Refugees and immigrants are a better investment than babies, and accepting refugees doesn't grow the global population.
Also, the headline is offensive.
33
Who are these imaginary liberals?
18
This column totally ignores the fact that the fertility decline is happening worldwide, in many different countries. Some more "liberal", some more "conservative".
News flash- America isn't the only country in the world.
23
I had to google "fertility vs fecundity." Fecundity is not declining. Women who can choose have fewer babies. They can change their minds if they choose.
7
Funny, France has a higher birth rate than America. Why? Perhaps because the French make it easier to have kids. There is a secular trend toward lower birth rates in rich countries, but it is worse in countries that don't help families or have entrenched patriarchies (Japan). https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/birth-rate
18
Wasn’t there a piece in these very pages a week ago that was data driven and showed liberals divorce far less than conservatives?
I don’t really care about labels (Douthat is obsessed with them — “a place for everything and everything in its place”
must be a favorite HC Anderson saying of his), but at least read your own paper so we don’t have to read it for you.
20
Whenever I hear the word wedlock all I can hear is the work lock
10
Liberals are so firmly set against marriage and the right to parent that they fought to expand the right to include our same-sex friends into the club.
Conservatives (especially Christian evangelical) are so pro-marriage that they fought tooth and nail to try and prevent this. And they made common cause with an execrable racist crook who made his own common cause with Russia to swing the election his way. And is trying to coerce Ukraine and China to do his electoral dirty work for the upcoming election.
But ooh, those judges. Gotta love them. Pack those courts, do it now. A gay couple might want to adopt, or even bear a kid. Or (gasp) buy a wedding cake.
23
After reading Douthat’s column this came to mind:
Mr. Peabody: Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1958!
Sherman: OK Mr. Peabody. I’ll set it for the time of “Father Knows Best,” “The Donna Reed Show” and “Leave it to Beaver.”
We live in the 21 century. It’s time we leave the 20th century behind. That goes for Douthat too.
12
How many straw men are you allowed to knock down in one article? How can you ignore so many other causes for the decline of marriage and expect us to take your screed seriously?
Personally, I am tired of Conservatives telling me what I believe, especially when most of them seem to believe nothing except the decrees of a liar.
25
Wow. This is FoxNews level junk. What's up next Ross, the War on Christmas? Or how liberals hate religion? I'm a liberal, an atheist, and one of my best friends is a Roman Catholic priest. Oops, did I just short-circuit your right wing disinformation-o-meter?
18
Yes in the eyes of white working people. Which is why the Democrats are going to re-elect the Phoniest man on Earth
No.
7
“The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s O.K. to worry about even if you aren’t a deep-dyed reactionary.”
Really? Isn’t it a little early to reveal yourself in this way Ross? Because “birthrate” is 100 percent, always, every time, code for “not enough white babies.”
Other countries have more babies, so let families immigrate here. If you worry about birthrate but are against increasing immigration, you are a white supremacist, period.
16
Is there any question too ridiculous for a conservative columnist to ask?
13
Scientists estimate that our planet can sustain about 9 billion people. The UN expects the global population to significantly surpass that by 2050.
The answer to sustainable economies and preventing the negative effects of aging populations in wealthy countries is not marriage or increasing birthrates -- it's immigration.
12
Does every topic have to be reduced to a left/right divide? It would have been more useful to read something discussing objective analysis of the issue. When Douthat starts throwing around terms like "neoliberalism" I know the end of my interest in the article is near.
12
I think you see what you want to see. Please share some sources of "frequent prestige-media pitches for polyamory or open marriages or escaping gender norms entirely." What I see in the young adults in front of me is fear...that their future is grim and no place to raise a family in. They have their heads down trying to earn a decent living in poor paying jobs, and can't see that marriage will make it any better than just living together.
19
Russ, I'm a married Catholic in my 20s (which is young for millennials) and I enjoy reading your work. That said, it is absolutely misleading to describe Tucker Carlson's monologues on the economics of marriage as "critical" of capitalism; it's equally misleading to describe Elizabeth Warren's "Two Income Trap" arguments as arguing for a single income. Tucker Carlson's arguments have centered less on the fallacies of capitalism, and much more on how having women hold jobs has ruined the American family. Warren has not argued for single-income households--she argued for having sufficient safety nets and high enough wages that deciding to do so is possible for more families. In a desire to find points of consensus, it feels like you're glossing over some key distinctions.
29
(I typo'd Russ instead of Ross. Sorry).
2
"Are liberals against marriage?" Are you serious?! This title of a so-called thoughtful opinion piece sounds anti-liberal from the outset. It's a political ruse to inflame your anti-democratic party friends on Fox TV. I'm offended! You are inferring that liberals (read democrats) are against American values. Marriage and Apple Pie. Ridicules!
11
The problem is that Douthat doesn't have an ecological bone in his body. He's just not capable of thinking on a planetary scale. US kids use up 6-10x the global resources that kids in undeveloped countries do (more cars, more houses, more energy to stay warm and buy toys, more food, more time on jets). Ross, please figure this into you equations that beg for an increase in kids coming from the USA. Then we might begin to listen to you. But conservatives never pit the planet in their equations.
10
One uses the term 'conservative' and 'liberal' as if everyone who is politically and socially of either are all branded with the same beliefs and behaviors.
I would like to see people writing articles use the term "most" or "many" conservatives/liberals.
To be either one doesn't mean we all lock step in place. I know some conservatives who view marriage as too fraught with negatives (economics, education level, having shared values or religion) that they avoid it or look for the perfect among the imperfect and everyone is found wanting.
The same for liberals.
Having children that you can support and care for all their basic needs is, in itself, a large undertaking because it goes on for a minimum of 18 years.
Perhaps both conservatives and liberals (or most of them) look at marriage and children in the same way but for many different reasons
2
Am I the only one who finished this meandering column and wonder if it could have been expressed more succinctly?
20
The author pins his article on the correlation between declining marriage and declining birth rate and makes the assumption that the lack of marriage is the root cause for less babies.
What if it's the opposite? The desire not to have children has taken much of the urgency out of getting married. As our lives get longer, the prospect of "until death do us part" seems more and more illusory unless there is a binding and mutually shared goal such as raising children. Even then, as a 58 year old divorced father, successfully raising kids doesn't guarantee that we will want to stay together for our entire lives.
The planet is getting trashed. Our longer lives means added years of increasingly unreliable employment. The lack of wealth flowing to to the working class means that many of us feel economically insecure. It all adds up to less confidence to have children which means that we don't need to get married.
Between the lack of impetus for children and the poor fit of a life-long contract with a long, multi-stage life, the decline in marriage seems much more organic than a product of liberal animosity. Besides, we liberals are pro-marriages an essential LGBTQ right. We just don't believe that it is an essential component of every life.
15
I think Mr. Douhat needs to write one level down, for those of us who haven't had his Harvard classes.
2
Lets remember that today hasn't suddenly appeared. It has not been so long since women were chattel – unable to have independence without their fathers' or husbands' permission and (usually) grudging approval. Marriage, even as late as the 1950s was the only sensible career choice for many women, along with teacher, nurse, and secretary.
What we now call paternalism is the attitude ingrained in men of protection and support in exchange for submissiveness and obedience. Many men still hold these ideas when they think of marriage, even when their wives are also working. Change comes slowly. Centuries of oppression are the foundation of the voices of women who have discovered their voice and have begun to honor themselves. That's too much for some men, particularly those who have been imbued with religious doctrine about the proper place for women and the "sanctity" of marriage.
Also, in earlier times, people's experience of the world limited their choices. Today even the most shut-in of individuals are shown via cable and internet a variety of relationship experience (real or fictional) with which to compare their own. Unsurprisingly, many spend their time looking for a fantasy mate who will perform according to their script. This is not so much a breakdown of social values as a central authority that has become obsolete.
16
Liberals scream, "We are destroying our planet! We are all going to die"
Conservatives calmly state, "The Apocalypse and Rapture is inevitable."
Tell me now, which of the groups is most likely to get married?
7
I consider myself a liberal, as the term is used in American politics these days. Often when I look into a mirror after reading one of Douthat’s columns, I find myself having to decide whether Douthat or the mirror that is mistaken.... and generally I find the mirror more convincing.
Seriously, kidding aside, Douthat would be far more credible if he were to write less about what “the left” believes and more about what he believes. He actually is qualified to comment on the latter.
19
Conservatives sure get nervous when that white replacement birth rate starts falling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html?searchResultPosition=2
Can't this Catholic columnist be glad we are seeing the lowest abortion rates since the pre-Roe era because fewer women are getting pregnant?
Since the only way to get pregnant (typically) is through sex, that means people are having less sex, a fact reported on extensively.
How does having less sex play into the right wing view of liberals as secular hedonists?
17
Seems like a mountain is being made of an anthill. Where is the problem really? With the climate crisis less people means less burning of fossil fuels, resource depletion and otherwise raping of the planet. Oh but we need replacement workers to keep the economy growing, you will say. Seems like there are more than enough potential workers who would love to come to America if our immigration system wasn't so racist.
16
A Puritans Puritan.
Seriously.
9
More gobbledygook from a right wing ideologue who just must blame liberals for the state of marriage, or supposed lack thereof. Which is hilarious to me, a very liberal mother of two very liberal sons, both married with two and three kids each, respectively, and counting! And while they married earlier than many of their former high school and college friends have been, there seems to be no let up in the number of young people getting married, to judge by the numbers of weddings they attend each year!!
This topic is way too broad for this attempt at sleight of hand to paint the picture Mr Douthat wants to represent: conservatives, good; liberals, bad.
Like his fellow Times conservative, Mr Brooks, maybe he should just open his mind to the fact that the reasons for changes in marital rates have many causes. Maybe if young people had less college debt and better prospects for high paying jobs when they enter the workplace, they’d be better able to afford marriage and everything that comes with it. Maybe he needs to be less rigid in his own thinking. He’s trying to make the case here that he’s not- he sees value in nuance! Wow! The reality is it’s the same old tired thinking with slightly different spin.
C-. Start over. Try authenticity in your theme and rework!
14
Hmm, since red states have the higher rates of divorce on average, I do believe that you are mistaken in your assumptions on how liberals “view marriage”
13
Plunging U.S.,birth rate? Great news! Way too many Homo sapiens (not so sapient) on the planet.
I realize it’s not good news for consumer capitalism, which needs to growwwwwww...
10
Rubio- Hawley - Barr???
Well there's three prime examples of the deterioration of deep conservative thinking. (which is now an oxymoron)
I mean when you have to reach down that far in the barrel of modern conservative purveyors of social science clarity?
LOL -I mean how low does the bar have to be in terms of thoughtful analysis (maybe under ground) before the the current crop of GOP intellectuals can pass over it and in to realm of homus erectus?
Here's a hint for ya of what's goin on:
The more intelligent you become -The more seriously you take issues of building and raising a family.
Unlike the bible belt/red state enclaves of regression where both kids and adults are dropping like flies while they support GOP policies that created their dystopi ain the first place.
10
Douthat's thoughts of what he thinks liberals think. Concrete thoughts and ideas are all that matter. Douthat's belief of a mystical liberal war on marriage is trivial and sad.
14
Way, wayyyy too passive-voice in your closing remarks, Ross. Please, this is an important topic -- Speak. Directly.
4
If I were you r. Douthat I'd stick to your interpretation conservatives because you are way off base when attempting to define liberal thought.
11
Douthat, like most of your philosophical ilk, you really must learn how to pick your battles. Conservatives lump everyone else into those neat little buckets without knowing every story behind the circumstances. One more reason why I detest them.
8
December 3, 2019
A natural union of live is a forever marriage and is best when apoltiical. Forget the liberal / conservative - let's these folks work it out for a forever union and its eternal rewards.
jja
2
Many social science survey over multiple past decades show that marriage is good for men--leads to higher life satisfaction and negative for women. When husbands routinely raise the kids and support their wives' careers, when men routinely do at least 50% of the housework and when men routinely have enough self-esteem and caring to want to be good in bed, then and only then will marriage be good enough for women that more of us will once again be interested.
20
this is a sentence??? "If the new liberal hostility to marriage-as-normative-institution is not one of the ideological causes of our latest post-familial ratchet, it is at least a post facto ideological excuse, in which the frequent prestige-media pitches for polyamory or open marriages or escaping gender norms entirely are there to reassure people who might otherwise desire a little more normativity (and a few more children) in their lives, that it’s all cool because they’re in the vanguard of a revolution."
12
"Are Liberals against marriage?"
Uh, NO.
My wife and I are both Liberals. We've been happily married (to each other, goll !) for 32 years. Next!
10
@Kevin C.
Bet both your parents were happily married to each other?
This will confuse people, what with using "liberal" in both its traditional European meaning and its modern American meaning. I cannot devote a lot of time to this comment, but I will say that I don't think liberals are against marriage, but they certainly aren't FOR marriage -- it being just one option among many in the anything-goes, relativist cultural world they inhabit.
The Great Depression did, in fact, see marriages drop. But it just pushed them back. Values didn't decline simply due to economic hardship, and marriages formed therein tended to last (see the data). When marriage is expected, people will largely get married. When not, not. Values aren't a kind of Marxian ephemera, which is the way most leftists kinda-sorta see them, if the truth be told.
(Note that anti-materialist progressives propose all-materialist solutions.) It isn't that people don't see the downsides of neoliberalism; it's that progressives don't see that other-than-neoliberalism has problems as well. In their rage at the Reagan and Thatcher years, they don't see that existing problems made a turnabout all but inevitable.
Nor, by the way, are the benefits of globalized neoliberalism ever given their due (especially by the French, who seem to despise it, on the whole, the most). Of more concern to me is what Benedict Beckeld calls oikophobia. The "we're the worst" phenomena is growing, when the truth is the reverse. The evil we once did, much of the world still does -- or would if it could.
1
Conservatives like to believe in myths. The myth of "the good old days" is a predominant one. Remember, they say, when everyone was married and people had big happy families? Reality check: domestic violence between husbands and wives is still a problem in our society. Just this weekend two women and two children were killed here in Minneapolis, in cold blood, by the fathers of their children. Can you imagine what reality was like when there were no laws against domestic violence? Next myth: all those big happy families. Does Douhat have any idea how many women struggled through six, seven, eight, ten or more pregnancies, with little to no access to birth control, raising four children under five and all the other manifestations of marriage in those good old days? Does he understand the reality of many marriages back then? The servitude? The "doing everything" from childcare, all homemaking, cooking, laundry and how many women got absolutely no say in anything of significance in their lives? Marriage is called an institution for a reason, and like most institutions, one should be careful when entering them. And while I have hope for my children's marriages--far more egalitarian than mine ever was, I myself enjoy the happiness of a long (20 year plus) relationship that is quite purposely, by my choice, NOT a marriage...things are so much more equal, it seems, when Douhat's myths are not involved.
19
Reading these comments, it's clear that liberal do not value marriage. They like marriage. They like the idea of marriage. They think marriage is good for society. They might even be married. But they think that marriage is just one of many lifestyle choices, and is largely an oppressive institution. They don't want to put the hard practical work into supporting it. A lot of them still support neo-liberal economics, just with far-left social policies, and such economics badly hurt the ability to start a life and family for the younger generations. They don't really care about preserving the institution of marriage and making it widely available to others. They like marriage just enough to avoid admitting how little they care.
Where are the economic progressives, socially moderate/conservatives when you need them?
I supported same-sex marriage. I wouldn't today. I think marriage is a great institution and we should be tolerant (even supportive) of gay people. But the social far-left has gone way too far since 2015.
If you aren't careful, I will vote for Trump. Mainly because I have two options and I'm not voting for the option that does not value marriage or community.
1
@James
I consider myself economically progressive/leftist and socially moderate to conservative. I think divorce is terrible for children, as are single family households. But I also don't think people should have to put up with spouses who are flagrantly cheating on them, abusing, or humiliating them. Which was essentially how it used to be. I would be fine with going back to fault-based divorce though, so that people are discouraged from leaving, if they have kids, merely because they lose interest, get on each nerves, and get bored.
However, the idea that you would vote for a guy with three wives, dozens of mistresses, children from three women -- several of which he barely acknowledges, who pays tens of thousands of dollars to porn stars and humiliates the mother of his child, all while giving tax cuts to the rich, because you think he values "marriage" and "community" is completely absurd.
Make it easier on yourself and vote for Bernie. :)
12
I think the same sex marriage movement was resoundingly in favor of the institution of marriage. If same sex couples just “liked” marriage, but didn’t value it, they wouldn’t have fought so hard to be included in the institution. Many same-sex parents believe in the value of the two parent family and think it is the best environment in which to raise a child. So I’m surprised that you would no longer support same sex marriage today, like you did in the past.
13
@Collin I think same-sex couples value their marriages. My top reason for having supported same-sex marriage is because I support marriage and understood its value to same-sex couples and their families.
I don't think straight liberals value marriage. They think of it too much as an oppressive outdated institution.
Straight liberals supported same-sex marriage because they support equality and tolerance. And because they hated the religious right, which is oddly a form of intolerance. They wanted to use gay people to virtue signal. And they wanted laws against Christian bakers. They just wanted to win some tribal culture war. When that effectively ended, they moved on to men being "toxic" and trying to fire people for pronoun usage. I don't think they were motivated by the same things I am motivated by: strengthening the great institution of marriage and building a society where we can all live together and everyone is treated with respect and dignity.
If Democrats and progressives don't have my back, why should I have theirs? Things like tolerance or Trump being a bad man is running thin as motivation. And the lip service they provide to supporting marriage is not good enough.
Things like progressive economic policies, same-sex marriage, and preserving heterosexual marriage and families are all connected together. I understand that, but I'm not sure that the Democratic party or most of the commenters here truly understand that.
1
Mr Douthat's analysis would be greatly improved if he considered countries other than the United States. The fact is, birth rates have plunged everywhere. Saudi Arabia, one of the most socially conservative countries in the world, today has a fertility rate (about 3) that is below where the US was in the 1950s. Among the countries with the very lowest fertility rates today (below 1.5) are predominantly Shintoist and Buddhist Japan and predominantly Catholic Italy.
What such statistics show is that the influence of religious and political belief on birth rates must be fairly modest compared to other factors. In my own experience, I find that many young people today, wherever they live and whatever they believe, simply don't see the point of having children. Understanding why that has happened is both interesting and hugely important,
But our understanding is not advanced by Douthat's sort of shallow analysis that strives mightily to show that conservative Republicans are slightly more inclined to marry and have children than liberal Democrats. Looking at the trends globally, the response to that has to be: so what?
12
The celebration of the destruction of the nuclear family I'm seeing as I peruse these comments is disheartening.
The collapse of marriage and having children is directly attributable to the affluence and greed of our Western society at large.
If you're not willing to support your own civilization through the most basic act of having children due to your own selfishness, then your civilization likely doesn't deserve to survive. Anyone who somehow believes we can import human beings from other cultures into our own in overwhelmingly HUGE numbers in perpetuity and not face a day of reckoning is foolish.
Just do the demographic math. This is happening now.
