it has treated my limited 'fertility time' with extreme disregard,' wrote Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD student, recently on Substack. 'At each step of the way I was encouraged to 'be patient,' do more training, told that 'things will figure themselves out,' even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.' The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids. Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.) Yet it's precisely in such moments that progressive leaders should offer clear alternatives that both respect women's autonomy and ensure people can make less constrained choices. If mainstream feminism ignores the barriers to early parenthood, the right will be all too eager to fill the void. 'If the so-called feminists, as long as they play it by the elite rules, refuse to take seriously what [we] can do to support young families, then the right can move in and say, 'You might as well give up on your stupid ideas and career aspirations,'' marriage historian Stephanie Coontz told me. Not everyone wants to become a parent, but most women do still say they wish to have children one day. If we're serious about reproductive justice, then it's a mistake to ignore how our schools and workplaces have evolved to be broadly hostile to both fertility and parenthood. Having kids at a younger age is not inherently better — but for those who want to do it, the economy shouldn't be working against them at every step. Many women believe, correctly, that college and graduate education are important paths not only for their own financial well-being, but also to afford raising kids in a country that offers so little support to families. The idea that people can just up and abandon higher education to have kids, per the Heritage Foundation, isn't serious. 'We've just done so much to obscure the reality and to make it seem like, oh, moms are asking for too much, or they're postponing too long, or maybe they shouldn't be going to school so much,' said Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at University of Texas Austin who studies fertility and gender. 'What an idiotic thing to say. The only way that women can get wages that are at all comparable to what's necessary to raise a family is by getting a college degree.' Yet the US has built one of the longest, most expensive educational pipelines in the world. One reason many American students take longer to finish undergraduate degrees (or don't finish at all) is because of financial pressures that students abroad don't face. Nations like Germany, France, and Norway offer free or heavily subsidized university education, while others, including the UK and Australia, have manageable, easily navigable income-based repayment systems. American students are more likely to be juggling multiple jobs alongside coursework, stretching the time to graduation. The timeline stretches even longer for medical, legal, and doctoral degrees — tacking on years of extra training and credentialing that aren't required elsewhere. 'There's been an increase in the number of years of schooling that is totally unnecessary,' Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, told me, pointing to, among other factors, the explosion of post-docs and pre-docs, plus pressure for applicants to acquire some work experience before even beginning their graduate studies. 'I went to graduate school immediately after college, and schools like UChicago and MIT had rules then that if you were there for more than four years, you paid tuition, so that incentivized people to finish,' she said. When educational timelines keep stretching with no structural support for parenting, the result is predictable: some people delay having children — or abandon those plans entirely. This isn't to say there are no parents on university campuses. There are roughly 3 million undergraduates — one in five college students — in the US today who have kids. But student parents are too often rendered invisible because most colleges don't collect data on them and harbor outdated assumptions about who even seeks higher education. 'Colleges and universities still cater to what is considered 'traditional students' — so 18- to 24-year-olds who are getting financial assistance from their parents,' said Jennifer Turner, a sociologist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Student parents are far less likely to be receiving financial help from their own families than students of the same age and background without kids — and in general they're more likely to struggle to afford basic needs. But most campuses neglect their unique challenges and fail to provide them with resources like on-campus housing, kid-friendly spaces, and child care support. The Trump administration's new budget proposal calls for gutting the only federal program that helps student parents with child care. And while pregnant students are entitled to some federal protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX, in practice many students never even learn about them, or face intense stigma for using them. For graduate students in particular, there's no shortage of examples of students receiving both implicit and explicit signals to delay childbearing. Research found women were twice as likely as men to cite child care and parenting as reasons for leaving academia. Whether or not women want to have children in their early or mid-twenties, many feel they can't — because the career paths they pursue require longer routes to stability. Women are more often funneled into professions that demand extra time, whether through extended schooling, slower advancement, or the need to earn extra credentials to prove themselves. Many fields where women are concentrated, like education, social work, psychology, and nursing, require graduate training for higher-paying roles. In contrast, men are more likely to enter skilled trades or businesses where higher earnings are possible without advanced degrees. Goldin, the economist, pointed to the problem of the 'rat race equilibrium' — where individuals over-invest accumulating credentials not because doing so is intrinsically valuable, but because everyone else is doing the same. In this situation, falling behind the pack carries high costs. 