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.