Unfortunately, me and my children will be on this continent when what we've sown is reaped. And it's not going to be pretty.
If civilization hadn’t decided that stagnating wages for 40 years was a good thing, maybe more of us could have afforded to have children.
Immigrants are not a problem. Who cares what color they are? Their kids will grow up as Americans. We should take every refugee we can get our hands on, they work hard and make good citizens. Sounds like you just don’t like the fact that America is becoming more brown.
15
What is this sense of prosperity Ross has? Certainly millennials and beyond aren’t feeling it. Also there’s this looming environmental collapse.
Basically all measurable future indicators are negative, if you have a positive feeling about that then your head must be stuck in the sand!
13
You seem to equate marriage with procreation and procreation with marriage. Both can (and are) being accomplished without the other.
9
Why do his columns make my head ache? I feel like I'm in a sociology or theology lecture with no exits.
11
I was devastated when my parents divorced, so I understand the concern with kids and single parents. Though I was one of the lucky ones, as my dad remained a fully involved 50% parent after the divorce. For most of my friends with divorced parents, the dad drifted out of their lives, took up with a new girlfriend or wife, and basically stopped caring about his "original" kids.
Now in my 40s, I have lots of women friends raising kids for the most part alone, with minimal involvement from the dad. In all of those cases, the father left the mother to take up with a new woman, or a divorce occurred after the mother discovered that her husband was having an affair. This has happened to my rich friends and my poor friends, religious and atheist, liberal and conservative. Often to the utter shock and surprise of the mother at the discovery.
At least nowadays leaving an unfaithful spouse is an option, as in the past most women just had to put up with it and had no other choice, economically.
And yes, I do know of a handful of instances where it was the mother who ran off, but let's get real, for every 1 story like that, there are 10 where it's the father who basically ditches his family to take up with someone new. See: our president.
I think we all understand this. So why is it that conservatives are always haranguing women, or liberals, or blaming lack of religion, instead of loudly lecturing men not to ditch their kids and families?? Why are men never addressed directly?
25
Interesting question. Why indeed?
8
Why. Even. Write this. Of course liberals are not against marriage. As a liberal, I'd say we are against legislating or forcing marriage on anyone, OR making marriage unattainable or undesirable, by social engineering tied to government benefits. Both kinds of marriage engineering are currently at play. Marriage can be an amazing and wonderful gift of growth, stability, mutual care and emotional commitment. It can also be constraining, abusive, and exploitative, and holding up "marriage" as the solution to all relational ills without acknowledging both potentials is just odd. Saying you are "for" or "against" marriage is kind of ridiculous. Saying you are for good and healthy marriages -- I think we are all there already.
9
I'm liberal. I'm married. Have been for almost three decades -- to the same person. We have children and a dog. I hope my children get married someday. Marriage is great. More people should get married. Did I say that I'm liberal? I did. In the first sentence. Did I say I was married? I did. In the second sentence.
13
Research that attempts to compare the outcomes of children in divorced households to the outcomes of children in married households are over-simplistic. As someone who grew up in a home with two very unhappily married adults, I can assure you that there are instances in which it is also in the child's best interest for two parents to divorce. I imagine it's too difficult to study this. "Married" and "Divorced" are legally recognized family statuses that can be cleanly counted, while "miserable and angry but still married" is not a category on the census questionnaire.
8
Maybe it should be! They ask everything else.
1
I’m confused about how this column frames things, and not just in terms of procreation (which is already narrow enough). What does marriage have to do with personal freedom, other than to enhance it? If you marry someone you love, who loves you, your possibilities and joy and freedom multiply and become almost infinite. And your sorrows, disappointments and even your tragedies diminish. Does he mean no sex outside of marriage is a limitation? The sexiest thing in the world is sharing your home with the person you love. Ross, you need to get out and meet a more diverse interesting set of people. People who can answer some questions. But I think you’re too narrow minded to know what to ask — or begin to see how this could help you. Signed, a lucky partner in a faithful, happy same sex marriage of 10 years and counting
5
Hey Ross, just suppose for a moment that for every baby you had:
1. Your market value to employers was drastically reduced and they were much less likely to want to hire or promote you.
2. Your market value to the opposite sex was drastically reduced and they found you much less attractive.
3. Your body would be severely damaged, likely on a permanent basis, and you might be sick enough to be essentially disabled for a year.
4. Your partner in making the baby was well known to be part of a group that is less interested in childcare, much more likely to run off and ditch you with the kid, and much more likely to want to trade you in for a younger man without kids after you were done having the baby.
5. It was going to cost you a quarter to half a million dollars to raise the baby.
6. Each additional baby would majorly amplify each of the above detriments.
Numbers 5 and 6 apply to both men and women. But numbers 1-4 apply just to women. Given these facts, it's astounding that any women agree to have any children at all!!
And no wonder that as soon as you give women education, choice, and opportunity, all but the most privileged and secure, or the most reckless and heedless, majorly curtail how many kids they have.
One could easily argue that a major function of most major religions has been as a method for men to convince women to keep pumping out babies despite all the obvious above-listed detriments to them of doing so.
Which I actually bet you agree with.
18
Don’t forgot that for every baby, a women still faces the risk of dying because of it. It still happens in 2019.
12
@kryptogal #2 is easily fixed by getting married and staying married.
#4 impacts guys as well since women often ask for divorce. So that they can go back to playing the field with bad boys. That said, most men I know want to get married and stay married. They aren't interested in getting married and having kids only to later go out looking for a younger model. I have to wonder where people get this distorted view of men. Most men is 2019 are not Don Draper.
But hey, thanks for clarifying. Modern women don't want kids or even want men. They'd rather be at work.
We got that distorted view of men from dating them.
50 years old, been dating for 36 years, have yet to find a man who doesn’t have commitment issues, mental health issues, or isn’t already married. I’m not interested in being anyone’s plaything until they find something better. I deserve better than that.
5
As I'm sure Mr. Douthat knows, liberals are all in constant communication with each other so that we can display a united front on every possible preference.
13
@polymath the blue check marks on twitter certainly are.
Oh Ross, you were born too late. You'd of bee a great moral scold in the 1600's. I suggest you read Paul Krugman's column in today's paper that factually refutes every point you make. Please make special not of the word "factually" as in facts, reality. what's happening now and not some conservative make believe world.
9
This "cultural shift" is much more nuanced than the author makes it seem. I am 35. I got married at 34, which would be considered late compared to the average age of marriage in prior generations. I have plenty of single female friends who are my age. Most of them want to get married and have children but have not met someone to marry. Yes, they are progressive and highly educated and they live in blue cities, but their decision not to marry is not borne of opposition to the institution of marriage. You can't get married if you don't have a partner. This article needs to acknowledge the large group of people who delayed marriage (i.e. waited until their 30s to settle down so they could establish their identities and careers first) who are now struggling to find a partner.
13
@Laura I think a lot of men are also struggling to find a partner. I think this is a fairly general problem and big part of the issue.
Though, what are these single female friends looking for in a guy? I mean, they must have hundreds of men around them. Yet they are struggling to find a partner.
Yeah but Ross would argue that the reason your friends can’t find a partner is because of liberalism encouraging men to be irresponsible and hedonistic
2
1. Someone who won’t run off for someone younger and better looking at the drop of a hat.
2. Someone who isn’t violent, seriously mentally ill, an addict/alcoholic or a criminal.
3. Someone who doesn’t try and control every aspect of our lives.
4. Someone who can hold a job and help support a family.
5. Someone who is a decent human being
6. Someone who doesn’t blame every one of their woes on other people who look different than them. Racism is a HUGE turnoff. Can’t tell you how many guys never even got to a first date solely for this reason. I’m not interested in listening to someone complain about people of other colors taking their rightful place as masters of the universe for the rest of my natural life.
9
Aren't most decisions about marriage, raising children, and divorce made in the context and beliefs of the pairs making those decisions? I can't imagine the pairs consulting liberal vs conservative social theories, and the mazes of of opaque nuances, to come to a decision.
And the context is largely material, income, education, health care, housing, transportation, crime. On the personal, compatibility is an important part of the context, as is the potential quality of life for offspring. Of course there is always the commonly used "who cares, lets get married asap" option.
Seems to me that conservatives main concern is to pack the courts that with judges will serve the wealth and power concentration desires of the capitalists, and rely on clerical oriented strategies to control the social boundaries of the working class, e.g. abortion restrictions and sexual orientation rights denials.
But as others have commented, perhaps the greatest reluctance to child bearing comes from the conservatives desire to let nature take its course with global warming, and help it along will unrestrained. fossil fuel use. If fire and brimstone is all you can offer future offspring, why have them?
11
I’m about as liberal as one can be if by liberal you mean supporting personal freedoms, believing in science over superstition and being expressly unwilling to offer de facto support of traditional “values.” That being said, I’m a huge fan of marriage, recognizing it as offering the potential for each of us to grow and develop in a transformative relationship; a relationship that, when it is good, strengthens individuals and their extended kin and friend networks.
So, I don’t care if you marry someone of the opposite or same sex or hair color or religion or whether you and your spouse agree on politics or dietary choices. What’s significant in marriage is that two people come together with a promise to do what it takes to be their best self for their partner and to support their partner in being her/his/“they” best as well. As a life goal, I don’t see that much exceeds the worthiness of such an endeavor, including loving one’s parents or children.
My husband and I promised to be a team and even when facing challenges that have been scary, knowing our marriage is our refuge has allowed us to find security and comfort in hard times. He’s my guy and we’re both voting a straight progressive/liberal ticket in 2020.
10
I don't think any of this hyper-political analysis bears on the decisions of normal people. We're living in the midst of a drug and underemployment epidemic, and the costs of child-rearing and of being married itself (ie being put-together enough to be worthy of being married to) are rising astronomically. Given people's innate instinct to prepare resources before childbirth, and the general desire to have a worthy mate, that's all the explanation for the decline in birthrates and marriage rates one needs. The fact that birth rates among married people has not declined underscores this.
9
I've been married to same man for 55 years. I remember when birth control became an option. Women could make effective decisions on whether to have children. That changed a lot of things.
I remember when the Feminine Mystique was published. It was popular culture, but it reflected and advanced big changes in the way women thought about themselves and men. The idea that women could and should be equals with men was heady.
Living in a marriage is complicated and the changes, at least to some degree, made it more so. People had to think about assumptions, gender roles, finances and child care. It was hard work and often failed.
I remember a monologue from years ago that explained why the narrator, who was a woman, wanted a wife. I agree. I want someone who will selflessly take care of me, love me and do the hard work required for daily life. I don't blame men for wanting that, but I don't think that makes it likely they will be good husbands.
I don't believe there is a liberal or a conservative view of marriage. Each of us has a concept based on our personalities and our experiences. It puzzles me why anyone would work so hard to try to parse it out based on conservatism vs liberalism.
10
marriage is an anachronistic institution that has outlived its usefulness. marriage is a religion based institution and as religiosity declines so does marriage. divorce on the other hand is a civil procedure whose inequities makes marriage a mistake for both men and women. its time to get rid of marriage in favor of a civil procedure that lays out the terms of its dissolution at its outset for everyone not just those rich enough to afford a prenuptial agreement.
1
@allen It certainly hasn’t outlived it’s usefulness for me. I have been happily married in a same sex partnership for 8 years, and couldn’t be happier. We are both atheists, so religion played no part in it- Our decision was based on love, increased quality of life, and security. It has proven to be a very good decision, all things considered, and I’m grateful to be living in a time when a same sex couple can enjoy it’s benefits.
My husband and I are liberals and we've been happily together for 46 years. We are childfree, which has given us far more freedom in life, more time together, and more money for retirement. Marriage does not equal kids.
7
Any commentary that fails to note that ultimately, marriage is the decision made by two human beings about what is best for them is missing the big picture. As far as what we should "do" about the falling marriage rate, my answer is "nothing". Don't have government put it's finger on the scale in one direction or another.
6
When Douthat laments the Baby Bust in America, he is, in reailty, talking about the Baby Bust in White America. Birth rates are far higher among Hispanic Americans & Black Americans.
In 2018 Hispanics were having 1,959 children per 1,000 women while whites produced judt 1640 chldren per 1,000 women.. Among blacks, the fertility rate was 1792 per 1,000 women. https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/
Looking ahead, a increasingly "mixed" society is likely to produce enough children to support us.Thanks to immigration and intermarriage, the percent of the population that is mixed is growing. By 2044, white Americans will be minority in the U.S.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.
This is because intermarriage is becomign commonplace.Today 10% of married couples in the U.S. have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, up from just 3% in 1967 https://theundefeated.com/features/pew-research-center-steady-rise-in-interracial-marriage/
Most importantly (for the purposes of this discussion) today fully 43% newlywed couples are white/hispanic.
Cultural differences suggest that they they are likely to have signficantly more children than a white/white couple.https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/
Going foward, despite Trump's best efforts to "Make America White Again," immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. from Latino countires.
8
Every past empire has had a 250 year run and one sign of the decline is low birth rates. Even the ancients had methods of birth control to reduce population in order to enjoy its materialism.
1
Ah, how nostalgic conservative males are for the days when females could be considered property and forced to labor and bear children for them - or be beaten into submission without anyone calling the police, which would probably have been futile in any case.
10
@Glassyeyed
The ultimate model can be lived in Afghanistan, where men literally lay around on cots and carpets while women, children, and their other beasts of burden do ALL of the work, and men beat said women, children, and beasts of burden with impunity. They find the very notion of educating women or teaching girls to read to be appalling, and point to the horrifically disrespectful, impudent harlots in the west as the obvious outcome of such education. Men trade their daughters and sisters as pre-teens with other families just like cattle or other market goods, and they are then expected to labor like slaves their whole lives, remain subservient in all aspects, and breed like cattle.
The small details might vary, but the ultimate outcome and goal is the same in all conservative religious cultures, from fundamentalist Mormons to fundamentalist Muslims.
8
Dear Ross,
There are plenty of conservatives who are shacking up. They are as apathetic to marriage as liberals, if not more so. I'd like see the data on the political breakdown of shacker-uppers, especially in fly-over land.
Their leader does not have respect for rules and norms. Neither do they. Why should any man commit if their fearless leader is a thrice married reprobate who has had courtesans galore? (a kindly euphemism)
"sexuality was linked inextricably to the educated class’s privilege and ambitious self-control and didn’t work as well outside the precincts of the meritocracy."
Coulda knocked me over with a feather. The meritocracy enjoys sexual relations as much as hoi polloi.
I believe that an intuition of climate change and overpopulation plays a large part in this, as others have said.
Ross's church is also an etiologic culprit. They have not sufficiently explained the sacrament of marriage and updated it for a world in which their are independent, educated women, as well as an exploration of sexuality by both sexes.
Alas, Ross, sex is not a sin.
6
This is a silly question. Are conservatives against reason?
4
Douthat's faux intellectual writing style is rendered truly comical by his suggestion to read recent speeches by Marco Rubio.
Thanks, Ross. That gave me a good laugh. I think it's a hard pass for me.
10
How the author can think that MeToo movement adherents are necessarily against monogamy is a conundrum I will not attempt to resolve because I'm worn out and don't have enough booze in the house. Goodness. The new boogeyman is MeToo, blame it for all our social ills, why not!
7
I am reasonably educated and have understood little to nothing about this article. Overall impression was intellectual and remote. Not a big fan of my NYT subscription these days.
3
The "Baby bust" is not all bad news: the rate of teenage pregnancy has been plunging--last year it was down 72% from a 1991 high.
Thanks to increased availability of contraception, plus sex education in our schools, fewer children are having children.(Meawhile, abortions have also hit a low.)
In general, both women and men are waiting longer before marryng and having children. Women ages 20 through 34 are having fewer children., Meanwhile, birthrates for women 35 and over have increased slightly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/27/birthrates-us-are-falling-abortions-have-also-hit-an-all-time-low/
BIRTH RATE BY RACEhttps://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/
4
Dear All, please stay out of my bedroom and I will stay out of yours. But before you go, know that the desire to be married and the desire to parent are unrelated. Coincident but unrelated.
8
You know Ross enough with your labels! This liberal likes marriage so much she's done it twice!
People aren't having babies for a lot of reasons but your quasi-Catholic-conservative judgement should look at the environment, job security, medical coverage, the cost of real estate, and loads of other very realistic concerns instead of lumping and dumping it on liberals.
Christ would encourage us to care for the children who are already here and he wouldn't be saying Hail Marys while doing so!
5
Once again Ross conflates living outside of legal marriage with his concept of perversion. We liberals all long for “polyamory or open marriages or escaping gender norms entirely”. Please. Big eye roll, for sure!
4
A missing point here is the divorce rates as a function of liberal vs conservative..The top divorce rate states are all red
https://www.statista.com/statistics/621703/divorce-rate-in-the-united-states-by-state/
7
OK Boomer.
The planet's dying, but yeah let's worry about religious dogma.
9
Apparently they think crowding the planet with more people will improve things.
3
"They" meaning Republican boomers, of course. Because liberals are very much aware of looming environmental catastrophe.
4
I wish I knew what problem Mr. Douthat is trying to solve.
Once there was a big problem. People got married who shouldn't have, because they thought marriage was the be-all and end-all. Because it was the only path to economic security for women. Because it was social death for a woman to have a baby out of wedlock. As far as I can tell, nineteenth century fiction has one subject: the prison house that was marriage in the patriarchy.
Now people have a little more freedom. It is messy, but it is a great improvement. Everyone wants a perfect world, but children of divorce aren't worse off than the very common situation in the old days of losing at least one parent in your childhood. And they are better off than children stuck in a house with two parents who hate each other, or maybe don't, but really don't belong together. Lived that -- it caused a lot of harm.
The declining birth rate: so what? The planet might thank us for that.
Again, what exactly are we solving for here?
13
I'm a liberal and a fan of marriage and stable families, and I'm frankly amazed to find out that my political cohort somehow discourages marriage. News to me.
10
The movement away from traditional marriage should not be attributed solely to liberals and leftists. Let us go back to 1957, long before Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer put pen to paper. In that year Atlas Shrugged, the Ayn Rand novel of which five million copies were purchased between 1957 and 1984, went on sale. The heroine, Daphne Taggart, defiantly remained single. She and the novel's hero, John Galt, proclaimed that they would never live their lives for another or ask another to live their life for either of them. If we are going to pass out blame for the excess of self-indulgent individualism, there is more than enough blame to apply to both sides of the political spectrum.
10
To answer your question Ross, no, liberals are not against marriage. But they're not for it either. It's a personal choice. Religion has nothing to offer to help make the decision to marry. Nor should it. Do you pray? Gotten any positive results or feedback lately? I'm results oriented.
6
Why do I always feel like columns by Mr Douthat are sermons? Indeed he called himself a 'Catholic journalist'. I would never have guessed.
Marriage rates and birth rates are going down all over the developed world. Japan, for example, sees it as a national crisis, and they are not Catholics for the most part.