'People want a great job, so they stay in graduate school 'too long.' Firms want the best lawyer, so they keep associates for 'too long.' I don't know what the optimal length is. But I do know that the addition of so many more years means that women will be more discouraged than will men,' she told me. These extended educational timelines feed directly into jobs that are also not designed to support parenting during a woman's prime childbearing years. Early-career workers typically earn less, have more precarious roles and rigid schedules, and often face more pressure to be fully available to employers to prove their commitment and worth. Some then move on to what Goldin calls 'greedy careers': Law firms, consulting companies, and hospitals that demand total availability, rewarding those who can work weekends and penalizing those who seek more predictable schedules. For many parents it's a double bind: the educational trajectories and high-paying jobs that make raising kids affordable are often the same ones with demands that make balancing family life nearly impossible. Fertility tech hasn't yet conquered the biological clock, but we did build this economy — which means we can rebuild it differently. Advocating for more efficient and more affordable education isn't a retreat from academic rigor, but a clear-eyed confrontation with institutions that remain indifferent at best to having children. The most forward-thinking places will see that compressed, focused educational paths aren't diluting standards, but respecting the fullness of human lives and creating systems where intellectual achievement doesn't demand reproductive sacrifice. Exactly how to help students manage timelines will vary. For those looking at careers in math and science, for example, there may be opportunities to take advanced courses in high school. Others would benefit from more financial aid, or using experiential learning credit, or enrolling in accelerated BA/MA programs. Some employers should be rethinking their mandates for college degrees at all. But even with educational reforms, parents would still face legal barriers that other groups don't. It's still legal in many cases to discriminate against parents in hiring or housing. Making parents a protected class would be a straightforward step toward making parenthood more compatible with economic security. Stronger labor regulations could also curb workplace coercion, and policies like those in Scandinavia — which allow parents to reduce their work hours when raising young children — could make it easier to balance kids with holding down a job. The rise of remote work offers additional paths forward, and expanding it could reduce the stark either/or choices many prospective parents face. And there are other policy ideas that could make parenthood more affordable even when people are early in their career. Other high-income countries offer parents monthly child allowances, baby bonuses, subsidized child care, and paid parental leave. The US could follow suit — and go further — by investing in affordable housing, reducing the cost of college, and decoupling health care from employment. For now, our current system abdicates responsibility. As Glass points out, while parents are paying more to have children, it's employers and governments that reap the benefits of those adult workers and taxpayers, without shouldering the decades-long costs of training and raising them. 'What no one wants to face is that 150 years ago, when everyone lived on farms, having children did not make you poor, but they do today,' said Glass. 'Children used to benefit their parents, they were part of the dominion of the patriarch, and when children did well the patriarch benefited. Now it's employers and governments who benefit from well-raised children.' I understand the reluctance to have these conversations. We don't want the government poking around in our bedrooms, especially when some lawmakers are already on a mission to restrict reproductive freedom. It's tempting to say policymakers and institutions should just shut up about any further discussion regarding having kids. But that's not serving people, either. Many other countries already confront these challenges with much more deliberate care. Honest conversations about fertility don't need to be about telling women when or whether to have children — they should be about removing the artificial barriers that make it feel impossible to have kids at different stages of life. This would all certainly be much easier if men stepped up to take these pressures more seriously. 'If men felt as compelled as women to take time off, if men were experiencing the same thing, I think we'd get a lot more creative,' said Coontz. We should continue investing in fertility technology, and expanding access to those options for people who want to delay childbearing or may need help conceiving. But IVF and egg freezing are never going to be the right tools for everyone, and people deserve the support to have children as they study and enter the workforce, too. Biology isn't destiny, but we shouldn't ignore it.
