OPINION:
President Reagan once said that “when so much around is whispering a little lie that we should live only for the moment and for ourselves, it’s more important than ever to affirm an older and more last setting set of values. … The family remains the fundamental unit of American life.”
A few weeks back, I came across a piece by The Heritage Foundation’s Rachel Sheffield on how fertility rates are finally beginning to rise after years of steady decline, inching up to 1.6 per woman but still below the replacement rate of 2.1.
That’s somewhat good news. The not-so-good news is that marriage rates — the fundamental element of American life, as Reagan said — are not rising at the same rate.
Let’s focus on the somewhat good news first: on why it is important that young Americans are having more children.
A recent Congressional Budget Office report documented how, by 2033, there will be more deaths than births in America, putting our nation in a zero population replacement rate and a demographic death cycle.
This trend has alarmed people domestically and internationally, and much of it can be traced to the devaluation of marriage over the past 60 years.
Peter Jon Mitchell and Andrea Mrozek of the Canadian think tank Cardus link the devaluing of marriage globally with declining birth rates, with devastating consequences for the future.
Domestically, Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies issued a report for The Heritage Foundation on the decline of marriage over the past several decades and the greater problems created by a society that has been slowly discarding what he calls our “keystone institution.”
One of those problems is our declining birth rates, which, if left unchecked, will lead our nation to what has been dubbed “demographic winter,” with elderly populations needing care greatly outnumbering younger generations capable of providing it.
In addition, as deaths start to outpace births, there will be ever-increasing pressure on programs such as Social Security, Medicare and pensions, with not enough people paying into the system to cover the expenditure going out.
This is already happening. It is now estimated that the Social Security trust fund, which relies on having enough younger individuals pay into it to pay for the benefits of those retiring, will run dry by 2034, resulting in retirees having their benefits cut by at least 20%.
Thus, rising fertility rates and the greater number of children entering the world will help a bit with this problem.
Unfortunately, it raises a more troubling issue: A lot of these children are growing up in unmarried homes, often without both a mother and a father.
Isabel Sawhill and Kai Smith of the left-leaning Brookings Institution wrote in a 2024 research brief: “The short answer is that marriage still matters. And depending on what metric you examine, marriage can matter a lot.”
They continued, “The finding that children who are born to married parents tend to enjoy better life outcomes is consistent with existing research that has established that children who grow up in two-parent homes are more likely to graduate from college and work and are less likely to have children young, be depressed, be convicted for committing a crime, or end up poor as adults on average.”
Although it is encouraging that Americans have more children, those children must grow up in a healthy and secure environment provided by a two-parent, married home.
However, as Ms. Sheffield writes, “Relationships today are also less committed. Marriage is no longer a requirement for sexual relationships or for childbearing, and often a committed dating relationship is not even a prerequisite for these things. Having multiple sexual partners during adulthood, living together with a romantic partner without secure plans for marriage, and having children from multiple relationships has become the norm for a substantial share of Americans.”
We must reverse this trend. Otherwise, we are swapping one problem — a lack of children to support older generations — with another: children who are depressed, lack proper socialization and are dependent on the government.
That’s why it is essential that we as a nation promote and protect the family, the fundamental unit of American life, so that all generations will continue to flourish and thrive. Marriage and family are values that last. It is my hope that as Americans have more children, they will understand this truth as well.
• Timothy S. Goeglein is vice president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family. He served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and as a deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison.
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