On this week’s podcast, Brad Wilcox joins to help us understand how COVID-19 has impacted the family. We discuss the current marriage rate and fertility trends and address some of the potential long-term effects of a two-year pandemic.
Brad Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe. He is the co-author of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, co-author of Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility, and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
Welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and thank you so much for joining us as we look into how COVID-19 has impacted the family. We’ll discuss the current marriage rate and fertility trends and address some of the potential long-term effects from this two-year pandemic. And we have a wonderful guest to break it all down; Brad Wilcox joins us.
Brad Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially in the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life.
He is the co-author of Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, co-author of Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility, and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.
I also think, Brad, that you have a new book that you’re working on. But first of all, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks today.
Brad Wilcox:
It’s great to be here, Beverly. Thanks for having me on.
Beverly Hallberg:
And your new book, what are you currently working on to add to your list of books that you’ve done?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, it’s a new book on marriage, and it’s going to be for HarperCollins and finishing up this summer. And the book is basically arguing that marriage and family matter more than ever for adults and kids and that there are three groups who are particularly successful today in getting and staying married; and then, finally, the kind of like a ruling class is behind a kind of cultural agenda that makes it much harder for folks to make good decisions about marriage and family life in the U.S. today. So those are kind of the three themes that are going to be articulated in the book.
Beverly Hallberg:
And important themes, especially as we are seeing the rate of marriage continue to go down, fertility going down, and how COVID impacts that all. But I first just want to start with just thinking of marriage itself. First of all, when we talk about marriage, are we including same-sex marriage in your research as well? Or do you only focus on couples, man and woman, being married?
Brad Wilcox:
Sure. For the research that basically Institute for Family Studies does, and the National Marriage Project does, we include both same-sex and heterosexual couples.
Beverly Hallberg:
Okay.
Brad Wilcox:
For the book I’m writing, I’m focusing on married couples, heterosexual couples with kids. It turns out there are really actually very few same-sex couples raising kids in the United States, married. And so when it comes to kind of basically offering a rich, empirical portrait of families in the U.S., that just means you have to kind of focus on heterosexual couples with kids.
Beverly Hallberg:
Got it. Got it. That’s an important distinction there in looking at the research. And as far as marriage itself, let’s just start with some of the data. How is marriage doing? Or how was it doing pre-COVID, and how is it doing two years after COVID?
Brad Wilcox:
I think kind of heading into COVID, what we were seeing was both a kind of retreat from marriage, a kind of decline in marriage’s sort of power and presence in the U.S., and then also a growing marriage divide, where Americans who are more educated and affluent are more likely to put a ring on it, and to stay married. But I’m also seeing in my research that Americans who are religious, and Americans who are Asian-American, are also particularly likely to get married and to stay married as well.
That was kind of the trend heading into COVID. And what I think COVID did, was that it kind of accentuated those marriage trends that I just mentioned. Also, tended to kind of accelerate the decline in fertility in that first basic year and a half in the wake of COVID’s arrival. I think what we’re now seeing, though, is a kind of a slight recovery, both in the marriage rate and in the fertility rate, as people kind of moved forward with relationships and with intentions to have kids that they put off in the darkest moments of 2020.
So what I would sort of say is, kind of in the short term, we’re going to see an uptick in family formation, and obviously pleased about that. But I would expect that kind of after that recovery has kind of been logged, we’ll see a continuing decline in marriage and fertility within about two years from now.
Beverly Hallberg:
But do you find that there could be some uptick in marriage because of the fact that COVID had people maybe leave cities, move back home, or move to a smaller town? Maybe easier to find somebody to date there? Or even just people who realized, “Okay, maybe my job has been thrown upside down. My world’s been thrown upside down. I really don’t want to live alone.”
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah.