Vox
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Our economy isn't built for the biological clock
is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade. Everyone should have the right to decide if and when they have children. Yet over the past 50 years, the United States has built an economy that increasingly works against fertility — demanding more years in school and longer hours at work for people, especially women, in the years when it is biologically easiest for them to have children, and concentrating wealth and income among those past their reproductive prime. As a result, American schools and workplaces are particularly ill-suited for supporting those who hope to start families earlier than average. 'If I were to complain about how society 'has wronged me as a woman,' it would be that it has treated my limited 'fertility time' with extreme disregard,' wrote Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD student, recently on Substack. 'At each step of the way I was encouraged to 'be patient,' do more training, told that 'things will figure themselves out,' even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.' The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids. Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.) Yet it's precisely in such moments that progressive leaders should offer clear alternatives that both respect women's autonomy and ensure people can make less constrained choices. If mainstream feminism ignores the barriers to early parenthood, the right will be all too eager to fill the void. 'If the so-called feminists, as long as they play it by the elite rules, refuse to take seriously what [we] can do to support young families, then the right can move in and say, 'You might as well give up on your stupid ideas and career aspirations,'' marriage historian Stephanie Coontz told me. Not everyone wants to become a parent, but most women do still say they wish to have children one day. If we're serious about reproductive justice, then it's a mistake to ignore how our schools and workplaces have evolved to be broadly hostile to both fertility and parenthood. Having kids at a younger age is not inherently better — but for those who want to do it, the economy shouldn't be working against them at every step. Colleges need to support parents, pregnant students, and prospective parents Many women believe, correctly, that college and graduate education are important paths not only for their own financial well-being, but also to afford raising kids in a country that offers so little support to families. The idea that people can just up and abandon higher education to have kids, per the Heritage Foundation, isn't serious. 'We've just done so much to obscure the reality and to make it seem like, oh, moms are asking for too much, or they're postponing too long, or maybe they shouldn't be going to school so much,' said Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at University of Texas Austin who studies fertility and gender. 'What an idiotic thing to say. The only way that women can get wages that are at all comparable to what's necessary to raise a family is by getting a college degree.' Yet the US has built one of the longest, most expensive educational pipelines in the world. One reason many American students take longer to finish undergraduate degrees (or don't finish at all) is because of financial pressures that students abroad don't face. Nations like Germany, France, and Norway offer free or heavily subsidized university education, while others, including the UK and Australia, have manageable, easily navigable income-based repayment systems. American students are more likely to be juggling multiple jobs alongside coursework, stretching the time to graduation. The timeline stretches even longer for medical, legal, and doctoral degrees — tacking on years of extra training and credentialing that aren't required elsewhere. Related American doctors hate the health care system almost as much as you do 'There's been an increase in the number of years of schooling that is totally unnecessary,' Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, told me, pointing to, among other factors, the explosion of post-docs and pre-docs, plus pressure for applicants to acquire some work experience before even beginning their graduate studies. 'I went to graduate school immediately after college, and schools like UChicago and MIT had rules then that if you were there for more than four years, you paid tuition, so that incentivized people to finish,' she said. When educational timelines keep stretching with no structural support for parenting, the result is predictable: some people delay having children — or abandon those plans entirely. This isn't to say there are no parents on university campuses. There are roughly 3 million undergraduates — one in five college students — in the US today who have kids. But student parents are too often rendered invisible because most colleges don't collect data on them and harbor outdated assumptions about who even seeks higher education. 