Religion has nothing to do with it. The problem young people face is the ethics and morality of bringing a child into a world that is warming with oceans rising and fires, earthquakes and foul food supplies and sweltering hordes of nomadic homeless undocumented people seeking food and shelter.
If you want to hear what they think just ask them. They feel they have been left at the table of life with nothing but crumbs left. Who can blame them for their cynicism?
13
Mr. Barr's comments that really began this debate focused on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s as root cause. He, and most commentators, fail to note that the defining social/political fact of that era was not the sexual revolution, but the Vietnam War.
Given the profound betrayal of American values that war represented, degradation of social structures that operate within the greater national social context was inevitable.
This, the loss of confidence of the American people in their nation, is the second great cost and crime of that ill conceived war.
1
What matters most in life is dignity, fulfillment, connection and peace. How that gets achieved is a multi-factored, complex dynamic that includes familial support, emotional intelligence, evolved coping skills, insightfulness, discipline, love and goals. It also involves not having artificial obstacles in one's path like access to healthcare or education and/or prohibitive costs.
So.
May I suggest you climb off thy might horse and look around, Mr. aptly named "do-that"?
Seriously. Stop pontificating form your ivory tower and consider the reality of what you are, pun intended, espousing.
For example--does traditional marriage between men/women serve the LGBTQ community well? Does traditional marriage always serve women well?
I am very pro-marriage. I am happily married for a quarter of a century. Ours is a stable, loving, supportive and very functional LIBERAL home. There is love in our lives, balance, and respect. These are things that exist WITHIN and OUTSIDE of my marriage and not because of it.
Some advice for you, since you are giving it out yourself: Think for yourself. Climb outside the linear bars of your upbringing and accept that people will always organize their lives in a variety of ways. Instead of castigating people for a variety of choices, might you not do better just respecting and being curious about other's life experiences? Might conservatives not do better to consider the needs of people unlike themselves?
Do-write-about-THAT please. :-)
5
Which `side' worked to extend 'marriage equality' and which 'side' was so strong in their campaign against it? People in gay marriages raise children too, some biological, some adopted.
Which 'side' fires people from their jobs for being gay married - which maybe scares some that heterosexual divorced people will be fired next? As usual for this columnist, missing a big part of the history of marriage, which is far more complex than what was normative in 1950s America.
4
I'm an almost 40 year old woman and very happily married. I love marriage because it makes a whole lot of things easier, but those things all have to do with paperwork and money.
We got married because we wanted to have kids and I suppose I'm a bit old fashioned in that way and felt that was the best foundation upon which to build our family. But honestly, the difference for us between being married and not being married is purely one of bureaucracy. Oh, and we're a same-sex couple too, so of course we're not even considered in this piece save for a cursory mention of Obergefell at the end. One kind of marriage is considered here, and that's the heteronormative kind. There are lots of folks who are married and are not straight, or not monogamous. Guess that's all a little too much nuance.
6
Ross, a few thoughts:
I am a woman who was raised as a devout Catholic in the 60s and early 70s. Many of us who rejected tradition then did so out the feeling of being straight-jacketed into stereotypical cultural norms that did not fit everyone. Eventually my husband and I consciously married; I loved children, loved being pregnant and a mom. But all of that was a clear and mature choice. You cannot possibly understand how many messages for young women there were then (and still are) that without a husband their value is diminished. THAT is what many women I know rejected.
Secondly, you underemphasize the difficulty of raising children in nuclear families. I have spent decades working with young families, which has convinced me that we are meant to be a tribal species. Nuclear families magnify dysfunction and isolation where that exists - much more rampantly that you may understand. These issues are worsened under stress. Families/children benefit from wider support and resources. Thirdly, I have noted that conservatives often use the word "attack" against their preferred institutions when discussing other points of view. You are not attacked when others, due to their own life experiences and stressors, make different choices. Our current socio-cultural-economic-political-ecologic climate is HUGELY stressful, especially for young people. In such unsettled times, many traditions are not seen as useful as in the past, or as desirable or within reach in managing life.
14
@colorado I think you have a lot of good observations.
A big part of how my parents raised me relied not only on the nuclear family but the extended family and the broader community other families who know each other through public school functions. At the moment, my brothers and I live in completely different states, and my career gives me little choice in where to live. This undermines the extended family and adds to modern stresses.
I suspect your decision to marry was a deeply mature decision. I hear a lot from the media and casual discussions about how marriage is just a choice and women are oppressed by marriage etc. But I hear very little about why I should make a mature choice similar to the one you made.
The fact that now is such unsettled times is a big part of it. Marriage certainly seems light years out of reach from where I am at now.
3
And in heterosexual marriages, wives, and maybe husbands, too, are still these days considered diminished if they don’t have children. This brainwashing/ pressure results in lots of couples who shouldn’t have children having them.
2
I get the basic argument you are making. But if conservatives generally favor monogamous marriage and all that goes with that, and keeping in mind the "impressionistic" conclusion that conservatives favor families, how is it that conservatives support Donald Trump, impressionistically or not?
10
More and more couples are having kids without marriage, to the extent that now more children are born out of wedlock than in. There are certainly plenty of theories about why this is happening, but there is little doubt that it is bad for kids. I won't say bad for families because essentially there is no family. When a couple brings a child into the world, they need to nurture the child to adulthood, not split and say oops; my bad, somebody else do the job.
1
If society wants people to get married and have kids, there needs to be enough good jobs to make that possible. It’s lack of money more than anything that prevents people from marrying.
2
Hi, I’m a die hard, blue liberal here and 27 years old. I’m getting married in July. I have no objections to marriage and all of my equally liberal friends plan on getting married when the meet the right person. My fiancé’s friends all just got engaged —- we are attending 5 weddings, including our own, in 2020.
A wedding is expensive. Kids are expensive. We will be waiting at least 6 years to have kids because we want our student loans to be paid off and assure that our savings are in a good spot. We also want to live a full life before I have children. While excited for eventual motherhood, I have a life I’d like to live first and my job is not to be a baby making machine as this male, Catholic writer implies. This is the same path all of my friends are on as well.
Us “snowflake millennials” are waiting longer because we’re broke and trying to assure our children are set up for success (this is ignoring the climate crisis).
Perhaps, men should be better partners and more women would consider marrying them. My fiancé does more than his fair share in our living situation but when I hear what women at work deal with in regards to their husbands, I’m floored. Maybe women aren’t getting married because it’s easier to be single than deal with a grown man who behaves like a 14 year old who refuses to cook or cleanup after himself and would rather “grab a beer with the guys” than be a Father or Husband.
17
Most of the work still falls to the women, even though we work our own jobs. Gee, I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t want to take on the incredibly expensive and time consuming job of motherhood on top of working outside the home.
4
So, I guess, liberals are in charge of the country's sexual mores. However we decide, the nation turns--and conservatives have no voice in the matter.
Heaven knows, the conservative movement--from Gingrich to Reagan to Trump--have provided sterling examples of monogamy.
But I'm a little troubled by the criticism that "progressivism seems hostile ... to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of 'consent.'" Is Douthat arguing that consent is not a necessary prerequisite?
It may seem that I'm picking a nit here, but it seems to me that this notion lies at the base of a lot of conservative thought. Unconstrained free will is a danger, leading to perdition and depopulation.
The basis of an ordered society is fealty to its rulers, starting with the husband's role as ruler of the household. Thus, women should not be allowed control over their bodies.
In this respect, his Catholicism (he mentions) is not irrelevant. The Church has been, since its founding, a pillar of authoritarianism.
6
Doesn't the Bible Belt have some of the highest divorce rates, births from unmarried mothers and opioid addiction rates? Russ needs to focus on his own tribe before analyzing and criticizing progressives.
Progressives have some of the higher marriage rates, though at a later age, and lower divorce rates. Those hedonistic and godless progressives....
10
"The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s O.K. to worry about"...
Yes Russ--we're ALL prosperous now. Thanks in part to the spectacular comeback of coal and the millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs personally created by Trump.
What an incredible disconnect with the lives of Americans outside the top 10 or 20%. Half of Americans are unable to meet an unexpected bill of $500--we're calling that "prosperity"? And what happens when the bill isn't $500, but $2,000 or $10,000? What happens in case of illness and a few missed paychecks? Since Russ is blissfully unaware...what happens is eviction. Followed by homelessness.
This is the "real America"--territory with which Mr. Douthat has absolutely no familiarity.
12
Exactly! I am so tired of people trying to tell me how great the economy is. I sure am not feeling it. Maybe I’d be a little more optimistic if it didn’t take 3 part time jobs to cobble together enough to barely scrape by,
8
Why is this nonsense being published here?
It's demeaning.
12
I am a liberal and I have been married 20+ years. I am frankly tired of these kinds of columns that seek to pit different parts of the country against each other. Guess what? It has worked stupendously. So let's just split the country up. The East coast will be fine. The West coast too. The rest of the country will be on its own. No more of my blue state tax dollars to prop up the red state haters who like to call me things like, libtard and human scum. Maybe Texas will support those guys. I don't want to help the red states any more.
10
@Gone Coastal And when both left coasts implode the rest of us will act accordingly.
Not everyone from a red state is a conservative idiot.
"Mankind should have been my business," as the ghost of Dickens's Marley retorted to his avaricious surviving partner Ebenezer, could just as easily be hurled at our political and business oligarchy who have torn the middle class to shreds since 1980. Need I mention the 58,000 and 6,000 plus young boys and girls we mulched in futile wars in SE Asia and the Middle East? Need I elaborate the outrageous greed that ripped the livelihood of so many families so that the elites could profit from overseas transfers? Need I mention the anxiety of our citizenry who live hand-to-mouth? I shall bypass the gouging in tech, medicine, real estate and entertainment that sucks the marrow of savings and security from our collective bones. Anxiety is the national mood that keeps legions of people from forming any true long term aspirations for family and commitment. Where are the needs of the People in this crass swindle of an economy?
7
@Brian The needs of the people will be identified and someone will start a business to serve it.
Preaching loudly to direct the boogeyman blame of involuntary celibacy.
No one is guaranteed the right to mate or have a relationship.
There has been a cultural shift that isn’t defined by politics or the blind eyes of religion.
2
Why be "extremely impressionistic"? Isn't that basically the same thing as making it up as you go along? Oh, for an evidence-based argument!
1
What an interesting topic made into a excruciatingly dull read. Women can stay childfree now without the extreme societal abuse they used to endure. I am blissfully childfree. There were always a percentage of women like me--now we can live as we want.
Quality child care costs are through the roof--wake up! Parents need support.
This guy needed some decent editing. What a bore.
10
So were liberals setting aside their general dislike of marriage while they were working so hard to make it legal for me to marry my same-sex partner? If so, I should thank them for consenting to embrace the irony, and possibly the hypocrisy, of their efforts on my behalf.
6
Why should heterosexuals be the only ones to suffer? Share the pain!
1
You forgot:
Third: conservatives have to do more to make family life easier, providing good health care options, support for child rearing for poor and middle class families, family leave, etc.
Fair?
4
@Numas Others are not responsible for your health care or child rearing. Most adults pay for their own stuff without looking for a handout.
Had wages not stagnated for 40 years, a lot more of us would be able to do that. One cannot start a family when one does not have a decent wage & job security. What happened to rewarding people who work hard? I’ve been told all my life if I work hard my bosses will notice and I’ll get rewarded. Reality has been very different. I saved one boss $50,000 on Monday-she rewarded me by firing me Friday. For something my predecessor did! How’s that for a reward for hard work?
3
Then don’t complain there aren’t enough babies. When people don’t make the kind of wages necessary to support families, they don’t have them. Conservatives have done everything in their power for the last 40 years to hollow out the middle class. This is the result we get from that.
3
When it comes to fertility rates and marriage rates, the elephant in the room is the economic stagnation and the data-supported life-long career and economic hit taken by today's potential child bears during the great recession. This discussion without considering these economics is weak or pointless.
5
I'm about as liberal as it gets, but looking back on my 35-year-long marriage, I have to say that marriage is an incredibly good way to live.
We spent 10 years in Switzerland, and the standard story of a person's life there is quite a bit different than the one I grew up with. It starts with a committed partnership - no wedding - and shared financial and domestic arrangements. Then, after some years, a baby arrives. This is the point where marriage seems to have some benefits that exceed the costs, and then, yes, people get married. I think this is a truly acceptable way to organize one's life. Works for the parents, works for the child. Avoids a lot of sturm und drang aroud divorce.
2
Pointless to intellectualize the marriage/fertility issue. I would argue it is easy to underestimate the effect of student loans on our society and family life. Young people are unwilling to start families while dealing with an economic burden that has no end in sight.
7
Can’t blame them I bit. I am past having children, but with the current state of employment being largely insecure, low wage positions which make paying back student loans extremely didficult, no young person in their right mind is going to start a family.
2
Declining birth rates should be welcomed. Automation - robotics, software - will continue to ruthlessly eliminate jobs, especially those that don't require advanced education or specialized skillsets. Widespread unemployment will be a real threat to democracy.
Regarding 'loneliness' - studies show that the unmarried have a larger network of friends. And nothing is lonelier than being trapped in an unhappy marriage.
7
Can we stop pretending that the moral superiority of the religious right and conservatives translates into stable families and strong marriages? There is significant evidence that divorce rates are higher in red states and driven by lower family incomes, higher unemployment, lower levels of education, and other "secular" factors. I'm a Protestant Christian, but I really dislike the superior moralistic attitudes of evangelicals and and conservative Catholics and their tendency to point fingers and build narratives that blame others for societal ills that are prevalent across society.
11
Apparently, having children is no longer satisfying or enjoyable. We are too busy.
1
NYT, why do you incite people with such click-bait headlines?
Shame on you for sewing division.
1
Ross, with all due respect, the REAL reasons people aren’t having kids is because no one can afford them; insurance doesn’t cover most of pregnancies/treats it as a precondition; and the rent is too damn high!
It has little to do with political leanings, religious beliefs, except for on the extreme right, where birth control is not allowed.
You, once again, are missing the forest because of the trees.
13
Have you considered that one spectacularly uncomplicated reason fewer people are getting married is that more women are no longer willing to put up with the absolute crap they used to put up with from men?
If they can support themselves at all, even at a lower wage than men's, women will avoid marrying, when it's harder to find a good man than ever before -- no matter how much those women wanted to get married and have children. And if they marry and the guy turns out to be a brute after all, women will leave before they have all the children they wanted to, unless pressured hard by the cultural norms of their community or by financial desperation to stay. And they know their children will be better off with a single mom than living in the house with an abusive jerk.
If anything, the lesson of metoo is that gross behaviors from men that one would think might have died out decades ago are alive and well and thriving, not just at work but at home.
10
I have been informally polling my sons' (29 and 32, both married, 1st grandchild this year) friends and cousins on this for at least the last decade. I have never run into a general hostility to marriage. What I have seen is fear of having children unless everything is just right. While resource and state-of-the-world reasons are sometimes given, the big two are economic insecurity and fear, particularly for women, of falling behind in their careers. Delving deeper, some of the fear is knowing that the resources of prior generations of neighbors and friends and local family has been diminished. Our more atomized, online lives, are not conducive to the reality that raising children with community and support is much easier and more enjoyable than raising them alone.
5
Yeah, we libtards are agin marrudge. Less’n yr gay.
We eat babies, too.
13
Heterosexuality is no longer popular among those who, in a normal, healthy society should be marrying and having children.
Might it have something to do with the fact that young people start out their adult lives in so much debt that they can’t even think about marrying (expensive!), let alone having kids (really, really expensive!)
8
Though I am not a liberal, I will weigh in on this. Patriarchal marriage, as it has come down to westerners though patriarchal religion, is very often a very bad deal for women and children.
13
How could you write this entire column, Ross, without mentioning the role that fear of ever worsening climate change is having on dropping marriage and birth rates? I listened to an entire NPR show about Americans making such decisions out of fear of the future. None are so blind as those who will not see.
301
This view ignores many things. The freedom of women to choose their own courses, to not be dependent on a relationship with a man is not a bad thing. Being able to separate from a spouse or significant other who is neither a good parent nor a good partner, whether for personality reasons or substance abuse, is good for children and women.
We married late in life, and had two children. More would not have been wise because of my age. Up until our 30s neither of us was in a position, or a relationship, that made marriage and family an option. And we wanted to be able to support our kids in a loving and financially secure way, to give them music lessons, a bit of travel, and a good education on the budget of schoolteachers.
The problem I see around me, in lower and middle economic households in our area, is that young people are having a difficult time establishing lasting relationships. The women's movement and MeToo have allowed us to not be stuck in a relationship that is toxic, as many in older generations were. And kids are born, both because of the stigma of abortion and the lack of stigma for unwed parenthood, and they are then raised however their parents are able to raise them. The fact that many women with kids are better off financially these days without a man to support as well is significant.
4
I'm a California raised liberal in her 60s, and I've been married for 41 years. We liberals have no objections to marriage at all - if anything, we want to widen the scope of marriage to include mixed race, mixed religion, and, of course, LGBT. As for having lots and lots of children - in my childhood, pre-the birth control pill, many families had 10+ children. As soon as the pill came out, women dove on it, and the birthrate plummeted. Most women - most couples! - don't want 10+ children. They want 1-2; some want 4; but most importantly of all - they want the choice to have as many or as few as they want.
10
The problem is not whether people are for or against marriage.
The problem is that it is a really, really, really, really bad idea to raise kids in a single parent household.
It doesn't matter whether the two parents are gay or straight. It doesn't matter if it is a man and a woman, or two women or two men. It matters that there are two long-term adults parenting kids.
Liberals don't like to hear this. But the number of studies coming to this conclusion are overwhelming.
The serious, statistically valid, negative impact on children, especially boys, of having a single parent are beyond doubt.
125
@Frank It's about income, not number of parents. When single parents have means, the kids are just fine.
95
@turtle And by means, we mean what?
Maybe at $200,000 a year or more when you can afford to buy quality in-home child care, and then private schools. But that really is just a way of outsourcing the 2nd parent function.
Not realistic for 95% of the population, who are having 98% of the children.
21
@Frank Hysterical much?
How bad can it really be? Even the best 'raised' most often just end up as another employee. So they can earn income and provide for their family ... rinse and repeat with their kids.
If this is the end goal, why all the fuss?
32
It's better for personal satisfaction and in the long run for the society if people entered into marriage from an enlightened interest in wanting to be with each other.
On a more practical level, there is no mention of impact of technology - dating sites, easier access to various sexual arrangements - in accelerating the pace of unmarried people.
1
For those, liberal or otherwise, who understand that, of course, marriage is dead, what other conclusion could they reach? There are no other lifelong commitments they have ever agreed to, nor would be willing to entertain. Properly explained, marriage sounds like an enormous con. Wrapped in religiosity and romance, the very idea is a fairy tale. Left unsaid at the ceremony is the utter absence of both when the lie is recognized. In their place are the civil and criminal courts who decide how this lifelong contract may end. God and love are nowhere to be found. As with children who are left with no other option but to move on when they realize "happily ever after" is poppycock, so are the happy couple who are left to decide, individually, what moving on would mean for them if they were to try to break that lifelong contract. Who must leave the house, what about the kids, money and property? Which of the parties is at fault, what is alleged and can be proven? Have either party kept a "marriage diary" to note when love and God have left the building? My advice, if you're going to marry, takes notes. Some magistrate may ask you to be specific one day. Interview matrimonial lawyers before you marry, and watch the movie "The War of the Roses".