Beverly Hallberg:
This feeling of loneliness and isolation, did it cause people to actually search out, not just somebody to spend a little time with to have fun with, but actually a long-term commitment that leads to marriage?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, Beverly, that’s a great question. That’s probably a $60,000 question when it comes to marriage in the wake of the pandemic. I certainly know that there are lots of single adults, and I’ve spoken to them for my book, who kind of found the lockdowns to be extraordinarily difficult emotionally. And it’s kind of a new motivation on their part to rethink marriage or to kind of pick up with the search for a spouse.
So it’s certainly possible that COVID may have kind of reset some of these trends in some ways. We’ll have to kind of look at how things look in about three years to kind of see if there’s any kind of major shift in sort of the broader trends we’ve been tracking in the last 20 years.
Beverly Hallberg:
And when you look at marriage, obviously, I think you come from the perspective that marriage is important. Why do you think marriage is important not just to the two people getting married, but also to society?
Brad Wilcox:
So marriage is that institution that really grounds and guides adult relationships and families. And of course, I think some people think about marriage as maybe, like, a Christian issue, for instance. But if you kind of take a broader view of human societies, human history, and you kind of look across time and space, what you see is that in the vast majority of cultures, and certainly I think every civilization that I’m aware of, we see marriage. And so I think marriage basically is a human institution that provides some kind of direction and purpose to sexual relationships, that gives people a sense of kind of kinship, and that connects both parents, on average, to their children.
So these are all kind of key sort of social functions that marriage serves, and also tends to kind of provide an important level of social stability for cultures and civilizations as well. Because again, it gives adults some security and direction in their lives, and then tends to give families more stability as well.
Beverly Hallberg:
I am someone who got married at the age of 41, first marriage, and something that I had wanted to do for a long time, but just struggled to find somebody —
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah.
Beverly Hallberg:
— to marry for a variety of reasons. And so I think one of the trends that we see is just people getting married later in life. I think there are a variety of reasons for that. I can speak from a female perspective and that, a lot of times, it’s hard to find men who are focused on marriage as well, or we’ve been told to focus on a career, let’s say, and so we did that first and kind of pushed aside this idea of marriage in our 20s. And then in our 30s woke up and thought, “Oh man, I really got to deal with this. I have a clock that’s ticking.” But what are some of the reasons you see that people may delay marriage and that that may inevitably lead to not finding somebody to marry?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, I think everything you mentioned is right on the money. What we’ve been seeing in attitudinal data, Beverly, is that recent Pew surveys, for instance, have been reporting that young adults accord more importance to their careers and to their bank accounts than they do to marriage and parenthood. So I think there’s kind of this idea out there that kind of your job would be that thing that fulfills you, provides your life with direction and purpose. The reality actually is that we still see in the research that marriage and family life matter a lot more for predicting things like happiness than does the size of your bank account or the character of your work.
So, I think that’s one issue that I’m seeing in the research. A second thing that I’m seeing is that a lot of women that I speak with, including women at UVA that I talk to, are frustrated with the men in their lives. Not all of them, of course, but they kind of feel like there are too many men out there who don’t have a lot of direction and don’t have kind of the willingness to commit to a relationship. And I think kind of the arrival of smartphones and dating apps has in some ways only augmented that, because it’s given at least some subset of men kind of more choices. They can more easily access dating partners in ways that I think can inhibit commitment on their part as well.
So that, I think, also, an issue sort of the man issue in all of this. And then, just, we have seen when it comes to the economy, an economy that basically where men who don’t have college degrees are much more likely today not to be working stably either for reasons related to their own issues, or because there’s been a plant closure, or some other kind of major economic shift in their area. So I think all three of those factors kind of basically according too much importance to work in some ways, men not kind of having the capacity to commit, and then changes in the economy, which have had a particularly deleterious impact on working-class men, have all kind of combined to push up the age at first marriage and reduce the number of people who are getting married.