'Colleges and universities still cater to what is considered 'traditional students' — so 18- to 24-year-olds who are getting financial assistance from their parents,' said Jennifer Turner, a sociologist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Student parents are far less likely to be receiving financial help from their own families than students of the same age and background without kids — and in general they're more likely to struggle to afford basic needs. But most campuses neglect their unique challenges and fail to provide them with resources like on-campus housing, kid-friendly spaces, and child care support. The Trump administration's new budget proposal calls for gutting the only federal program that helps student parents with child care. And while pregnant students are entitled to some federal protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX, in practice many students never even learn about them, or face intense stigma for using them. For graduate students in particular, there's no shortage of examples of students receiving both implicit and explicit signals to delay childbearing. Research found women were twice as likely as men to cite child care and parenting as reasons for leaving academia. The financial fears are not irrational Whether or not women want to have children in their early or mid-twenties, many feel they can't — because the career paths they pursue require longer routes to stability. Women are more often funneled into professions that demand extra time, whether through extended schooling, slower advancement, or the need to earn extra credentials to prove themselves. Many fields where women are concentrated, like education, social work, psychology, and nursing, require graduate training for higher-paying roles. In contrast, men are more likely to enter skilled trades or businesses where higher earnings are possible without advanced degrees. Goldin, the economist, pointed to the problem of the 'rat race equilibrium' — where individuals over-invest accumulating credentials not because doing so is intrinsically valuable, but because everyone else is doing the same. In this situation, falling behind the pack carries high costs. 'People want a great job, so they stay in graduate school 'too long.' Firms want the best lawyer, so they keep associates for 'too long.' I don't know what the optimal length is. But I do know that the addition of so many more years means that women will be more discouraged than will men,' she told me. These extended educational timelines feed directly into jobs that are also not designed to support parenting during a woman's prime childbearing years. Early-career workers typically earn less, have more precarious roles and rigid schedules, and often face more pressure to be fully available to employers to prove their commitment and worth. Some then move on to what Goldin calls 'greedy careers': Law firms, consulting companies, and hospitals that demand total availability, rewarding those who can work weekends and penalizing those who seek more predictable schedules. For many parents it's a double bind: the educational trajectories and high-paying jobs that make raising kids affordable are often the same ones with demands that make balancing family life nearly impossible. We can structure society differently Fertility tech hasn't yet conquered the biological clock, but we did build this economy — which means we can rebuild it differently. Advocating for more efficient and more affordable education isn't a retreat from academic rigor, but a clear-eyed confrontation with institutions that remain indifferent at best to having children. The most forward-thinking places will see that compressed, focused educational paths aren't diluting standards, but respecting the fullness of human lives and creating systems where intellectual achievement doesn't demand reproductive sacrifice. Exactly how to help students manage timelines will vary. For those looking at careers in math and science, for example, there may be opportunities to take advanced courses in high school. Others would benefit from more financial aid, or using experiential learning credit, or enrolling in accelerated BA/MA programs. But even with educational reforms, parents would still face legal barriers that other groups don't. It's still legal in many cases to discriminate against parents in hiring or housing. Making parents a protected class would be a straightforward step toward making parenthood more compatible with economic security. Stronger labor regulations could also curb workplace coercion, and policies like those in Scandinavia — which allow parents to reduce their work hours when raising young children — could make it easier to balance kids with holding down a job. The rise of remote work offers additional paths forward, and expanding it could reduce the stark either/or choices many prospective parents face. And there are other policy ideas that could make parenthood more affordable even when people are early in their career. Other high-income countries offer parents monthly child allowances, baby bonuses, subsidized child care, and paid parental leave. The US could follow suit — and go further — by investing in affordable housing, reducing the cost of college, and decoupling health care from employment. For now, our current system abdicates responsibility. As Glass points out, while parents are paying more to have children, it's employers and governments that reap the benefits of those adult workers and taxpayers, without shouldering the decades-long costs of training and raising them. 'What no one wants to face is that 150 years ago, when everyone lived on farms, having children did not make you poor, but they do today,' said Glass. 'Children used to benefit their parents, they were part of the dominion of the patriarch, and when children did well the patriarch benefited. Now it's employers and governments who benefit from well-raised children.' It's not feminist to ignore this I understand the reluctance to have these conversations. We don't want the government poking around in our bedrooms, especially when some lawmakers are already on a mission to restrict reproductive freedom. It's tempting to say policymakers and institutions should just shut up about any further discussion regarding having kids. But that's not serving people, either. Many other countries already confront these challenges with much more deliberate care. Honest conversations about fertility don't need to be about telling women when or whether to have children — they should be about removing the artificial barriers that make it feel impossible to have kids at different stages of life. This would all certainly be much easier if men stepped up to take these pressures more seriously. 'If men felt as compelled as women to take time off, if men were experiencing the same thing, I think we'd get a lot more creative,' said Coontz.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lawmakers No Longer Understand the American Family
