Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: The State of Our Unions: An Interview with W. Bradford Wilcox
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 48

The State of Our Unions: An Interview with W. Bradford Wilcox

Colin Smothers

1. What is the state of marriage and fertility in America in 2022?

There is bad news and good news to report about marriage and fertility in America. The bad news is that the marriage rate and the fertility rate have never been so low as they were in 2022. Too many Americans have neither the means nor the motivation to form a family today. For instance, more than a quarter of young adults today will never have children, and more than one third will never marry. These trends will leave millions of Americans kinless as they head into middle and late age.

The good news is that the increasingly selective character of marriage and childbearing means that marriage is getting more stable and the children who are being born today are more likely to be raised by their own stably married parents. So the kids being born today, especially to married parents, will be more likely to enjoy a stable family life in the coming years than their fellow citizens born a while ago.

2. You recently completed an in-depth report called “The Divided State of Our Unions” for the Institute for Family Studies. This report details, among other things, shocking disparities in family formation along the lines of class, religion, and even political party affiliation. What do you believe best accounts for these disparities?

We found that COVID supercharged polarization in America. As COVID wanes, America looks more divided than ever in

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 49

terms of income, religion, and politics. As I wrote in Newsweek, for instance, interest in marriage and childbearing varied a great deal by these three factors:

The rich, the religious and Republicans reported the greatest overall increase in the ‘desire to marry’ while the poor, secular Americans and Democrats reported less or no increase in marriage interest, according to a new YouGov survey of men and women aged 18–55 by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Wheatley Institution.

At the same time, 18-to-55-year-old Americans’ post-pandemic interest in childbearing fell seven percentage points since last year. But the “desire to have a child” tanked much more among poor, secular and Democratic Americans than it did among their more affluent, religious and conservative fellow citizens.1

What we seem to be seeing is that family formation depends more than ever on “means” and “motivation.” Those with the means to marry and have kids more readily — the affluent — are today more likely to be emerging fro...