So what we are projecting now, based upon a recent Urban Institute Report, is that about a third of young adults in their 20s and early 30s today will never marry. And that’s like record territory for us in the U.S., really. So that’s, to me, pretty concerning.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. It’s very concerning. And something that I’ve thought about just with my age range being in my 40s is that I’ve, I’ve often wondered if those who are the same age as me, because we were the first generation that really struggled to find spouses. And there are men who are in this category as well.
Brad Wilcox:
Sure.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I’ve thought about this with my nieces or other family members, this idea that we tell young people, is we always say, “when you get married” or “when you have kids.”
Brad Wilcox:
Sure.
Beverly Hallberg:
But I think so often, it’s “if.” The reality is it’s an “if” these days.
Brad Wilcox:
Right.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I don’t think we’re preparing young people for that potential. And I would also just be curious what you think about, how do we help them if they desire to get married? What can we do?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, I think it’s important to on the first point, just to acknowledge that historically we look across our history in the U.S., we look to Ireland, my wife’s from — I mean, way back in the day, her family’s from Ireland. And of course, there were times where there was tremendous economic privation where there were a decent number of folks who didn’t get married and they would be kind of often living with their kin, with a sister or a brother, and they’d be the aunt or the uncle who’d kind of be in the household. And I think, given what we’re seeing today, we’re going to see more of those kind of extended families emerging so that people who never marry will end up living with a brother or a sister and or close to them.
I’ve seen that certainly here in Charlottesville, women that I know who are living close to family and spending time with them and their kids. And that’s great. It’s not necessarily the ideal, but it’s certainly better than just being on your own entirely. But in terms of the second point you’re making, I think I would definitely encourage young adults and do encourage students at UVA, for instance, to be a lot more intentional about their 20s, to kind of think about it as a prime opportunity this decade to find a spouse, if you’re looking to get married, and not to assume that you can kind of focus on your work and having fun for about eight years and then find the best possible partner when you’re 28 and looking to put a ring on it by age 30.
So I think the big takeaway, again, is to kind of encourage younger adults in their early 20s to really be very intentional about looking for people and even thinking about where they would live. Because some places in the U.S. have, for instance, many more men than women, and some places have many more women than men. And so if you’re looking to kind of find a spouse, you should be kind of aware of how the geographic concentration of women and men might help you find a spouse or hinder you when it comes to finding a spouse.
Beverly Hallberg:
So ladies, move to Alaska; your chances are better. That’s one thing that we can learn.
Brad Wilcox:
Well, for instance, yeah. And I think I’ve heard even Silicon Valley is relatively more men than women. So just thinking about these things is worth keeping in mind if marriage is a key life goal for yourself.
Beverly Hallberg:
Where do you rate the happiness factor in all of this? And that may not be an area that you research. Obviously, some people have broken marriages, hard marriages, reasons for divorce.
Brad Wilcox:
Sure.
Beverly Hallberg:
It doesn’t mean that a marriage is automatically going to lead to happiness, but what is, what does the data show on marriage equating to happiness?
Brad Wilcox:
So I would say I think three different things: one is that there’s a very clear and strong correlation between marriage and happiness in America. So folks who are married on average are much more likely to say that they’re very happy, for instance, compared to folks who are not married. And I think, in some ways, sort of the positive effect of marriage is likely to increase in family more generally, and come to that in a second. But the second thing, of course, to know here is there’s a huge debate among academics about how much of this is called causation or correlation.
And of course, it could be that the kinds of people who get married have more wealth, or better social skills, or something else that kind of makes them the kind of person who will be happier in general. So there is a kind of a debate about whether or not marriage per se matters. But from my vantage point, kind of looking at the relationship between marital status and happiness, I do think that marriage is a kind of a boost when it comes to happiness, but also kind of protects you against things like depression and loneliness as well in ways that do seem to be causal.