Imagine if our national economy, culture, and politics were rooted in the idea that the default American household is white and Christian. There would be no Spanish-language campaign ads and TV shows, no interracial families depicted in commercials, no fill-in-the-blank Heritage Day at ballparks. Workplaces would see no need to accommodate holiday schedules for Muslims or Jews. That was a good bet more than 50 years ago, when the country was 88 percent white and 90 percent Christian, and less than 5 percent of the population was foreign-born. Since then, politicians and business leaders have figured out they will lose out if they deny the existence of the new, far more diverse, face of America. They may be motivated more by votes and dollars than by principles, but they've broadened their pitches to reflect (at least in part) the modern American household. And yet, when it comes to the family structure itself, the system (public and private) is stuck in an earlier era, one which assumes a 'traditional' household made up of a married couple and their offspring. Lawmakers proudly brand themselves 'pro-family,' and vow to fight for 'working families.' There's Family Day at attractions and entertainment venues, and family discounts on everything from phone service to cars, retail and college tuition. The best value for consumables is the 'family-sized' version that will rot before a single person can finish it. Solo diners are shooed to the bar at restaurants, with tables reserved for couples or families. Single people subsidize family health insurance plans, pay higher tax rates for the same joint income of a married couple, and can't get Social Security death benefits awarded to a widowed spouse. Companies that brag about being 'family-friendly?' Ask a single person: That means they work nights and weekends. The fix has been in, for a long time, in favor of those who marry and have children. In times past, this was just a temporary irritant, since most people indeed ended up marrying (in their early 20s, back in 1970) and having a family. But that family prototype is no longer dominant—and all indications suggest we're not going back to the way things were. Why are policy-makers in denial about the country we have become? 'It's not that [leaders] don't understand that families have changed very much from what they used to be. It's that they don't want to confront the reasons why families have changed,' said Stephanie Coontz, author of five books on gender and marriage. It's not that people don't want to couple—most do, she added—but marriage is not necessary anymore, especially for women who no longer need a man for financial support and don't need to stay in an unhappy or abusive relationship. They want intimacy, but with equality, and 'women have the ability to say, if I don't get that, I'll hold out,' said Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. There's a misguided longing, especially among conservatives, to return to a storied American family that never really existed, Coontz argues in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In reality, drug abuse, alcohol consumption, and sexually transmitted diseases were more prevalent in the 1950s, but economic conditions (in part because of government support for families) make the mid-20th century family look idyllic in retrospect, Coontz argues in the book. 'There's this ideology, it's really more of a worldview, that if you get married, you really will live happily ever after, and be healthier and morally superior' to unmarried people, said social scientist Bella DePaolo, author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. But when it comes to how people actually behave and the choices they make, 'the place of marriage in our lives has been slipping,' she said. 'Fewer people are getting married—fewer people want to marry. That is threatening to people who want things to stay the same.' The statistics back her up: in 1970, 71 percent of households were made up of married couples; by 2022, that group became a minority, comprising just 47 percent of households. 'Non-family' households were an offbeat 19 percent of homes in 1970; the most recent Census Bureau statistics show that 36 percent of households now are 'non-family.' Married couples with children made up a solid plurality (40 percent) of 1970 homes. Now, such families comprise just 18 percent of households—strikingly, barely more than the category of women living alone, who make up 16 percent of American households, according to the Census Bureau. Even the current White House doesn't reflect the household ideal pushed by social conservatives. President Donald Trump is on his third marriage (with five kids from three wives); his wife Melania Trump is reportedly a part-time resident of the White House, and Trump hangs out with First Bro Elon Musk (who himself is reputed to have more than a dozen children from different mothers). There's been a steady trend towards later marriage, and even away from marriage entirely. The Pew Research Center, using data from the American Community Survey, points out that in 1970, 69 percent of Americans 18 and older were married, and 17 percent were never married. By 2010, just half of Americans over 18 were married, and a startling 31 percent had never been married. Those trends have caused agita among conservatives worried