2
The details might be complicated but the big picture is simple. Marriage and babies are optional because of the recent availability of modern birth control.
It is easy to talk about sex without babies now, but it was a pipe dream 60 years ago. Now it is a practical reality.
Cultures tend to adapt to reality, although they sometimes take their time about it. We are experiencing that adaptation now, and this article is evidence of that.
4
Methinks that conservatives are conservative and see no benefit in social change. It is all better as it was. It is an historical myopia that defines conservative ideology and demonstrates once again the illogicality of conservatism.
Apparently, there has been an extensive period when virginity was not valued and cannibalism was in vogue. St Paul and Aristotle thought slavery was acceptable. For example. (All perhaps in different eras.) Yesterday and its ideals are, thankfully, yesterday.
Conservatism is based on illogic. You didn't make it. You didn't choose it. It is important to take it seriously but hubris is a fundamental conservative shortcoming.
3
Everybody has a bunch of opinions. Every Op-Ed column everywhere from every side always sounds to me like just another college class essay.
Just get real. We are put here to live. We are equipped by countless aeons of evolution to live. Dive into life; this is always my message to the young.
My wife and I were married at 19 in 1967, the Summer of Love. So now we've been married 52+ years. We had 3 kids by age 22 and the last two by age 28. We had 6 grandkids by the time we were fifty.
We have 12 grandkids, most grown, and recently acquired two grandsons-in-law. I ski, hike, travel with adult grandchildren.
Throw away the magazines and the newspapers that tell you what life is about-- they're all wrong.
The real question here is "why does this matter?" At the end of his essay, Mr. Douthat points to "sterility" and "loneliness". Not all of us care about the birth rate (more immigration anyone?), but of course, widespread loneliness is not desirable. But is traditional marriage the only way not to be lonely? Gotta wonder about all those priests....
6
Not mentioned among the excellent comments I have read so far is the pernicious effect of forces in our culture that are not liberal or conservative but simply out to make money -- the wedding and entertainment industries.
How many couples simply pass on marriage because the wedding and entertainment industries have convinced them since they were children that MARRIAGE = WEDDING? And with what weddings have become, they can't afford a wedding.
Gone are the days when the couple would invest in a dress and some flowers and cake, and some bridesmaids' dresses and rented suits, and invite their local friends and family for a ceremony at their local church, followed by a simple reception. A wedding now means at least a year's advance notice for an event involving three days of all-day entertainment at some full-service glamorous destination, with scheduled activities, six changes of clothing, ten meals, party favors, and heaven knows what else, and costs the couple tens of thousands of dollars and their guests a couple of thousand each.
Better to spend it on a down payment for a house, or to pay back student debt, or some other useful purpose. The one thing that hardly ever occurs to a young couple is to have a simple, local wedding, whether at a church or somewhere else. That is just not in keeping with the "Special Day" they have been taught to equate with marriage.
1
I would like to make one more comment.
There is a definite correlation between the decline of industrial jobs in manufacturing (and the unions and wages associated with the industrial economy) and the decline of marriage.
We can place the blame for that on the neoliberal economists embraced by conservatives who espoused free trade with low wage countries and hence the move for many people into low value-added service sector jobs, like stocking the shelves of Wal-Mart or Amazon, selling their cheap stuff made in near-slave-like conditions in China, which used to be made right here, and paid decent wages, and made people proud of their work.
Discuss that Ross Douthat.
7
"For all the bright talk about the blue-state, upper-middle-class marriage model, in the aggregate Republicans marry more and divorce less than Democrats, ideological conservatives are much more likely to be married than ideological liberals, and conservatives are more than twice as likely to describe marriage as something “needed” for “strong families."
All this may be true, Ross, but it strikes me that you are cherry-picking data no more or no less than your liberal sparring partners, so you can brush aside the economic angle to press your social critique. The fact remains regardless of professed political alignment: In the United States, the poorer you are, the less likely you are to be married. (A brief by the Institute for Family Studies, no liberal organization by any means, backs me up: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today.)
Marriage (and divorce) cost money in our society, or are perceived to. Increasingly, people who have little money to spare are opting not to take a chance on that cost -- for better or worse.
5
Ross Douthat, stop using the word "liberals". I'm a liberal and I'm definitely pro-marriage. Being pro-marriage is not the province of "conservatives". Many prominent conservatives are spouse cheaters and divorced.
This is what conservatives do: they make an outrageous statement against progressives or liberals and then the progressives or liberals are forced to defend.
Here is my headline:
Are Conservatives Against Reason?
11
Yes
4
@Sirlar Yes. I posted that the author abuses the term "liberal".
1
"And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock."
"… emphasize … to explaining …" | What's up with that?
"… emphasize… in order to explain" sounds better to me.
1
Ha, ha, ha! For a second I thought Mr. Ross was seriously suggesting that conservatives, with their much higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and sexual violence, were more likely to support and engage in "traditional" marriage than liberals. I then realized that this was not an illogical screed but rather biting satire. Ha, ha! Well done, sir!
6
Why is exercising a freedom of choice, such as choosing not getting married, such a threat to those who have the freedom to get married? This is where the GOP has retreated. If you aren't 100% with them, you are an enemy, period. Not Christian; Enemy. Not pursuing marriage; Enemy. Not voting Republican; Enemy.
Our biggest mistake is allowing republicans to get away with the constant demonizing of everyday citizens exercising their basic human rights and freedoms for which so many have died to preserve. Pete Seeger essentially said that your neighbor probably doesn't feel the same way that you do, and you should probably get used to it. They demonized him too....
6
@SamRan, Long before marriage became a religious or societal norm, communal cohabitation was how mankind lived and procreated. And with disease, war and famine a daily threat, most children were more likely to die young, or grow up with a single parent, or no parents at all. Thus, children growing up in single parent homes is not new. And with most marriages ending in divorce, single parent homes will continue to be the norm. The varying forms of birth control has helped prevent more women and children from being stuck in those poverty stricken single parent households..
4
Since Mr Douthat is publicly Christian, I'm going to quote from the Bible: "First take the log out of your own eye." Meaning, instead of being prescriptive about what other people should be doing, it would be helpful if you would focus on finding and fixing your own flaws. Taken seriously, that will prove to be a full-time job, and it's unlikely that after that you will feel any impulse to pontificate on this or any other topic.
5
They are not against marriage, just not in favor, regarding it as not superior to casual shacking-up.
They are against childbearing, partly because of ideological reasons and partly because it interferes with the lifestyle of casual sequential shacking-up.
That will be the death of our civilization. The birth rate among educated, mostly "liberal" (in the current sense), Americans, Europeans and Asians is far below replacement. The American birthrate only looks (a little) better because of comparatively fecund underclasses (of a variety of ethnicities).
When women are educated and given some measure of equality birth rates go down. That is not a bad thing. We may well need to tweak our capitalistic model to embrace sustainability over constant growth. This will be incredibly difficult but may save humankind as well as the planet.
3
What does abortion have to do with marriage rates? Unwanted children don't usually do much to promote conjugal stability. And speaking of liberals, maybe Ross missed that pile of data showing much higher rates of divorce in so-called red states. Maybe some liberalism could help these people keep it together a little longer, not to mention getting better healthcare.
7
How can an article, titled as this one is, not even mention the State’s infantilizing overreach into Citizen’s personal lives. Marriage is a lot of things, not the least of which is a covert contract citizens unknowingly sign, allowing the Government many liberties with your personal life, property and finances. This doesn’t even take into account t the control and ownership still attached to Marriage. Time we move on to a more respectful arrangement.
1
I have 3 siblings, from the 4 of us 3 children who are now 40, 36, and 30. And very likely none are having children. Why? Can’t afford it or manage it, not maternal, pessimistic about
3
The number of humans on earth is still unsustainable and will be for a long time. The economic answer to low birth rates is not more babies; it's immigration. And the main reason I'm not marrying my partner of over 20 years is because under the current US healthcare system, one serious illness or accident could bankrupt our family.
141
@KL
Sorry about your healthcare situation... and of course in the US you're not alone. But if just one of you could get health insurance from a decent employer then a marriage would mean coverage for both (and any other dependents as well). Still, health insurance is no guarantee that a severe illness won't push you into bankruptcy. America is a vicious country!
"The number of humans on earth is still unsustainable and will be for a long time."
It won't be a long time if Trump has a 2nd term! He's accelerating the cataclysm that will involve a global genocide witnessing the death of billions of people.
14
@KL I am in a similar situation. I cannot get married because I make less than my partner, so having two incomes count toward my health insurance costs under the ACA would mean I pay a lot more and get no benefit.
He works for a small company and has health insurance, but it only covers him. I work part-time and have been actively seeking full-time employment in my field while working on a graduate level education. Full-time jobs that pay more than minimum wage are becoming scarce, at least in my field. They have been replaced by part-time positions with no benefits, hence my return to school.
7
I grew up in a conservative state and married at 23 and divorced at 36. I would say that waiting until you are older to marry is a good idea because people change a lot over time. While I don't think you necessary need to wait until you have all of your ducks in a row, you should be old enough to have a sense of yourself, your values and what you want.
As far as children, there are many married people that would have more children if there was more financial support. I know people that have one or two that would like more, but can't afford the child care costs and unpaid maternity leave and policies that helped with that would increase the number of children.
I do think a family with two (or more) adults as in an extended family is better for children than a single parent. European families that are unmarried are as stable as married families. However, given US culture, I would not recommend being unmarried for both legal and social reasons.
In the past working class jobs paid well enough to support a family. Today, they do not pay well enough to support an individual. Poorer people choosing not to marry or have children are making a wise economic choice.
2
This seems to ignore the statistics that show blue state divorce rates are smaller than red states, or the fact that well educated liberals tend to raise more children in 2 parent households than red states.
6
There are 7.7 billion people on Earth and we should have more children? Explain that to me like I'm a four-year-old.
8
Are conservatives against children? It does not feel like a coincidence that conservatives oppose food stamps, medicaid, subsidized pre-K programs, school lunch programs, and much else that benefits our youngest. Not a good way to frame a debate regardless of perspective, but conservative hatred of liberals is getting more and more absurd and dangerous every day.
12
Redirect some of the obscene wealth concentrated in the upper classes to fund quality child-care in impoverished areas that need it most as well as throughout middle class America, fully fund quality health care for all lower and middle class families that need it, and invest in public schools nationwide regardless of zip code, or more so in the ones that need it.
It’s really as simple as that. In the end, marriage is just a piece of paper that means nothing. I know great parents who never married, gay/lesbian couples who are raising great kids (one lesbian couple I know personally through my niece and nephew adopted two sets of siblings who are thriving), and many other non-traditional family units. Economic empowerment of and generous governmental investment in the family unit, no matter its flavor or credentialing, is the only way to stimulate more society-building childbearing.
Conservative obsession with waging political and economic holy wars with the pathetic “marriage is between one man and one woman only” mantra will never win. Republicans are the ones who have repeatedly, and quite viciously at times, attacked and defunded the civic foundation of the family unit because it evolved beyond their narrow antiquated definition. Until Republicans accept change and actually fund families with the kind of supportive services that allows them to thrive, they will continue to be the one and only anti-family party. Marriage is besides the point.
4
The babies/children who were taken from their parents and locked in cages will never get over the trauma of separation.
The border patrol people who took them knew in advance that they'd never be able to keep track of their victims or reunite them with their parents.
Why doesn't Ross lead a crusade to find those children and restore them to their families?
10
From your own paper:
The researchers Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have made the case for liberal attitudes, in their 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.” Liberals encourage gender equality and later marriage, which helps explain why divorce is lower in blue states. College graduates tend to marry and stay married. Blue states are better at keeping families together than red states. The red states of the Deep South really do look worse by almost every social metric than the country as a whole, including income, life expectancy, educational attainment and family structure.
9
I was raised as a Catholic, went to Catholic schools for 10 years, have been married for nearly 50 years, but have no children. The nuns and priests who taught us made it clear that the only acceptable life paths to take were to enter the priesthood or the convent or get married and have children in order to follow the biblical admonishment to, “be fruitful and multiply.” We were told that God wanted as many souls as possible to worship him in heaven. This philosophy of growth also benefited business interests that looked forward to growing markets for their products and services. In my early adulthood I was often admonished for not having children, sometimes by parents wishing to have grandchildren, sometimes by friends who considered it the proper thing to do. My own reasonings for my decision to remain childless notwithstanding, I see little benefit to people being encouraged to have children at a time when we are facing extreme environmental challenges due primarily to unfettered human population growth and our related consumption of limited resources. To fail to understand that the traditional path is unsustainable reminds me of an oft quoted line from a play by Oscar Wilde in which someone is described as knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing. In other words, always stressing the economic benefits and costs while failing to consider the larger ramifications.
7
Why can’t it also just be okay that it turns out many women don’t want any/as many kids as they were essentially forced to have in the days of legal marital rape, no contraception, etc.? Women have real options for the first time, living in a world where we were fortunate enough to be born and raised with that knowledge. None of my (mostly liberal, all well educated, none married) friends want children. And you could qualify that with “yet”, because we’re still young, but the simple fact remains that at our age (early to mid twenties) we would all be married and working on our fourth or fifth kid in Douthat’s conservative heyday. Instead we went to school, earned careers, and get to pursue our real passions. I see no loss in that, only gain.
10
I'm an economic and cultural liberal, and yet it's hard for me not to find Douthat (and Frank from Boston) persuasive here. That's not to say that it delegitimizes economic and cultural liberalusm, as they have lifted women from patriarchy, minorities from inequality, and millions from poverty. But I'd be on denial if I didn't acknowledge their pitfalls, which I'm forced to admit includes not just the social ills Douthat outlines, but indeed the Trump Presidency.
@Maria
I hear you, but what Douthat insinuates--that a society without traditional marriage prescriptions must falter--is simply not true in other western democracies where marriage is no longer the majority custom for couples. Iceland Denmark, Sweden, and others are not collapsing from lack of traditional marriage or lower birthrates.
He never explicitly says this (because he knows better), but the subtext is plain as sunshine: Douthat does not like same-sex marriage, reproductive autonomy for women, or people choosing non-traditional gender roles, He sees these as threats without producing persuasive evidence that they really are.
7
@Eric I agree, that illiberal subtext to Douthat's arguments on this are clear. But I'm less interested in what the article says about his perspective, then about what pitfalls it exposes in my own. I particularly can't deny this point and I wonder whether you can either: "its favored model of marriage — as a capstone on a long period of professional development and sexual exploration, rather than a foundation for adulthood and a home for adult sexuality — was linked inextricably to the educated class’s privilege and ambitious self-control and didn’t work as well outside the precincts of the meritocracy."
@Maria
I was struck by that sentence as well. I think there is real truth in it, but these two poles that he strings apart--marriage as capstone and marriage as foundation--are not mutually exclusive frameworks for solid marriages. I think the societal move toward later marriages, as a whole, has been healthy for younger adults. And he doesn't explain how marriages that begin after "long long periods of sexual exploration" and career development cannot be a foundation of adulthood. Does waiting until 33 or 34 to marry really stunt one's maturity??
Unless we see the average marriage age ticking up past 40, I see no real evidence for the kind of cultural alarm he is sounding.
1
My daughters, aged 25 and 27 are both college educated, gainfully employed, and looking to get married and have children. The older one is not meeting men with a similar mind set, and the younger one is in a relationship, however, his job situation is not as stable as hers. These are real factors in the real world that contribute to this situation. Don't put the onus on the women, look at the external factors, men are still not looking to settle down, job market is not as stable as advertised.
5
The biggest problem with this article is that it tries to articulate narrow and specific explanations for broad and general trends. Virtually every advanced industrial economy around the world is experiencing fertility declines. One of the most well established correlations in social science is that as economies develop, fertility rates drop. Yet Douthat offers purely internal, domestic American explanations for the declining fertility rate in the US. This simply does not work. You cannot explain global trends on the basis of causes unique to the United States.
6
First, marriage is, aside from the financial union, a public declaration of the said unification of two persons. Liberals are not against marriage, however we (maybe all or some) find it archaic. Hopefully we have evolved enough to commit in both principle and honor to the formulated said or unsaid agreement between partners and the offspring involved to remain together ; this would carries more merit than wedding bells or a certificate stating it as such. And just to be safe a financial agreement between the parties would be helpful.
As I've heard, "the biggest cause of divorce is marriage". Better we take responsibility for our actions then pretend a marriage license and ceremony will hold people together.
3
"there was a clear liberal-led attack"
We take this way of talking for granted because it is so common, but the projection from the conservative imagination of some coherent "liberal" tribe engaged in "attacks" is something that really ought to be contested, because it is wrong, and dangerous.
What Douthat and Barr and their fellow travellers see when they look at the world does not match reality. And that reality is that America is a free country, a democracy comprised of individuals who seek out truth, come to their own authentic, independent conclusions about it, and then act on that.
Just to be clear, that is not what Douthat et al see. They see "liberals" as people who are simply obeying an alternative orthodoxy to the one they obey. What Douthat sees is the orthodoxy changing, not real people like you and me changing their minds.
7
I think the author needs to get past the obsession with marriage.
Yes, kids do better when they have two parents involved in their lives and living in a two parent home.
No, those parents don't need to be married and they don't even need to be male-female. Two parents is the key, not whether they are married or opposite genders.
Aside from tax benefits, there really aren't any advantages to marriage over non-marriage.
5
Did you think of asking a group of younger women? If I had had adequate parental leave and low-cost quality child care I would have been very eager to have more children. Even in a solid heterosexual marriage I needed my career to ensure family security, especially in case of illness, death or divorce of a spouse.
7
Thank you Ross Douthat for your thoughtful article laying out some of the facts and the political perspectives. Many commented that they don't know when the marriage and kids issue became so political, but this seems to be a measured response to what others have said in op-eds and ultimately suggests that the matter is not primarily political.
I think a lot of the issue is socio-economic. I have a college degree and great job. But I have to move every 1-2 years for work and spend all my time working. I don't have the sort of stable career for starting a family.
I tried dating. Many women in their 30s are hardcore feminists and very career driven and seem to lack a personality beyond their careers. (Perhaps they lack a stable career too.) Such women seem largely uninterested in having kids or "boys". I know other friends who know many divorced single moms in their 30s who seemed to go into marriage with grossly unrealistic expectations and after a few years got bored of it. Some of these women also view men as pigs and want to sow their own wild oats.
There seems to be a lack of women who genuinely value relationships, want kids, and have a realistic view of men and relationships. Neo-liberal economics is a big contributing factor (which liberals supported). But social factors like feminism seemed to have created women who value careers over relationships and don't value men. How am I to meet a good wife? Or with my career, be a good husband?