The third point I’d make, though, is that marital satisfaction is a big qualifier for all this, particularly for women. So [what] we see is that, it looks like for women, if they’re in a good enough relationship or in a great relationship, that gives them a boost. But if they’re in a difficult relationship, that’s likely to have sort of negative effects on their emotional well-being and their physical well-being. Whereas guys, to be frank, are just often happy to be married. And frankly, too, men are just not as attentive to all the ebbs and flows of a relationship.
I mean, my wife can tell you 27 things that I’ve done badly in the last two days. And I can’t name one thing that she’s done badly in the last two days. And part of that is just that she has the capacity to sort of, I think, monitor the ups and downs of our relationship more deftly than do I. So again, the point that I’m making is that quality is an issue. And it also turns out to be, like, just a huge predictor of people’s overall happiness, but I think particularly for women.
Beverly Hallberg:
And let’s talk about government policies. Do you think that there should be put in policies that promote marriage? Is this more of, we need as individuals and community members and family members just promote it on our own? Where are you on that?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah, I definitely think there’s a role for government to play here. And we have to obviously acknowledge that government’s role is going to be kind of a minority share all of this. But I think when it comes to things like social welfare policy, for instance, right now a lot of our public policy is like Medicaid, for instance, and the earning income tax credit end up penalizing lots of working-class couples, vis-à-vis marriage. I talked to a couple here in Virginia recently; they had two beautiful young daughters. She was a stay-at-home mom. He was an IT technician. They would’ve been very traditional like 30 or 40 years ago. But because she was on Medicaid, and Medicaid was covering her and the kids, they’d actually sat down on the kitchen table and run the calculations and realized that if they got married, they’d lose access to Medicaid.
So these are the kinds of situations that give me pause. And I do think we need to think about ways to eliminate the marriage penalty facing many working-class couples. I also think we should be thinking, too, about family life education in our public high schools, and even kind of like a PSA campaign to just sort of give people the idea that if you follow what’s called the success sequence — three steps: getting at least a high school degree, working full time in your early 20s, and then getting married before having kids — if you follow those three steps, your odds of being poor, just 3%, by the time you’re in your late 20s and in your 30s.
And I think too many young adults don’t kind of understand or appreciate that that sequencing, particularly in terms of putting marriage before the baby carriage, is really so important for getting off on the right foot. So again, not an elaborate governmental initiative, but I think kind of just doing some basics when it comes to sort of letting people know how much marriage matters for us in a variety of different levels. And also making sure that we’re not ending up penalizing marriage; that would be helpful when it comes to strengthening marriages across the U.S..
That’s sort of the direct response. We could also, I think, talk about ways, too, to bring more men into strong vocational education programs and apprenticeship training programs that would qualify them for decent-paying, middle-income jobs. We could think about doing things like revising the child tax credit to strengthen families as well, and give them more options when it comes to family formation and having kids as well. So there are a couple of things that I think we could do to help families. But this is also obviously a very important cultural challenge facing us as well.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And another challenge I want to turn to now is the issue of fertility. So obviously when people get married, they often start thinking about kids. And this could be obviously related to age and people getting married later. But are you seeing more and more issues with fertility issues with married individuals?
Brad Wilcox:
So there…. I think people are having more fertility problems, and that is related to waiting to marry and waiting to have kids. So that’s certainly part of the story. But we’re also seeing kind of just a decline in fertility as well. It’s sort of more general, and that’s related, too, to people postponing marriage and marrying in fewer numbers as well. So our fertility rate hit about 1.6 in 2020, and that’s the lowest level it’s ever been. That means that the average woman over time would have about 1.6 kids, and the replacement rate to kind of keep the population at the same level without immigration is about 2.1 kids per woman on average.