about the changing model (or the 'breaking down' of that model, as they characterize it) of the American family. Fiscal hawks rightfully worry, too, about demographic trends that indicate we will have an increasing number of old people drawing Social Security and Medicare, and not enough young people paying into the system. This is a legitimate concern; fertility rates in the United States reached an historic low in 2023. But the response to these phenomena has not been an examination of how public policy could be reoriented to the new reality of American households, but rather to try to force Americans back to an earlier, mythic demographic era. There's a deep, anti-social vein running through the strategies of those who'd force today's square-peg Americans back into the round hole of their nostalgic fantasies. There's the tactic of insulting or shaming unmarried women ('childless cat ladies,' as Vice President J.D. Vance called them). There's blaming feminism in general. 'We have this low birth rate in America … it just hit me right now because who's going to sleep with these ugly ass broke liberal women?' singer and Trump acolyte Kid Rock said on Fox News. Conservative essayist John Mac Ghlionn lays blame at the sparkly-booted feet of Taylor Swift, who—while being very successful and wealthy, he concedes in a column in Newsweek—is a terrible role model for young girls because 'at 34, Swift remains unmarried and childless.' Worse, the author screams in print, Swift has had a lot of famous boyfriends, and 'the glamorous portrayal of her romantic life can send rather objectionable messages.' The sneering message is clear: stop being so promiscuous or career-driven, and you'll attract a man who will give you what you want—marriage and children. Except that's not what women (necessarily) want. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that just 45 percent of women 18-34 want to be parents someday. That's substantially less than the 57 percent of young men who feel that way. An earlier Pew study found that half of uncoupled men were looking for either a committed relationship or casual dating; 35 percent of single women said the same. And while women who were seeking relationships were more likely than men to say they wanted a committed union, instead of a casual arrangement, the survey results knock down the old trope of women being almost universally on the prowl for men who will offer them a ring and children. Bribing people to have children is another misguided approach, with the Trump administration mulling a laughably low 'baby bonus' of $5,000 to American women who have children. Yes, having kids is costly; the per-child cost can top $310,000, according to a Brookings Institution study. But it's not just a function of money. A growing percentage of adults under 50, in a 2024 Pew Research Center study, say they don't plan to have kids (47 percent are nixing the idea now, compared to 37 percent in 2018). The reason? 57 percent of those who aren't planning to have kids say they simply don't want to. 'I don't think you can solve what is ostensibly a cultural problem with financial incentives. That just doesn't work,' said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. 'I do think that the increasing costs of daily living, and the increase in housing costs, are all playing a role in (people) feeling more financially vulnerable and less secure,' he said. But structural issues—including women's fear of losing their autonomy or having their career advancement thwarted because of childcare demands—are leading to 'some real trepidation' towards marriage, he said. So, what is to be done? Instead of trying to make people want what they demonstrably don't want, government and business could instead adapt to the modern American household and the economy it has produced. There are about a thousand separate rights Americans acquire when they get married—everything from visitation rights at hospitals, to Social Security survivor benefits, to joint health insurance plans, said Gordon Morris, board chairman for the advocacy group Unmarried Equality. And that, he says, needs to change to reflect the fact that nearly half of U.S. adults are unmarried. Paying for Social Security and Medicare doesn't need to be fixed with a forced baby boom, either. One solution is to embrace immigrants, DePaolo said, since they (working legally) will contribute income and Social Security taxes. Another simpler fix, Morris said, is to remove the income cap for Social Security/Medicare contributions. 'It's a problem that's easy to solve, economically, Politically, it's very hard,' he acknowledged. But first and fundamentally, he argued, policymakers need to accept that the country is changing demographically—and that's not just about race or religion or national origin. Some of the most profound changes afoot in society revolve around the whens and whys Americans are getting married and having children. 'The problem is, there's an assumption that you're supposed to get married and you're supposed to have children. That assumption has got to change,' he said. The new reality, after all, has already arrived.
Washington Post
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
What's a marriage sabbatical, and why are there so many books about it?
Love? Hah! For much of recorded history, marriage was rooted in wealth, social standing and livestock. 'Marriage was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love,' Stephanie Coontz wrote in her 2005 book, 'Marriage, a History.' Love is one thing and marriage, the long and happy kind, certainly another. 'When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part,' George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface of his 1908 play, 'Getting Married,' which advocates for democratizing divorce laws.