1
@James Feminism hasn’t “created” these women, they always existed but were often forced into the role of wife and mother regardless. Would you rather be holding someone captive in your marriage, or know for a fact they had other options and genuinely chose this? Maybe think what you’re implying over a little more, it will do much more for your empathetic capacity to be “a good husband” than any career change could.
4
Women don’t have much of a choice. They have to value career over a relationship, because that relationship could be over at any minute. If you are not prepared for this, you will end up living in your car when your man decides he wants a younger, better looking woman.
4
@Smilodon7 Well, us men don't have much of a choice either. I know some people who have gotten divorced or come close. From what I've seen (of people in their 30s), it isn't men looking for a younger better model and then seeking divorce. It is women getting married with unrealistic expectations that it will be some big romantic adventure. After a few marriage, they discover that isn't what marriage is and they seek a divorce and decide they'd rather have casual fun and date bad boys. And then the men being emotionally devastated and finding out that in terms of money and who gets the kids divorce largely benefits women.
So I don't see where the idea that men seek a younger model comes from. I think that's the older generations.
But honestly, what good are relationships and marriage if your life partner could leave you at any moment and destroy your life? Marriage isn't supposed to be a long term relationship that you quit when you get bored. It is suppose to be a stable life long commitment. That way people can trust one another and put in the work when times get hard.
Because of that, I actually don't think no-fault divorce should be legal. Divorce shouldn't be legal but rare. That just undermines the institution of marriage and turns marriages into non-monogamous long-term relationships (in that people might end it and seek a new partner after 10 years). People can't trust their partner nor the institution if marriage is temporary.
The reason marriage has declined in the US in the past several decades is because conservatives have taken every opportunity to undermine the financial foundations of the American family, in the name of their corporate and billionaire backers.
People don't get married today because they can't afford to -- can't afford a wedding, can't afford the house that was so often the impetus for sharing finances, can't afford to have one partner's student debt payments skyrocket because of the impact of filing taxes together. The cause? Income inequality and income insecurity from decades of conservative and neo-liberal economics.
People aren't having children because they can't imagine 20 years of stable income to raise them, nor how they will ever pay the college bills when they come due. The cause? Conservatives' wholesale undermining of our once-great public universities, their handouts to predatory for-profit schools, and their efforts to make crushing student loan debt nearly inescapable.
I can't tell if this moral handwringing is rationalization or distraction, but it's pathetic and repugnant either way.
17
Yep and yep to the two final paragraphs. Only successful liberal-progressives can afford the #LuxuryBeliefs of the sexual revolution. The rest of society - and especially children - get to carry the scars and pay the costs/externalities of failed family formation.
"So in the never-ending right-left debate about how to explain the decline of marriage and what to do about it, I think the important developments are twofold. First, the emerging phase of conservatism is more inclined to integrate left-wing arguments about the effects of economic policy and neoliberal capitalism into its cultural diagnoses — though whether this integration will lead to a wiser right or just be swallowed up in Trumpian hypocrisy and folly is an entirely open question.
Second, the emerging phase of liberalism is less inclined to concede anything to conservatives on the cultural front. It is tracing a return to the spirit of the 1970s, to the promise of ever-widening liberation — and the long-term influence of that return on a society already shadowed by sterility and loneliness will be, shall we say, interesting to watch."
1
Marriage has had a very long history, and it is hardly as straightforward as suggested in this column.
It was not always one man and one woman, with several religions even now allowing multiple spouses, and more than a few same sex marriages through history as well.
It was not always equitable in how spouses were treated, with a blind eye turned very often to spousal abuse, even to the point of murder.
It was not always about who you love, as so many marriages were about inheritance rights.
It was not always about communal property of the couple, as some societies had the husband taking possession of all of the wife's earthly possessions.
It was not even all about child-rearing, as raising kids was often viewed as a community project or extended family project, and in many places is still viewed that way.
Here's the question, Ross: whose idea of marriage should we champion?
Or, just maybe, should we examine what we want a modern marriage to do, and see how that can be encouraged?
19
Impressionistic, Mr. Douthat. Your ideas of nuance are cutting close, very close to the notion of tarring everyone with a single brush. In the sense that it's your impressions, based on what 'thinkers' say, yes, it's impressionistic. But they are based mostly on your biasess, rather than an examination of what you admit yourself is a complex set of responses by various people to various factors. Those factors include opportunity, income, anticipated income, education, and personal aspirations. Those will vary from one person (or pair of people) regardless of poitical leanings.
5
The opinion piece mentions declining US fertility rates several times. This trend is actually world wide. It correlates most strongly with increasing rights and education for women.
Eventually, sometime after 2050, the world population will start to decline and will be accompanied by severe shocks to economics and the world balance of power.
5
@Percy00
The real upcoming shocks will be due to climate change's impacts, pollution and technological advances. Actually, a smaller world population will make adaptation easier.
The marraige ethic has shifted from a socio-political instution to a personal one. One can trace this shift in literature, for example, in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers defy the alliance- and wealth-building marriage plans for Juliet. In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, you see the focus shifting from social/economic advantage to love, i.e., personal fulfilment. By the mid-20th century the shift was complete: Since love was now considered the only proper reason for marriage, the absence or loss of love became not merely an excuse but a mandate for divorce. A "loveless marriage" was seen as bad for the chldren as well as their parents.
What drove this change? Not a decline in morals, but technology. The industrialisation of the West enabled made meeting basic needs cheaply and with llittle effort. People eventually had more than enough energy and time to pay attention to life's purposes. The Declaration of Independence stated flatly that it is every human's right to pursue happiness. I think we no longer feel how radical a claim that was. Technology has made that pursuit possible for more and more people.
Technology leads by increasing choice. Morality follows.
5
I am a scientist, and so I would have liked to see a bit more examination of the basic premise of this column.
Mr Douthat presented an interesting statistic that the fertility rate amongst married couples has not fallen in the same way as that of the general population over the last decade or so. However, we must remember the statistician's maxim that 'correlation does not equal causation'.
Married couples have a higher fertility rate, yes, but why is that? Is it because, as Mr Douthat seems to assume, people who are married are more likely to have children or are there other reasons? Perhaps people who want to have children are more likely to get married (such that the correlation is essentially self-selection). Perhaps there is an underlying driver that makes people both more likely to get married and more likely to have children (economic security seems like a plausible candidate).
21
I grew up in a very religious family and considered divorce not an option. This belief was based on a system of extended family relations dating from a centuries long system of familial support in case of hardship, whether it be economic, emotional, or health based. Another base of this system was religious and communal (Amish/Mennonite).This system began falling apart in the first half of the 20th century, moving from the extended family to the nuclear family of parents and their off-spring (with the exception of isolated colonies).
Religious communities in general curtailed their support of members in time of need or as in the Evangelical Christian Churches abandoned any physical aid (substituting in its place, 'I'll be praying for you').
The period of the nuclear family was followed by the single parent structure, to end in a system of individualism without children. Obviously the loss of a base of support pushed and produced these changes.
2
"...to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many, one script to play with or abandon, one way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned, and whose still-outsize cultural power probably requires further deconstruction..."
Suffer the little children.
1
The decline of marriage doubtlessly is related to the increase in the divorce rate, which may be as low as 25% and as high as over 40% for first marriages.
Although the topic lended itself to silence well into the 1960's, most baby boomers growing up knew very few, if any, children being raised by a single mother (and, of course, none by other than a widowed single father). Young people today live in a world in which they justifiably are less optimistic about marital outcomes. Combine that with the increased financial independence of young women, and you have a result which has a lot to do with realism, and nothing to do with political orientation.
8
My husband and I have been married over two decades. We never started a family because it is economically impossible for us to do so on our two incomes. We support a disabled adult, and assist other family members financially when we are able. We live responsibility and frugally, and honestly there is not much left at the end of the month. We are working very hard to be debt free - so we can save the maximum amount to fund our retirement (we aren't betting on social security). How could we afford daycare? We certainly can't have one of us leave the workforce. And that's just the beginning of the child's life. We don't buy lattes, or new phones, or travel the world - there's nothing luxurious about our lifestyle. Wages simply have not kept up with inflation. If conservatives want to increase birth rates universal healthcare and a guaranteed basic income would be good places to start.
18
It’s telling that a piece centered on declining birth rates doesn’t even mention the age-old solution and lifeblood of American growth throughout our history: immigration! It is a major part of the oxygen supply for this nation. Without it, we wither.
20
Douthat's job is to argue about the number of conservative vs liberal angels dancing on the head of a pin. And it is always silly.
Look at what people do to determine where their real feelings and desires are. It is statistically true that so-called red states full of pious Christians have more marriages, divorces, and out-of-wedlock births than blue-staters. If conservative/Christian values mean anything, it is certainly not proved by actions. It seems that bullying aspirations are what's important. And let's remember the forever and ongoing pederasty scandals of the very religious conservative priests/bishops/cardinals of the RCC.
9
Liberals are also against death. As noted in another column, today's paper, statistically red states have higher death rates. Can you back up your arguments with data?
11
With burgeoning world problems such as climate change and leaders taking increasingly partisan stances that mean problems aren't being solved, my adult children are reluctant to bring babies into the world. Anyone wanting to increase fertility rates needs to look to making child-rearing more possible now but also making the future of the world more bright.
8
Douthat gives basically no analysis to the conservative view of marriage. He certainly does not trace its development across six decades, and in fact, he gives only three paragraphs to conservatives' (he says) increasingly nuanced view of the decline of marriage. He then traces the "modern" progressive view of marriage--not its decline--all the way back to the 1960s (the decade when Mad Men was set, just a friendly reminder) and chews it over across at least ten paragraphs, although that's just when I stopped counting.
It's only at the end of all of this that he offers a real examination of the current progressive view of the decline of marriage, which is what I think was supposed to be the point. I don't think he ever feels the need to define or track the conservative view of marriage (not its decline), which inconveniently for Douthat, has changed quite a bit in my lifetime, at least.
Look, I'm just going to boil it down to this. I was old enough in the 1990s and early 2000s (when our president seriously floated the idea of a constitutional ban on gay marriage), and while we had not yet as a society really settled on a useful vocabulary for talking about gender, I could imagine pretty much exactly this coming in those days from a conservative commentator's mouth, or pen, mutatis mutandis: "the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period."
3
i'm confused.. marriage versus commitment to one person for as long as it can work? what definition of marriage? is marriage different from commitment to a long lasting relationship?
3
When marriage is as beneficial to women as it has historically, and continues to be, for men, then maybe -- maybe -- you can convince more women to enter into the institution and stay with it. But we need a better way to deal with what you're wringing your hands about -- stability in caring for children. Considering that there are more than 124 million single Americans, by choice or chance – outnumbering those who have tied the knot – it no longer makes sense to have the government reward people for their romantic decisions instead of their caregiving responsibilities. All of us will at some point in our life need to care for or be cared for. We should be creating policies that encourage and support that, and men, you're going to need to do your share, too.
13
I think marriage, and perhaps procreation, are being impacted collaterally by larger dominant cultural discussions about sexual norms, gender, sexual consent, and several recent generations who experienced high rates of divorce among their parents. Then there are the mixed messages: Popular culture glorifies sexuality and sex, equating it with fame, success, and fortune. At the same time, religious parents teach their children to equate sex with sin and damnation - some religious groups teach that even birth control is sinful, despite knowing that many kids will experiment and some will get pregnant or sick without protection. Schools teach children to equate sex with disease. We teach children to value individualism and personal ambition and then criticize them when they put these values before marriage and child-rearing. I think our current struggle to understand and address these fundamental human relationship questions is a much more powerful factor than economics - I think we focus on the economics because it is safer territory. I would add that the history of Christianity's impact on sex, marriage, and gender relationships is also more powerful than economics - but again we don't talk about it because it is not socially acceptable to criticize religion or religious belief.
4
Firstly, I'm not so sure that more marriages and more children are desirable. Certainly not for women. Is it just a coincidence that as women gain more freedom, education and economic independence that marriage and parenthood are declining?
The burdens of marriage and child-rearing fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women. A woman gets married and suddenly she is doing the laundry for a guy who is, just as suddenly, incapable of doing his own. Frankly, all a woman has to do is move in with a man and this seems to be the case.
With the birth of a child the burden on a woman is enormous. She is the responsible one while her partner "helps" or not. In any event the male is rarely seen as the responsible parent.
Monogamy! Since when have men been monogamous? Double standard anyone? Enough said.
If our society wants more marriage and children then males need to step up and grow up.
19
Normally I cringe when conservatives describe what liberals are thinking. These descriptions are usually disjointed, one dimensional and self-serving with much of this column being a case in point. While blaming liberal thought for our growing “sterility and loneliness”, Mr. Douthat sounds like so many other conservatives predicting a dismal and fearful future if we veer from the golden ways of the past. Rather than trying to tell us what progressives want, Douthat would do better exploring what really motivates conservatives. It certainly isn’t family values in any rational sense. Is it me or do progressives seem happier and more positive even while openly addressing the enormous threats to our environment and general well-being while those who would call themselves conservatives such as Douthat ignore these threats and yet relish the idea of an apocalyptic future?
10
Here's the dirty little secret: the ultra-left (which, if you haven't looked, runs the entire American west coast) would really like our society to fracture and fall apart. They have done this, in classic Marxist terms, in order to put society back together. Their repairs; their vision; their power.
This should not be underestimated: they own public education; they own higher education; they own the bureaucracies, they are governors, legislators and they have super-majorities to ram through their agenda. Here in Portland, they have their own, private little army (the Antifa; our mayor has yet to say a single word in criticism). The local media parrots "progressive" tropes, probably without realizing they are in league with people who think the First Amendment needs a few tweeks.
Here in the west, there is no effective, organized opposition to this ongoing "project." The GOP really doesn't exist, except in rural reservations. One can only hope that the pendulum will swing the other way--but this is a political/social/economic revolution, and revolutionaries don't give up.
2
@richard cheverton You eloquently and accurately describe present life on the Left Coast, where intellectual diversity and political choice no longer exist. It’s a chilling, Orwellian Paradise.
1
Sounds pretty great to me. No wonder lots of people want to move to the west coast. Hopefully that spreads up here.
5
@richard cheverton I'm a conservative who lives in the West, and you seem to be living in a Fox News-fueled fever dream.
1
We all know that the decline in marriage is socio-economic. College educated liberals tend to get married. They would not dare to have children outside of marriage, or at least not until their careers have been well established and facing the end of their biological clock.
The few who do not get married and have kids with a partner, tend to not get officially married before the state but set up their own contract, because the marriage tax penalty is rather ridiculous.
Those not getting married but still having children and having them young tend to not have a college education - and those are splitting among Democratic and Republican voters depending on where they live and their ethnicity.
We also need to acknowledge that the phenomena of falling birth rates as a society develops is global. It is a human thing, not just an American thing and thus is not really prone to much change through policy. Once women are educated and have other options, they become more able to control their fertility and very few chose to have more than 2 children. 1-2 kids still gets one the parenting experience - why incur the added expense (physical, monetary and mental) of having a larger family? And many are perfectly happy not to be parents.
What we need to rethink are our retirement and old-age support systems. People having the ability to control the size of their family is a good thing.
9
Douthat is misreading statistics again. Many of us think people should finish college and have a job before marriage, making it a poor idea to marry before age 25 or so. Those 18-25 year olds overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Equally, older people are more likely to be married and to vote GOP. Before you draw any meaningful conclusions about the correlation between marital status and part affiliation, you have to control for the age differences. Otherwise, you have a conclusion no more meaningful than listening to Sinatra causes Republicanism and listening to Katie Perry causes one to become a Democrat.
6
Readers can imbibe Douthat's and other right-wingers' ideologically driven mythology or they can learn the facts in Paul Krugman's column, "The Red State Death Trap."
America's political "center" has been dragged so far to the right that even the only slightly right-of-center "moderates" such as Douthat are objectively radically right-wing.
Will Douthat next argue that "Liberals" really are warring against Christmas and Thanksgiving?
12
It’s not just wealthy countries that have low and declining fertility. For example, Columbia, Armenia, and The Bahamas have the same fertility rate as of the US, according to the World Bank. Fertility rates seem to be in long-term secular decline everywhere, with only temporary reversals here and there. For that reason Douthat’s attempt to find an explanation in current trends in European and American culture is not persuasive.
I certainly don’t know the answer. And I know I don’t know.
3
There are definitely some important factors that were not touched on in this article.
1) Many young people have seen members of their family or close friends go through divorces. This acts as a warning to be more careful in choosing a partner. Many people date for several years and live with their partner before becoming legally bound to each other.
2) Weddings are very very expensive and children are very very expensive. Paying back student loans is a large burden, which makes paying for extra things difficult. Especially for people pursuing degrees beyond their bachelor's, they may not finish school until 25 or later for a masters or legal degree and into their late 20s or early 30s for a PhD or MD if they go straight through with their education. Then they have to find a job and start paying back loans.
I am hopeful that the decrease in births and marriage is a sign that people are being more intentional about these major life decisions.
5
@Julia Weddings don't have to be expensive. Whatever the license costs. But, yeah, kids are RIDICULOUSLY expensive, even if, as was the case when I was a young'n, the parents aren't going to be paying for the kids' college educations.
1
@Julia Weddings don't have to be expensive. Whatever the license costs. But, yeah, kids are RIDICULOUSLY expensive, even if, as was the case when I was a young'n, the parents aren't going to be paying for the kids' college educations.
If you’re interested in improving family cohesion and making life more stable so that people want to bring children into the world, ending mass incarceration would be the best place to start. Elite debate over things like marriage and family is important, but stuff like this feels very rarified when we put whole generations of people of color in cages, tearing apart their families and communities. The worst social problems aren’t arising from elite marriage and family ideology—they are coming from the near-consensus among elites that millions of our fellow citizens are irredeemably criminal and don’t deserve a shot at a decent life. We consign so many men to unemployability and poverty by criminalizing them. Then we wonder why people aren’t getting married, why families aren’t more stable. The economic exclusion and stigma that comes from criminalizing huge swaths of the population has more explanatory power than prevailing upper middle class marriage attitudes.
5
I’m a millennial, married, with no intentions of having kids. It just isn’t feasible anymore. Both my spouse and I have good salaries, but we work at least 55 hours a week with no OT pay. Our choices would be lose one salary or fork over thousands a month for daycare. I earn slightly more than my father did, but work longer per week for it, so arguably make less per hour than he did. He was able to raise three kids, buy a 4 bedroom home in the suburbs and support our mother to stay at home and raise us. That house was bought in 1981 for 93k, and is now valued at over 300k. My student loan debt, through which I earned the degree that affords me my salary and benefits, was 30k. My fathers education costs for a similar degree, about $6k total back in the 1970s. He was able to afford two cars too. The price of a new car now? As much (or more than!) my college degree. Used prices are not much better. We have good health insurance too, though recently my spouse suffered injuries in an accident. Between lost wages, coinsurance for surgeries and appointments and 2x a week copayments for PT, well over half the savings we had worked years to build for a down pay on a home were wiped out. We do not have a high deductible plan, thankfully, though we have to pay a small fortune every month for an EPO, on top of rent that exceeds what our parent paid for their mortgages. American are fighting against a rising tide of adversities, and losing the battle. Childress families are consequence
7
Stop listening to old people pontificating and start listening to the potential child bearers.