So again, we’re kind of hitting record-low territory here in the U.S., on the fertility front. And what’s, I think, particularly, I think worrisome for me is that Japan was at about this level in the late 1980s. And since then, Japan dropped dramatically when it came to fertility. And now Japan has a real problem with low fertility, low marriage, many young adults who are not dating, not having sex. It’s just kind of, it’s a whole new world it’s sort of showing out there in Japan.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I would say this has two angles to it. One is what does this mean to the person? And we’ve discussed some of that, as far as happiness and marriage. But of course, we know that it’s devastating for people who want to have kids and can’t. But there’s the other side of what does it mean for a country? So when you look at our low fertility rate, people not having as many kids as they used to on average, and at the same time we have people like Megan Markle and Prince Harry saying, “Because we have too many people in this world, we’re not going to have more kids than two.” What do you say to these depopulation efforts and even the messages that are being sent to young people, thinking that if you have kids, it’s actually bad for the environment?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I think one thing I would note, just from a kind of emotional and psychological perspective, we’re seeing that kind of classically like 20, 30, 40 years ago, there was a negative link between having kids and people’s happiness. So parents were less happy than non-parents, is sort of the bottom line here. But in probably the last two decades, that relationship has kind of switched. And we’re seeing now that parents are actually happier than childless adults.
And I think that’s partly because today we’re living in a world where social media and other kinds of electronic enticements are kind of keeping people away from in-person experiences. We’re seeing an increase in what I call kind of atomization, folks not going to church or not being involved in the local secular communities. And so there’s just a kind of individualism afoot that I think is leading to more and more loneliness and unhappiness.
And so, I think for those reasons, marriage apparently become actually more important for people’s basic emotional well-being.
Beverly Hallberg:
Right.
Brad Wilcox:
So I would sort of take issue with the kind of Prince Harry perspective in that regard in terms of not appreciating sort of how much I think family matters today for people’s basic emotional and social welfare. But beyond that, it’s also a case, too, that population growth is crucial for economic growth. It’s crucial for kind of keeping our coffers growing when it comes to the federal and the state and local governments, and it just kind of lends a certain kind of dynamism to any developed economy in society. So I think one of the problems facing us is we’re going to be not having enough people to keep afloat programs like, for instance, Social Security.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And so we’ve talked about a lot of the negatives that we see in trends. I just want to end with something that I could be incorrect about, but it seems to be a positive trend when it comes to kids. And that is we — I think as we think of women who, they entered into the career…. Feminism usually meant you go for your career, and you don’t get married or you don’t have kids, but there seems to be a switch even among some of the celebrities, whether it’s Beyonce or Kim Kardashian, where they’re having lots of kids and it’s celebrated. So is there some sort of switch with the view of motherhood, and that young people are viewing that more favorably than what a woman would have potentially let’s say 20, 30 years ago?
Brad Wilcox:
Yeah. I do think there’s a way in which parts of the pop culture are pretty mom-friendly. We published a piece on that sort of theme in Family Studies this week, in anticipation of motherhood. And you certainly, I do see, I think among many of my colleagues in academia are much more sort of parent oriented. It would’ve been the case for the sort of pioneering feminists in academia back in the 1970s, for instance. So there has been a kind of shift there that’s constructive.
I also want to say, too, that we’re seeing a slight increase in the share of kids who are living with two, stably-married parents. And that’s in part because divorce has come down since 1980, and non-marital childbearing has leveled off since the recession, since about 2009. So those two trends together kind of translate into more family stability for our kids. And that’s obviously good news as well.
Beverly Hallberg:
And before you go, if people want to read or buy some of your books, read what you have to say, follow you on Twitter, where can they go?
Brad Wilcox:
So on Twitter, I’m BradWilcoxIFS, and then it comes to sort of the web FamilyStudies.org is a place where both I and my colleagues, in sociology and economics, psychology, are regularly publishing articles on a variety of different family topics.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, we so appreciate your work on this important issue. And thank you so much for joining She Thinks. Brad Wilcox with the National Marriage Project, thank you so much.
Brad Wilcox:
It’s great to be with you today, Beverly, thanks for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you, and investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and well-being for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation by visiting IWF.org/donate. That’s IWF.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review. It does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode, so your friends can know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