As an employed and married person of childbearing age, I can tell you the three reasons we don’t have kids (and likely won’t): student debt, job insecurity (despite having advanced degrees in STEM, the effort of child rearing takes away from one’s competitiveness in the workplace and we have only a tenuous grasp on long term employment), and climate change.
Change those three things for me and we’ll have babies, simple as that. I’d love to have kids, but only if/when I’m confident they’ll have a good world to grow up in (no massive debt, no worries of unemployment, and no looming climate catastrophes caused by the obstruction of scientifically ignorant right-wing war mongering lunatics)
14
More of my friends are getting married than at any time in my lifetime. The reason for that is that people may legally marry a person they love, regardless of that person's gender. What does the Right not get about this?
8
I get so tired of the "us conservatives" vs "you liberals" or vice versa narrative. Ask any young person why they don't want to bring children into the world and you'll get the answers. Because the planet is literally burning. Because, with our student debt, there's no way we can afford it. Because we simply don't see a good future for our children in a world that elects Trump as president of a once great country.
16
Ah, Mr. Doughat,
Seems to me you are missing the paradise of the 1950s! Let’s make a deal. We go back to marital norms of the 1950s, but include the benefits for all Americans(not just white men) and reinstate the income tax structure of that era too!
I willing bet you would run from this deal!
15
Just using 'Liberals' in the title lumps Douthat in with the echo chamber crowd in which everything non-Trump is 'Liberals'.
7
Just an observation. 'Conservative' Republicans marry and divorce more often then 'Liberal' Democrats.
12
Are conservatives against modernity?
11
@Cardinal Fan
Yes. They're against freedom of choice and education.
7
The divisive title is quite condescending and tells us exactly who you are and what you would like us to believe, Mr Douthat. Were you trying to attract the alt-right to read your column and agree with you?
7
Of course, most babies are born to people (women) who aren’t even familiar with the term "liberal".
1
So why, if marriage is both unnecessary and unpleasant, are gay people (most of whom are liberal) so happy to have the legal right to marry, and so eager to take advantage of that right?
3
I sure hope Ross reads Paul Krugman's column today! Rather than scolding liberals he should perhaps take a trip to a deep Red state and see how things are going there.
6
The thing Conservatives hate most: people living life the way THEY want to, not the way the Conservatives think the Church "wants" them to. These same "anti-government" zealots sure want to tell me what to do inside my private life, my private bedroom, and most of all, inside my private uterus. Women are so very tired of this. So very, very tired.
14
Can't even read it. Time for a new conservative writer that can actually make valid points
7
@RVVPA
But he's aligned with Opus Dei.
Before I have a kid, you're going to have to convince me that it's worth bringing one into a world where the most prestigious newspaper can't find anything better to publish than columns like this one.
8
Yes, this liberal woman thinks marriage is outdated and only benefits men!
8
Mr. Douthat, as you lament that young people may not think the commitment of marriage necessary to the happiness and stability of their lives and society, I'd like to remind you that it was you and yours who told young people that being in love and wanting to commit to another person, to join your life with theirs, was not reason enough to get married.
That's what you said during Obergefell, during the debate over same-sex marriage. Now you may have meant only to say it to gay people, but you failed to understand that today, young straight people see gays as their peers, as their friends and siblings, as equals, not as The Other. So, by telling young straight people that their peers didn't need marriage to join together, you inadvertently sent them the same message.
9
Why have kids without the ability to guarantee the most basic essentials of clean air, water, and safe food? Without the hope of a healthy planet, the idea of bringing children into it only leads to despair. The health of our planet is essential to the well being of families. If conservatives want to support families existing, they must stop denying and start doing something to address climate change!
9
This article only focuses on exactly what the author states:
"The educated class’s privilege and self-control, and their the favored model of marriage"
What about the other half of U.S. society?
The non educated class?
The nonwhite-collared liberals or conservatives?
Hispanics (52M people) in the U.S. average almost 2.0 children per childbearing age woman. 3.85 in Wash DC area and other sanctuary cities - unclear on education level, legal marital status, father figure, etc.
Who says that marriage is needed institution? It is good according to whom? FYI marriage is just a contract between the two people. One can spend one's whole life with a loving partner and raise children without the need for that contract if they love each other enough.
Who says declining birthrates is bad? According to whom it is bad. According to me, it is great that fertility is falling. People should bear babies less and adopt more from the places that have more than enough birthrates. Oh, I see, but those babies are mostly brown not white. That is the problem for conservative Americans.
I have never gotten married and will never marry. I have never had a child and do not intend to bring one to this world especially with the uncertainty of the planet's condition50 years later. (I'm not even discussion the danger AI pay pose, etc.)
7
"...whether this integration will lead to a wiser right or just be swallowed up in Trumpian hypocrisy and folly is an entirely open question."
Given the scope of the current hypocrisy tsunami (social/religious cons who somehow idolize 45!) I don't think this question is nearly as open as the author imagines. It's getting more and more difficult even to imagine a "wiser right" of any sort.
Seems plausible that American evangelicalism's lust for political power will effectively cripple their influence on family decision-making for generations, particularly among young women.
Enjoy the thin pottage of power while it lasts, Jeffress, Graham, Falwell, et al. It is certainly a rank mess.
4
Perhaps the drop in marriage also is due, in part, to 1) living through the divorce of parents, and 2) getting old and not needing to get married again after the death of a spouse.
Considering Trump's animus toward California and New York, I won't be surprised if he imposes tariffs on their exports of wine to other states
1
Ross’s politics have brought us to the Trump era, which might bring about the end of America and an authoritarian oligarchy.
Why listen to,him for any viewpoint or advice?
8
Again Douthat is probably speaking from a very comfortable position and has never had to work hard or struggle for anything. Let alone bouts of unemployment or crushing debts.
3
Ah, all the country's problems flow from a liberal based society. On the other hand, I had to find earmuffs to silence the dog whistles buried in this piece.
4
I had a lousy first marriage that seemingly went of forever. In later years I came to blame society for pressuring young people to get married, sign a mortgage and have two kids. Now Mr. Douthat seemingly represents that busybody society that added to my misery. He can take his unsolicited advice about marriage and stick it in his ear.
5
Your hypocrisy is breathtaking. It is conservatives who have embraced a doctrine that is antithetical to families. it is conservatives, including evangelical Christians, who have embraced an amoral man to whom marriage is anything but sacred.
Marriage is a contract between two people and not a moral imperative. Why does gender matter? Because the religious right want to impose their views on the rest of us? (Obergefell v. Hodges upheld for one thing, separation of Church and State.) It seems strange to me that people who proclaim Christ ignore one of the main tenets of Christ's doctrine which was one of tolerance.
The decision to have children is a commitment (or should be) not a moral imperative. The world is burgeoning with people, many starving and without the basic necessities of life. Fertility is not a problem.
How do you feel about the U.S. policy toward children brought here illegally and separated from their families Mr. Douthat? Is that a good family oriented policy? It is the liberals who want to see these children and their families treated decently. They are far more pro family than conservatives. What is wrong in wanting to see people fed, have decent healthcare, and be educated in order to become productive citizens? Think about the conservative view really hard.
For the record, this old liberal has been married to the same old liberal man for over 51 years and counting and the relationship has been monogamous.
11
Maybe the economy's just not as good as you think it is.
6
Are Conservatives against compassion? Are Conservatives against ethical behavior by the President of the United States? Are Conservatives against treating gay people with respect? Are Conservatives against the poor? Are Conservatives against refugees? Oh, please enlighten us, O great Conservative oracle who only finds fault with Liberals!
10
It's fairly clear from the comments that a deep sense of pessimism permeates the political left. This discourages making babies, which (when not accidental) is a profound act of optimism. It also is a long-term demographic political problem. The future of a political movement that discourages procreation is dire; just look what happened to the Shakers. In the shorter term, pessimists rarely make for inspiring leaders. Is part of the difficulty in finding an inspiring Democratic champion the fact that the Progressive movement has such a negative view of the country? This goes well beyond the effects of Trump. It seems unlikely that any potential leader would stir Progressives out of their dour fascination with the impending apocalypse. It's a very self-limiting political philosophy.
@Tom Meadowcroft We liberals happily have (had) babies, raise them with a spouse or on our own, get them through college, and now play with our grandchildren. This must pain you!
2
@Tom Meadowcroft
Actually every time they do large scale psychological profiles of liberals vs conservatives they determine that the liberals are far more optimistic and trusting than conservatives. Conservatives are far more driven by fear, particularly fear of different people. Liberals believe if we all work together we can fix our common problems while conservatives think it's too late, let's just stock pile whatever wealth we can for our kids and build a bunker in the backyard stocked with guns.
But I think the trend of liberals having fewer children is correct. This happens in every group throughout the world that becomes educated enough for both genders to have fulfilling options in life. It's okay, the children of poorer less educated people join our ranks, we don't need to procreate to pass on culture.
5
Men, by and large, don't want to get married.
Too much conversation on this issue focuses on "women's liberation" and choices, but ignores the crucial fact that it takes two to tango... I know many heterosexual women who aspired to find a male partner to marry and raise a child with, but that partner never materialized. I'm sure many therapists and matchmakers can back me up o this... I can also personally attest that after decades of dating I can count on one hand how many men I've ever encountered who wanted marriage and children, especially within any reasonable time frame (say, before 50).
Weather it's for economic or cultural reasons, men's attitudes toward marriage and child-having have shifted just as much as women's, and we won't hone down the real cause for this decline until we stop blaming women and assuming it's their decision alone.
9
THIS ^^^^^^^
Considering the divorce rate is higher in red states, it would appear that it's conservatives who are against marriage. Conservatives also appear to be really, really anti-marriage if it involves gay people.
8
1.Yes
2. Climate change
2
Wow! Home run! Wonderful sociological analysis and synthesis on a vital topic long considered politically incorrect. Douthat is a major asset for the New York Times.
I confess I am commenting without having read the column. The headline turned me off, It suggested to me that Mr. Douthat was going off on another thoughtless rant about the liberals.
6
@hark
Yes, that's what he did. And he repeated the word "wedLOCK" from the headline.
1
Without, I think, realizing it, you've made a compelling case that "liberals" (what a thoroughly delimited word!) actually love their partners more than conservatives do, Ross.
You paint a picture of people (liberals) who experiment socially and sexually and end up spending their lives with someone they truly love - or not. They've established themselves professionally and find a relationship that works for them - or don't.
On the other hand, conservatives marry early, breed, and then stay together no matter what. How nice! And what the heck is "adult sexuality?" Sounds awfully boring.
Ultimately, the big question for many people is, "Do I really have to reproduce?" Or, as my neighbor said to me one day while watching the kids across the street beat the stuffing out of each other: "Children...what's the point?"
I probably fit your definition of "liberal", though certainly not progressive. I've been married to the same woman for forty one years, no children. We love each other more now than ever, having been through the better and worse, the sickness and health, the richer and poorer together. Why not just accept that that's an option?
Have your kids. I don't mind. Just keep 'em off my lawn.
7
Great opinion piece if your goal was to show how shallow your thought processes are. And the click bait headline? Please do better.
7
WedLOCK? A horrible word. The headline writer uses it, and Douthat uses it.
Who wants to be locked into anything? The old ball and chain?
5
Yes, we liberals hate marriage. And we don't like kids that much either. And we're against all religions, even the good ones. We don't like much of anything. Except kale and French press coffee. And rainbows, we like them too. But marriage is just so... Republican. We don't like republicans, either, mostly because they try to take away our weed. We liberals like weed, mostly because it helps us forget about how republicans like you are wrecking the environment and turning the country into a giant armed militia camp of kale-hating gun nuts. Oh Douthat, do you ever talk to normal people?
13
@steve
OH, Bravo! You appear to be as sick and tired as I am with all the things liberals apparently hate, not to mention that 'society wrecking' agenda we seem to have.
I'm telling you, I'm sitting here laughing my head off. I hope it's not too late for the comment cops to post my comment.
By the way, you forgot the avocado toast. Just love that avocado toast....and Dijon mustard also.
1
Another illogical rambling from Ross Douthat published on the same day as Paul Krugman's column which provides a clear and concise analysis of what is really happening. Perhaps Mr. Douthat should read his colleague's work? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/life-expectancy-united-states.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
6
@Paul Smith says that a static or declining population is advantageous to the well being of mankind:
The problem is, that the decline in birth rates in confined mostly to Europe, Japan, and the U.S.
The rest of the world is growing population very quickly. There has been some slow down in China.
The technical advancements needed to deal with the growing population must come from technologically advanced countries like the U.S. If we decline substantially in population, who else will be available to do the technical problem solving?
@HH
Go review the recent international PISA test results--the Chinese students are kicking our butts.
No worries, they'll soon be way beyond us. Hopefully, they'll solve all our problems.
1
Maybe instead of demonizing immigrants we should be bringing in more of them.
"Economic prosperity" for whom?
The middle class of the 50's is gone. It does not exist. Families simply cannot live well on one-income, and the cost of child-care, education and health care make having children a prohibitive undertaking. Low unemployment does not = greater income. Taxes on the wealthy have decreased by over 40% since the 50's. They are the only ones currently enjoying this so-called prosperity.
4
Perhaps only at the margin, but I wonder if the feminist war on men has contributed to diminished extent of marriage? Given the sizable majorities of women in, e.g., med schools, and that a significant majority of college students are women, something is amiss here. Could that contribute to the marriage question? And the childless problem?
1
Maybe that’s because we can’t depend on men to be the breadwinner anymore. Should we just sit on the sidewalk and beg instead?
3
Douthat raises provocative points, but he assumes a reality that is not true in the U.S. today. He also subtly projects his anxiety that without marriage as America has known it until relatively recently, society cannot really flourish:
1. The "prosperity and low unemployment" he casually assumes is patchy and tenuous. Most Americans, by far, struggle to stay afloat financially. Between housing, health care, and education costs--all steeply and inexorably rising--life in the U.S. for most people has a veneer of prosperity around a swollen core of precarious debt. More people are becoming lone wolfs not so much by choice but by economic exigency.
2. Several rich western societies exist where legal marriage is the exception rather than the rule. These societies are not floundering in social decay or teetering on the edge of Gomorrah; they have smartly wedded their social policy to their secular cultural expectations in a way that helps families flourish.
2
Marriage is a bad deal for women. A better alternative for women is to get educated, build a career, buy a home. Then IF (and it’s a big if) she finds an actual partner she can bring him/her into her life as an equal. If that partner starts acting like the woman should be the housekeeper, “helpmate,”—there to make the mans life easier and happier—she can say, “get the hell out of MY house.” Children are often used as a weapon for women who have had it with being an unpaid maid—or when the partner “gets tired of the nagging” and trades her in for a younger model. So having kids on her own is also a good option. Many women are left with few resources and become “single moms” regardless of how the relationship
begins. Better for women to always know this and be ready. The only way the patriarchal systems in society and religion work is when women are forced into them. Times up, guys. Men: Do better. Or as Melinda would say, “be best.”
12
I’ve read equally myopic views from men who see children as a goad to behave themselves and divorce as a lifestyle alternative where the women get both the kids and the majority of his income.
My point isn’t to support that point of view but to challenge yours.
As a single father who raised two children from early childhood to adulthood with neither child support nor another parent who cared or was involved in her children’s lives I have a unique perspective. I’ve seen the hostility directed at men who presume to actually parent. I’ve been told that since I didn’t give birth that I’m not a “real” parent. You want to have it both ways and replace one form of oppression with another. What I read was you want to replace male selfishness with female selfishness, in the end its the children that suffer for someone’s perceived independence. No one is disposable least of all a parent.
The idea that patriarchy dominates marriage and women’s lives has become a place for shallow thinking and excuses for bad behavior. It becomes about disposable fathers and single parent lifestyles for the affluent. Conservatives want to return to the 1950’s and feminists act as if we never left them behind. But of course its more complicated than that. Remember that affluent white women were among Trumps enthusiastic suburban supporters and rural white women are up there to. They don’t want what you do and they ain’t the patriarchy either.
2
In the world right now, there are over 92 million orphans at risk of starvation and death.
If Douthat is really so concerned about the "baby bust," why isn't he urging Americans to adopt those orphans.
330
@Scott Rose
A source for that number? That would be about 3% of the under-18 population. How many orphans do you know, or even know of? The rate of young adult (parental) death is higher in poor countries than in the US, but this number is implausibly high.
Most orphans old enough to consider it would not want to be adopted into an entirely foreign culture, with a language they don't speak. The number of pre-verbal, pre-cultural infant orphans must surely be much smaller. Most of their governments would not let them be adopted abroad.
5
@Scott Rose He has: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/opinion/03douthat.html
5
@Jonathan Katz ...You might be correct in terms of Manhattan and St. Louis. But our foreign interventions have helped produce millions of orphans left to fend for themselves as
I witnessed years ago in Southeast Asia, the ME and even Europe. Americans are clueless in their perception of true hardship—especially conservatives who often view it as a consequence of underachievement.
20
prosperity and unemployment are two totally different things. without focusing on that there will continue to be such a large income gap.
1
In looking at young people that I know, many of the young women would like to have families with children. The problem is getting young men to want that as well and the reality is that, at any point in her life, a woman must be able to support herself and her children without support from the children's father. The young women I know learned hard lessons by watching my generation struggle with this reality. Men can simply walk away from their children at any time with few consequences. This has always been true in history but perhaps not as common as it is today. It is the defining factor in the minds of many young women that I know. They can probably support themselves in today's economy but trust a man to stay around help them raise a child. Many don't consider that a good bet.
4
It is a sad and unfortunate development to link political ideology to the decline of marriage and resulting birthrates. Is every human move tied to politics? No. It could be fair, however, to look at social changes from a distance and engage in informed speculation as to why they occurred and what might be done to correct past errors.
We are a nation devoted to individuality and autonomy in making life decisions. Women woke up in the late 1960s and early '70s and declared they would like those potentials, too. This was coupled with the development of birth control pills so that sexual engagement was no longer seen as requiring a 20+ year commitment to child rearing. The trends were also pushed forward by economics. No longer would women be entirely dependent on men for financial well being.
Barr and other far right voices would accuse Democrats of being irreligious, as another charge, when in fact knowledge, scientific and otherwise, has put religion in a different prospective. We know more now than they did 2,000 yrs. ago when the Christian Bible was written. We know, for example, the being gay is not a conscious choice of the mind but rather something deeply programmed into some people.
Etc.
3
Sure would be nice to have some scientific evidence before doing a deep dive on this issue.
Conservatives give lip service to the institution of marriage, but does that translate into actions?
Obama is a “liberal” (actually, not really) and he’s been married for quite a while.
Meanwhile, there are “conservatives” like trump and Gingrich who’ve been married six or eight times, combined ...
Okay, perhaps I’m making Douthat’s point. I guess conservatives love marriage so much, they can’t stop at just one.
5
It doesn't take a lot of nuance to explain the downward spiral of the birthrate among unmarried people. And I'm not surprised that Mr. Douthat has once again missed the elephant in the room.
Over the past 40 years, the conservative tax revolt and generally nasty conservative policies toward people of modest means (including the college debt-for-profit con) have put home purchase and child care out of the reach of what used to be the American middle class. Why invest in marriage when you can't afford a place to live and can't afford to take proper care of children?
5
Not surprisingly, this piece does not address why a decline in birth rates might be a blessing for the health of our planet.
7
Marriage is the best form of control of the middle class by the elites, liberal or conservative. Its decline has a lot to do with efforts to loosen this control.
4
Hate to break it to this author, but not everything has to do with right-left politics. Cohabitation was occurring long before the concept of marriage was even created. And thanks to varying forms of birth control over the past 70 years, women are less likely to be forced into marriages due to an unexpected or unwanted pregnancies as they used to be.
7
@A Disgusted Independent American
Over 35% of children live with one parent.
Two thirds of that time, it is the single mother.
No-cohabitating. Unclear what birth control was desired nor involved.
1 of 5 children have parents who divorce.
50% of children born to co-habitating situations in the U.S., have parents who leave each other by the time they are 9 yo.
- Pew Research
All other points aside, I've never understood why this argument is for strictly heterosexual marriage. Non-heteronormative marriages can be fantastic environments for child rearing (either through adoption, surrogacy, IVF, or otherwise) and should therefore be equally championed by people concerned about fertility and the "baby bust."
4
I deeply resent the massive conservative attack on "liberalism" that constantly reinforces the arrogant belief on the part of some conservatives and evangelicals that liberals are less than Christian, less than honorable, or less than ethical in their beliefs, their choice of political parties, and their acceptance of and respect for lifestyles that differ from their own. It angers me that this is the way that these folks choose to divide us as a nation. Looking at you, Ross Douthat.
13
I consider myself liberal and have been married for 31 years with two children who are millenials. However, I can understand people who question marriage and childbearing. The first consideration is the environment. Given our current political leadership and its denial of and inaction on climate change, young people today have cause to worry that the world they would bring children into may be a hellhole in the not-too-distant future. If I were starting out now, I would have to seriously consider whether bringing more children into the world is a good idea. The second consideration is a deep-seated skepticism of traditional institutions (including marriage). A twenty-something today can justifiably look around at what a traditional society has created and seriously question whether it was the right way to go. We've created a highly polarized society, both politically and economically. We have created an educational system that has fallen far behind other industrialized countries. We have shortchanged our infrastructure. We have allowed corporations to pollute the environment and destroy wilderness areas and we continue to elect leaders who want to do even more of these things. We've made a mess of the world and we can't in good conscience say that our children should follow in our footsteps.
8
ARE CONSERVATIVES AGAINST MARRIAGE? Let me count the ways. You guys created a tax cut that rewards billionaires at the expense of middle/working classes, especially since you allow corporations to not give us raises. (minimum wage is a JOKE.) We regular folk pay more taxes than Apple. You've made it incredibly hard to save for college for us or our kids, as we've had no interest on our savings for years - which serves the rich who want free money, not the rest of us. You won't protect kids from guns. You won't protect girls from violence - witness McConnell blocking the violence against women act over and over, and how you've vaunted to the supreme court and presidency, etc., known women abusers. You will not deal with racial inequalities, but turn into a raging snowflake every time the subject comes up. You detain babies at the border, ripping them from their parents. You disdain science, say too bad about climate change, and our kids' future. You refuse to rein in polluters or pesticide makers who hurt our children's health, and don't get me started on health care, or on social security - which you have refused to expand (which would be easy,) so we must help with our parents health care bills while big pharma treats them like cash cows... need I go on. Conservatives have created an environment so hostile to families, it is off the charts. Who wants kids in this? So stop ranting about 'liberals' and look at your own record of NOT supporting families and children.
19
Let’s get real here. All of this liberal and conservative handwringing is over the decline of the birth rates among
educated white women.
In fact the decline in birth rates should be celebrated. Mother
Earth’s resources are finite. And we are facing a massive reduction in food production due to climate change.
What is really disturbing to those lamenting the “decline of birth rates” is the decline in the white majority in America.
I welcome it.
Mike
14
In another opinion piece today in this same newspaper, Paul Krugman points out that people in blue states now live four years longer on average than those in red states. So, I guess one can choose marriage or a longer life?
10
More superficiality and divisiveness from Mr. Douthat. Hey Ross, have you noticed that the world is drastically OVERPOPULATED with humans? For what its worth, I am a 71 yr. old white male, married to the same woman for 47 years and grandfather of five.
9
@Matt This is a myth. Most of the worlds population could fit in to the state of Texas with a population density close to NYC. The world is not overpopulated. Advances in science are allowing us to grow more food on less land (thank you, Monsanto!), and meat is even being grown in labs now. Please, stop spreading the "world is overpopulated" canard. There's plenty of food and space to go around.
So, you think this can go on forever and the earth does not have finite limits to the number of people it can support?
2
@Justin
Of course we could fit more people. Problem is, climate change.....is a problem. The more people, the bigger the problem. And, the powers that be simply don't seem to care.
But, we'll all be enjoying our fake meat, I'm sure.
1
This liberal-conservative sorting is so silly. Sexual orientation - once binary - is diffuse into absurdity. The reality is we all don't fit into labeled boxes. We are cafeterias of emotions, thought, morality - sweet and sour.
4
If only life were so simple as it seems to be in Ross's world.
Douthat forgets that people should not get married and or have children if they cannot afford it in the first place.
8
Jeez. Right off the bat. "The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity..."
Prosperity for who, Ross? I'm a licensed professional. I'm in my 30s. Even if I wanted marriage and kids, I still won't be in a position to have them for at least another 5-10 years. The old, the wealthy and the policymakers have sent a clear message to my generation for a while now: "We don't care that you're in crippling debt. We don't care about the environmental future of the planet. We're not going to help you with anything you might need to start a family. Forget you." Then we get hectored for not having children (the planet doesn't need more people, btw). Why would I even consider it if I'm constantly getting bombarded with that message from my society?
What a silly, ignorant column.
21
Stop it.
Just stop it.
Just state what your opinion about the cause is the birth rate it. Period.
Don’t wrap yourself in the flag of conservatism.
Don’t speak of others, just yourself.
Don’t demonize a huge swath of people by brushing all of them with the brush of liberalism.
Or do you think that your thoughts and opinions cannot stand up to scrutiny without the support of conservatism behind you?
Have you learned NOTHING these last few years? Your language serves only to increase the partisan divide, and such demonizing of those who might disagree with you contributed to this divide.
Just stop it.
14
Thank you 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻. Thoughtful, concise and to the point.
4
An interesting and provocative piece. I was surprised by liberals’ eagerness to hurry past or even dismiss Katie Hill’s throple relationship as irrelevant to defend her. That such an arrangement - a bad one for all concerned, especially children - is now apparently acceptable to elements of the left is unsettling.
That said, Ross, as he does so often, ignores the elephant in the room. Trump’s three marriages and his serial sexual misconduct, including his admission to sleeping with a porn star shortly after the birth of his last child, surely plays a role in the trends Ross identifies, but he never mentions them.
2
Well, it's really special that the MeToo movement gets lumped in here will all the other problems that we liberals cause.
Yes, of course it's because women are calling out men for abuse that people aren't getting married and aren't having children. Why didn't I think of that when some random guy reached out and grabbed my breast one evening? It's clear to me now that instead of being appalled, insulted and feeling violated I should have thought about how my reactions would cause the demise of marriage. And all those women calling out famous men for abuse? I guess they better shut up and have a kid or 2, amirite?
We liberals really do mess everything up, don't we.
10
It's because we're broke.
9
The birth rate is falling in developed countries because anyone with a brain in her head can see that 8 billion is an unsustainable number of people.
6
This is not a liberal v conservative problem. This is an American problem, and the problem is that in general Americans dislike children.
I never see anything as shocking to me as the comments in what is supposed to be the liberal newspaper of record whenever there is a story about say, pregnant women losing their jobs or taxpayers supporting childcare or family leave. NO ONE wants to support young families and especially young mothers. Every “woke” person clamoring for reduced college debt is suddenly “pregnancy is a choice” “why should I pay for other people’s brats” “People who get leave just dump work on the rest of us” etc. etc.
Conservatives of course claim to love children but only if their mothers take absolute entire responsibility for them (the new Evangelical way to impose upon women is to make them all home school their kids as some kind of badge of Christian womanhood...they can’t even get a six hour break)
Why would anyone in this society want to take on child raising under this kind of social disdain?
6
@Karen
What on earth are you talking about? Paid leave and child care are two giant items on the Democratic agenda, specifically to help families. Where are you seeing these "other people's brats" comments?
NO.
Ross could have earned his column's money by writing a single word answer. Instead, as usual, he looks for villains wherever he can find them except, of course, in his conservative gaggle where the disease lies.
7
How interesting Douthat neglects to mention conservatives' virulent opposition to marriage equality.
When it's gays or lesbians who want to marry, the wish to do so becomes an assault on the very institution. When queers wish to adopt an unwanted child, having two fathers or two mothers is WORSE than having none! The Catholic Church howls. The religious right barks and shrieks. Conservatives are shocked, genuinely shocked that such an aberrant wish as two men (or women) making a lifetime commitment to each other and raising a family would ever be fulfilled. What hypocrisy.
He is though right about one think: so important a question should never be left to weirdo Catholic columnists like himself.
6
As a crazy rebellious Berkeley student who eloped in the 60’s and rode every shifting fashionable wave of coupling living in California, I feel qualified to contribute.
Negotiating a decades- long relationship with another very different individual requires commitment and ( dreaded UNchic word) sacrifice, and confers depth, richness,and grace. Raising a family together is so expansive an experience as almost to defy description: testing you to your very core, connecting you in a vast rich web to the past, your current community, and the mysterious unknown future. This means experiencing life at its most unbounded.
How comparable journeys of meaning can be made in today’s world of instant gratification and tweeted narcissism is unknowable but I’m hoping the human spirit still craves and seeks commitment for the intangible yet essential rewards it can provide.
2
It does. But that has collided with the reality that even with two incomes, providing for children has become increasingly difficult. It doesn’t matter how much you want something, if you can’t afford it, you can’t get it.
2
@Smilodon7 Yes, today’s economic reality for aspiring parents is difficult and far different. Housing was cheap and plentiful in my day and the dream of home-ownership ( that safe, stable nest for procreating) attainable for most. Many women still stayed at home or worked part-time so today’s heartstopping childcare costs were negligible. We also relied on neighbors and coops for childcare as a fallback—simpler times.
But we also had much lower expectations for what raising a child actually entailed materially (we made clothing, borrowed it, shared minimal baby equipment—this was the norm even among the affluent) and did not plan very far ahead for some ideal future. We were young and foolish, yet it worked out. I’m hoping you’ll find a creative way somehow to make it work, too.
1
On my 50th birthday, two years ago, I looked up what the world's population was in that year. In my lifetime, it had doubled from 3.5B to 7B. There's my argument against having more children. Hard pass, Ross.
8
The marriage/more children subject might be nuanced but the reality of the planet isn't: earth is not wanting or needing more babies. At least not human ones. Just because the West is no longer in a randy mood to pop out legions of babies doesn't mean the rest of the world is too: there's already 1 billion in China, India and Africa will be next if its not there already. We need to think smarter and perhaps more globally about what it means to bring a human being into this world. Is it really necessary? Can nation's with low birth rates not merely be tinkered with immigration? Look at Russia: a huge blot on the map with a small number of people who are all the same race and risking economic stagnation because there's simply not enough of them. Immigration could help, but of course Russians are so in love with their own whiteness and "Russian-ness" they'd likely never consider it.
5
I don't know if this has come up elsewhere in the comments - but I think at least among college students of the liberal political persuasion that there is some hopelessness about the future that impacts their desire to marry and have kids. The climate crisis, after all, has their potential kids right in the crosshairs. It's not all about personal satisfaction, but a realistic distrust of the future.
8
@Laurie Greta Thunder is 16 years old (I believe). What 16 year old girl isn't thinking about anything except boys, what she's wearing, boys, her nails, BOYS. But she's not because 16 year olds today can't afford to be typical: they have to worry about the planet being burned down or flooded or if there will be clean water to drink and clean air to breather in 10 years. Or, if they'll be shot by a mass shooter. Tragic.
1
This is hilarious.
The reason the birthrate is declining is because many in my generation cannot afford to have children. It's that simple. No need to do a "deep" dive into intellectual history when obvious structural economic forces exist.
This is also a problem with decent evidence for a solution. Countries with a more long-standing problem with birthrates have found some success by increasing social programs dedicated to families. There seems to be a narrative forming that as more women join the workforce birthrates drop, and as government spending makes things more equitable - subsidized childcare, healthcare not tied to employment, enough time off to be a family - birthrates rise.
The other magic button is, of course, immigration. Immigrants in general have MUCH higher birthrates than natural born citizens, and polities that encourage immigration tend to thrive economically. But that's not bandied about much as a solution to this problem because most people discussing this don't simply want more babies, they want more babies of the right color.
8
Just because a couple say I do I do in front of a priest, doesn’t make a marriage work for their lifetime. I know plenty couples who have been together 60, 65 years, their marriage endured not because of their vows but because of their unconditional partnership, their interdependence their response to their heart beats their fine tuned attention to the cues their readiness to pick up slack their ability to not push put pressure..
2
A wise old friend once told me the secret to a long happy marriage. Which she said was hearing loss! To which her husband of 50 years replied loudly “WHAT?”
Still laughing over that one.
1
This column would benefit greatly from an at least cursory tour of trends in other countries. The fertility decline is pretty much universal in advanced economies, including ones as culturally distant from the US as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. You can't attribute drastic fertility declines in e.g. Taiwan to US-specific trends like "wokeness" or that favorite bugbear of the cultural right, "the sixties".
This adds a lot of weight to economic-flavored explanations which explore the relative costs of childbearing and child-rearing in different settings
2
Now, if I only knew what "normative" meant---I'm half way through and it has appeared three times so far.
2
With apologies to all baby lovers out there, if I had to live my life again, I would have dogs instead of children. Among many other advantages, they love you forever; they are cuter when young and stay cuter when old; they are loyal; they don’t talk back; and they are cheaper.
5
7 billion people on the planet that has a capacity to sustain about half that. I wouldn't worry too much about the baby bust. I'd worry more about the clogged freeways, the over crowded planet, the destruction of the rain forests, the spewing of fossil fuels that are destroying the earth rather than whether John and Betty will decide to have another baby and add to the overpopulation of the planet. Besides, couples aren't having children today because they can't afford it. No one wants to be mired in poverty for the sake of another kid in the family where Dad hasn't seen a raise in 30 years. College graduates mired in student debt just trying to meet the rent aren't going to want to bring children into the world when they can't provide them with what they need to survive. Finally, lasting marriages tend to occur more often in those blue secular states rather than the righteous Gemstone Southern Evangelical Red States. There's talk about family values and then there's the walk. Look to the blue states for the walk.
7
What is this guy even talking about? He ascribes an "admittedly impressionistic" set of attitudes to "liberals" but where is his evidence? It may be somewhere, but it isn't here. This allows him to hang all sorts of anti-marriage ideas on prorgressive thinking that quite frankly I haven't heard of since my salad days in the '70s. How does this kind of flabby reasoning make it to the front page of the New York Times, anyway?
If this guy is so worried about demographic imbalances, there's a simple solution- increased immigration. But the impediments to a reasonable immigration system for our country come from his side of the political spectrum. And that is not an "impression" or a "feeling." That's simply an inarguable fact of American politics.
So, rather than slap together a straw man assessment of liberal thinking, this guy should be working to sort out the truly dysfunctional ideological side of the ledger- conservatism. Put differently, he should stop plucking the mote from the other person's eye and start worrying about the beam in his own.
9
Ah, the political right's obsession with this topic. Of course, outside of getting married and going to church, they don't care about what happens to most folks in terms of health care, education, and the general idea of "it takes a village to raise a child".
7
Liberals aren't against marriage.
Marriage and families are too expensive in the United States. Period. End of discussion.
It's not that hard to figure out, Ross.
6
One reason for less marriage among liberals (of which I'm one) is that in this day and age, where marriage is no longer seen as necessary, an ideal marriage is one where your partner is a best friend who you also lust after, and people are free to hold out for that ideal.
Unfortunately, the best places to find a partner are probably college and graduate school (my parents met on my father's first day of graduate school), but a lot of people aren't ready for marriage by the time they get out of college.
I read somewhere that it takes an average of around 80 first dates on a dating sight to result in a really good relationship, and from my own experience, I'm inclined to believe that.
The other problem, which may not discourage people from marrying, but certainly discourages people from having children, is that our social safety net is so poor compared to those of western European countries that it would take a very optimistic outlook to have children. Give us Medicare for all, and greatly reduce inequality so that those on the lower end of the income scale can more easily afford children, and more children will be born.
2
The world had 3 billion people in 1960. It's now closing in on 8 billion. Focusing the conversation on how people in the U.S. or in other advanced countries are reproducing totally misses the point. Too many, not too few, babies are being born worldwide as human overpopulation destroys the planet. That overpopulation will eventually invade all advanced nations. Douthat needs to look at the big picture.
4
I love you, Ross, but armchair theory only goes so far. As a forensic nurse, I listen to narrative after narrative of women being brutalized and exploited by their husbands. And I also see many family-less children who are loved and cared for by absolutely no one. I don’t know what the solution is, but I believe the “father-knows-best” model is only a fantasy. Come hang out among working people, armchair philosophers of all ideological colors. The concept of “self-actualization” has less to do with the developments of the last 40 years, than does the brutal reality of life outside the world of elites.
3
The states with the highest percentage of births to unmarried mothers are overwhelmingly in conservative Trump states. So, question should be, are Conservatives Against Marriage? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/unmarried/unmarried.htm
6
The average out of pocket cost to have a baby for a women WHO HAS INSURANCE is $3400.
Again, that's for people who have insurance. Without insurance, it ranges from $10,000 to $50,000.
So yeah, pontificate all you want about society and sexual liberation and all that, but there’s some numbers.
5
That’s just for having the baby. Then there’s increased costs for food and shelter, health insurance, childcare (almost nobody can afford to be a stay at home parent anymore), then the cost of sending them to college which is now a necessity for any kind of job, and it’s pretty easy to see why fewer people are having kids now.
2
More theocratic drivel. Does Ross really want to force marriage and fertility by law? That this would be beneficial for society? Apparently so.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Professor Klugman's recent column shows conclusively that the pro-religious, pro-marriage conservative parts of the country are killing the people living there at a faster rate than any place else in the industrialized world.
We must look at the big picture. Freedom from religion was wisely put into the Constitution by our Founders for a reason.
3
All I can say is that I'm an aging educated middle class liberal living in a super "blue" state and married to the same woman for 43 years. All my friends, relatives and neighbors are similarly in 40 year marriages. All of them. Over the past 10-15 years, one of our big activities has been going to our childrens' weddings. Meanwhile, in "red" flyover country, everyone seems keen on personally acting out their favorite country song. Face it, Ross, it's not a coincidence that your side has elected a crude, vulgar, thrice-married, serial adulterer and sexual abuser who has not seen the inside of a church in 50 years. And idolize him! Get back to us when you have an explanation for that.
7
Some people just don't want to get married. Some people don't want children. There are many reasons that factor into these decisions. Quit trying to link this to being liberal or not subscribing to your version of religion. I am so sick of this. Seems to me that folks like yourself spend too much time worrying about what other people are doing, and trying to push your beliefs onto everyone else, and judging us for not living up to your standards. This is what causes division between people in this country. Go to the gym, read a book, walk your dog....you do you. Get a life and leave us all alone.
3
If one wants to know who is “against marriage”, look no farther than deep Blue America’s very low divorce rates as compared to the former Confederacy’s sky-high divorce rates. Case closed.
3
"On the conservative side, I think there has been a general advance in nuance over the last five or 10 years"
-- I just fell off my chair from laughing so hard.
-- see also: Fox News, and the titular president. Nuance??
6
People who are religious know one of their primary jobs here on earth is to produce and raise offspring. Marriage has been correctly encouraged as the best way to do that. You likely won't need most of the myriad of government programs advocated by liberals if you'd follow that simple path. Many Liberals advocate a godless world that is about you.. your experience, your needs. In that lens, marriage and parenthood can seem like a burden instead of a god given responsibility. Just look to Europe, where child bearing rates have been collapsing faster than the US.
Really. Just being religious and having lots of babies will fix everything. God will provide, right?
If that was true there would be no suffering, starving children anywhere. God gave us brains for a reason. He expects us to use them. If we can’t afford kids, it’s irresponsible to have them.
3
This article, like most NYT & media articles in general, is out of context. It works from the 1960s.
If we use the far more fundamental and significant sample space of evolution on Earth — 4.54 billion years > 2019-1960, capiche? — the pattern recognition is better. It includes this wisdom from Sir Arthur Eddington:
"We need scarcely add that the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.”
Here's a pattern from Google exec, Eric Schmidt.
“There were 5 exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003; now that same amount is created every two days.”
Unprecedented:
Complexity;
Human numbers;
Technology;
Reach.
Distills thusly:
Unprecedented Relationships, even with the Sky & Ocean.
Marriages, humans, elephants & whales, have never existed in these environs—ever.
Code & Complexity — A Fundamental Consequence
Complexity increases weaken the efficacy of code, whether genetic, legal, monetary, language, religious, software, etc.
Our biological and cultural coding — Relationship Infrastructure — do not fit the emergent environs.
That is, our biological & cultural coding are non-selectable.
World culture and the Geo, Bio & Eco networks it is built upon resemble an immune system being overrun by novel pathogens.
We're experiencing an acceleration of failed relationships, symptoms of the Emergent Complexity Apocalypse.
Marriage is part of that pattern.
Liberals with money love marriage, as it is an efficient vehicle for accumulating more wealth. As a leftist, I am against marriage (having done it once). The nuclear family is just an economic unit of consumption in a society completely atomized by capitalism. Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. are aware that they live in a society that does not actually value children, or care work--that we all live in a state of precarity, and should think twice before having more (or any) children.
2
Thank goodness Mr. Douthat terms his thoughts as impressionistic. Certainly when citing no sources for his last thoughts on #MeToo feiminism, and incorporating needlessly academic jargon to claim hostility to marriage, one gets the impression he is just making things up since no sources are named.
2
At a time where population explosion is killing the planet, it seems naive to worry about having less babies or using birth control. In poor countries people have too many kids. Educated people have less. For a good reason ! Better raise 2 kids well than 20 hopeless isis fodder or beggars and thieves.
1
I direct your attention to the Aug 30 1976 issue of The New Yorker magazine, talk of the town. It will help relieve your stress about marriage.
Isms in order of appearance:
liberalism conservatism neoliberalism individualism capitalism libertarianism optimism feminism progressivism essentialism
So many convenient boxes. Do you realize that labels and boxes are the problem?
The column reads like a bad philosophy paper. If liberals are against marriage, good for them, count me in. You might want to explain why gays, generally liberal, fought so hard for the right to be shackled in matrimony....
or is it matrimonism?
1
Nice try at sounding like William F. Buckley. "Ultimate valence" indeed. People are having fewer children because, unlike in previous times, they have a choice in the matter.
2
The worst possible damage that has been and can be done to this planet is human over-population. Any rational observer can see that this is an ecological disaster that can only get more damaging with continuation and time.
Yet, "conservatives" like Douthat yammer on about marriage and reproduction, seemingly oblivious of the world around them. Not a whit of concern for the planetary degradation and human suffering that is hurtling toward us like a deadly missile.
All because of human despoilment due to ignorance, not caring, and the blind, ignorant, over-population of a cancer, forging ahead with no instinctual recognition that it will die off with the host it is in the process of killing.
2
Prosperity?? We, the middle class, are drowning!
2
Don't really care why, just glad to have fewer people gobbling up the limited resources of our stressed planet.
1
I’m a left socialist and dream of a future of stateless anarcho-syndicalism. I completely reject your ideology; and yet, I was married at 22, waited until marriage to have sexual intercourse. We have been married for 14 years and have 3 children. We own a home, pay taxes, create jobs, bbq of the 4th etc. the difference between me and you? You’re compelled to do so out of fear of a man made god and I just thought it was a pretty good path that worked for me and had a community that supported my choice. The wise man built his house upon a rock, not sand, as they say.
3
As soon as Ross mentioned, conservative intellectuals, I new we were on our way to fantasy land.
3
Ross, perhaps you should read your own newspaper’s story about the students in the class of 2000 from Minford Ohio. Maybe OxyContin had something to do with birth rates etc...saddest story I’ve read in a while. My son graduated high school in 2001 in “liberal” Northern California and although some of his friends have had issues with addiction, to my knowledge not one of them got addicted to opioids and not one of them has spent time in jail or died. I think nuance is a word people use when they are afraid to face facts...like the highest divorce rates and unwed mothers are in the conservative, god-fearing states not states like California or New York. Which I know is hard for you to accept so you dance around it always...
2
Bring down the cost of housing, education, and healthcare, and behold the weddings.
2
More 'less government' Conservatives telling others how they should live their lives. Conservatives, especially the Christian variety, should get their own house in order before they pontificate on how the rest of us should live our lives. Get a clue Ross...
2
Whenever I read something in which more than three words in a paragraph end with "-ism" or "-ization" my brain starts shutting off. Sorry, Ross, there might be a point somewhere in what you say, but it all sounds like vague generalizations to me.
3
Woke progressivism is not liberalism of any sort.
I loathe when anyone makes a sweeping generalization about a group of people, which Mr. Douthat's columns seem to center on. Personally, most of my progressive friends are married (both gay and straight) and getting married is not a 'conservative' value.
2
Good old Ross Douthat, resolutely rearranging culture-war deck chairs on the Titanic.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of innocent children are being kept from their families by the "pro family" political party, and millions of red staters are drowning under unceasing waves of economic displacement, crushing education and childcare costs, and subsequent opiate abuse.
3
Marriage and childbirth disproportionately advantage men over women. Men get a "fatherhood bonus" at work- women get a "motherhood penalty". Women still do the majority of housework and childcare at home even in a society that believes itself to increasingly egalitarian. Women are subjected to domestic abuse at far higher rates than men.
Women are smart to view marriage and child-rearing as something to be considered very seriously. I think Ross's view is rooted in a religious belief in gender normativity and sex within the bounds of marriage for procreative purposes, but also in the simplistic belief- expressed in the final, foreboding sentence of the article- that marriage is necessary for human connection and meaning. Marriage can be a really wonderful thing. But for women especially, it can also be very risky.
8
"...the cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges, ..."
What does marriage equality have to do with whether or not heterosexual couples have children? Are there couples who say "we really want a half-dozen rugrats, but we'll pass because that nice gay couple down the street is legally married"? Does Mr. Douthat want a return to the days when gays had to marry unsuspecting heterosexuals and have children?
7
Forty years of GOP fiscal policy have brought our culture to the state it currently occupies, not least where the feasibility of affording to have children is concerned. Own it, Mr. Douthat. This one's down to your side.
3
Historically, gender ideology follows economics. The “liberalization” of women’s roles, e. g. more women working outside the house, followed economic practice and developments (Rosie the Riveter’s work during WWII is an example of economic practice) that pushed more women to enter the workforce.
Secondly, both the marriage rate and a number of children per marriage have historically trended downward in American history, with a blip after World War II.
American economic practice has become extremely child unfriendly. It is a necessity for most most couples to have both partners working, in many cases simply two paychecks are not enough any longer, and extra work needs to be done to afford rent, for instance, not to mention schooling for children.
We have virtually nonexistent childcare infrastructure. People are expected to move where the jobs are, which makes grandparent-care or more difficult— If the grandparents are not also working....
Rental and childcare pressures may be greater for those in cities — bastions of blueness—and for minorities.
All of which puts a large question mark by the concept of “choice” when it comes to marriage and parenthood.
People may think they are liberating themselves because they believe in liberation, but, as I pointed out, gender ideology seems to follow evonomic practice. Until American conservatives start taking a family-friendly approach to economics, their arguments seem self- serving, to say the least.
1
The American "Awokening" is primarily rooted in economic injustice, inequality, and abuse of power. If marriage rates decline because of this awakening, that is a good thing. I'd rather have marriage decline if it that is a necessary byproduct of up-rooting, exposing and destroying misogyny and racism in American culture. Perhaps once that cancer is eliminated, healthy marriages may steady.
2
Dear Ross,
Please read the comments carefully and then write again with the real life experiences of many "middle class" Americans behind your opinions. Note the economic realities in life story after life story.
Or do you separate the piece of paper labeled marriage from the ability to afford to marry and raise children?Don't forget to address health care, child care and education and retirement in addition to food, clean water and housing.
1
Why are people to blame and not corporations and their owners, mostly men? Consider how our children's workplace differs from ours. I'm 60, married at 21, children at 30, I worked full time which meant 40 hours/week. My daughters are 25 and 30, in professional jobs and work 60 hours/week. All on salary with no overtime pay. If I did the math, they are probably earning less per hour than I did 35 years ago. Having children is a giant committment in money and time, younger adults are short of both.
9
And this piece makes no mention of what the earth is going to be like for future generations? My daughters view the possibility of the climate going into a death spiral as a very real existential threat to their futures. As long as we have people like you, Mr.Douthat, with platforms who choose to talk about culture and religion and support the likes of our current regime which is criminally negligent to say the least when it comes to the environment, then I can only conclude that millennials and younger are making the eminently rational choice to forgo having children. Nothing will matter, not your norms and values, if the earth withers and dies.
5
Are liberals against marriage?
If you look at the political agenda they advocate: paid family leave, child care funding, enhanced education spending, universal healthcare, affordable college, the answer is pretty clear.
The liberals are pro-family, not just pro-marriage.
13
Is that the lack of marriage, or widespread poverty?
Poor people don’t marry because they can’t afford to.
@Concerned Citizen
How does marriage help with your 'inner city chaos?' It doesn't. That's a problem marriage cannot solve.
I have two single-parent mothers in my life who are doing just great. Their kids are also doing great. Marriage has nothing to do with that, obviously. What makes it work is decent wages (both are professionals) and community support.
1
While the idea of the general population being blessed with "prosperity and low unemployment," the numbers tell a different story. When both partners are working two or three jobs to make ends [jusr barely] meet, with no job security, no affordable childcare, no healthcare, well, bringing a child into the world seems like a senseless act of cruelty.
Conservatives get all gooey-eyed over unborn children before they're even viable, but once they're born, conservative abandon and betray them and their parents. From that point on, they're on their own.
5
Ross, the world already has too many of us in it! Why not focus on all those who are suffering because of scarcity and hunger. Or is it because they don't adhere to your preferred religion or culture. I am truly sick of these tortuous arguments about the cultural wars. There is much work to be done. Frankly conservatism rings hollow in the face of world poverty and destruction from climate change. Wake up!
2
At the last liberal club meeting I attended, we took a vote and decided that marriage was for squares baby. Any hep cat knows that’s it’s just a contract with the man baby! Seriously, Ross, 2019 is calling. The terms liberal and conservative are ridiculous when you have Trump parading as one or the other since the 80s. It’s a blame game. It’s a joke and those of you who make money keeping us under those labels need s new byline. But don’t quit, I still enjoy your columns.
5
Marriage should be a choice made by all parties, not something people (mostly women) feel that they must to do to be "real". Remember when women couldn't get a car or house loan without a husband's approval? I do. Have you, personally, ever had your terrified mother tell you to hide because the man she married at 17 and divorced a year later was circling the block? BTW, her mother (my grandmother) gave him the address because she always liked him, despite his mental illness. Did your biological father (married to your mother) flee when he found out your mother was pregnant, even though this was a natural consequence of marriage? Why did societal rules punish my mother for his moral failing? Why would a woman ever want to marry if she truly understood that she would forever be a posession unless she had to? This was the reality of marriage until very recently. Society and religion were used to force marriage on people, and punish them (once again, mostly the women) if they did not conform. Forgive me for not buying into this farce.
4
I am 54 years old, and it seems that for my entire life an ever-expanding claim to individual rights in both the social/cultural realm and in the economic realm has been what has powered society, for both good and ill.
We seem to be recognizing that we have reached a point of diminishing returns. Humans are not as happy, beautiful or fulfilled without some traditional structures and strictures as the cultural liberationists promised we would be. Our lives are not as dynamic, wealthy, efficient and secure as laissez faire economists preaching unencumbered capitalism promised we would be.
Having reached the limits of radical individualism, the small "l" liberalism which is the foundation of our Enlightenment experiment, we'll have to find a way to correct our path without eroding respect for the individual.
I suspect it will have to be an "inside job," a modification of our government, politics and material circumstances that starts with a modification of our internal attitudes and values. I am heartened by the glimmers of self-recognition on the cultural left and capitalist right, as mentioned by Ross.
1
I wonder about two things:
Have your generations delay in marriage & family created a lull? My parents were in their 20s while I was in my 30s, surly that would create a demographic dip.
Second, I don't find we live in a culture of comprise, and heaven knows if you keep waiting for a perfect match you'll probably die alone.
1
Ross failed to address the issue of Catholic priests' rape and sexual assault in masse of the church's children. If that isn't a deterrent to bringing children into the Catholic church, nothing is. Fact is, very few people are interested in identifying with an organized religion that has systematically abused their flock. Look no further than the massive decline in church attendance for evidence of a broken structure.
3
Couch it in any arcane economic/sociological argument that you want but it ultimately comes down to the fact that Ross and religious conservatives have an unhealthy obsession with the sex lives of others.
4
Bottom line: this is not a time of "prosperity." Unemployment is low because there are more part-time, no- or low-benefit jobs than ever. An entire generation is mired in debt, spending more than 50% of their income to house themselves. Even the married couples aren't having kids. To act like low birthrates are the result of a lifestyle choice is ridiculous.
6
This banal column from a conservative Republican who the majority of his party supports (and includes many white evangelicals) Donald Trump. A true beacon of family values.
3
Marriage is a church & state driven sham. It does nothing but provide barriers in society. Imagine if we just could love each other, have kids or don't, and not be judged for not having a piece of paper signed by a state official or a ceremonial head. And then imagine if all the money and time wasted on these ceremonies were put to better use like taking care of each other's basic human needs. We would all be better off (period).
1
Marriage ≠ childbearing. Liberal ideas are sympathetic to people who do not want to take responsibility, so it's a convenient set of principles to believe in. Single mom, girl power, being proud of anything unconventional for the sake of "good vibes" and getting votes. Liberal ideas were marketed very well in the early 2000s, taking advantage of a drug-addled post-9/11 generation that generally believes in nothing and is suspect of everything, even the food they eat on a daily basis. Births are low for a variety of reasons, but not marriage. Child support, sexual harassment, low wages, significantly more expenses than counterparts in previous decades, inconvenience of children affecting lifestyles, super-nuanced and niche beliefs that are now dealbreakers, wild entitled expectations SJWs and red-pillers (read: Twitter idealogues) have of sexual partners and what they demand. Also, emergence of trans and other sexual encounters that are impossible to produce children.
Marriage is a device based in religion. Someone that doesn't believe in god shouldn't also believe in soul mates, or anything spiritual for that matter; that'd be hypocritical.
2
One thing not really addressed here is how abuses around the marriage issue contaminated it. Women in abusive relationships were counseled to “put up with it” by religious and right leaning sources. “Children should be molested and not heard” (or some variation of that) was championed by abusers for a very long time —the victims have memories. Good men in the 50s paid the bills & stayed out of the way (sounds more like slavery than marriage). 1970: “gays don’t want to do the hard work of marriage, they want the easy way.” 2000: “gays want to marry? oh, no, then straight people will feel less special about their fragile marriages.” On and on. Marriage has been used like a weapon more than a social tool. Now those who weaponized it are trying to blame others for its demise?
1
Marriage is typically stronger and divorce rates lowers than in Blue States versus Trump Country
1
We live in a world with an unsustainable human population and will likely have devastating high casualty events because of it. Yet Ross Douthat is really concerned that "Americans," which should be interpreted as white Americans, aren't having enough children and thinks more "traditional marriage" would fix everything... Okay boomer.
2
The USA is very quickly declining and I would lay most of the blame at the feet of people who identify themselves as "conservatives." These are people who are essentially selfish and do not want to pay their taxes to support the common good. They are anti-environment and are killing the planet. They are anti-education and are dooming the future. Now tell me why anyone would bring a child into that horrible scenario?
1
Marriage declines among young people in the face of excessive debt, the inability of the country to provide a world that some one would want to bring a child into, and the painful expense of health care and education. If this nation cared about children, it wouldn't jail them or allow them to be shot down in their schools or on the playground.
This claptrap about religion and right/left ideology affecting marriage (the non sacrament kind) is just the fading argument of a male dominated, pseudo-religious and perverted group of sundowning men trying to remain in power.
1
This is hogwash. I'm a liberal who lives in a red state, married 24 years and counting.
In Kentucky, most conservative Christians are on their second or third marriage by the time they are 30. Do more marriages count as being more in favor of marriage, Ross?
6
The title of this column is sensationalist and is the reason newspapers get a bad name. While this is an opinion piece, and the title is meant to draw in readers, it also gives no justice to the nuance of the arguments. Furthermore, Mr. Douthat's use of the term "elite progressives" gives in to the fear-mongering of the modern Republican Party. There are no "elite progressives." There are educators who do research but there are few people who thumb their noses at the "poor" middle and lower class catholic conservatives. While I am sure that people like this exist, they are few and far between. This is simply ridiculous stereotyping.
2
This is overwrought rationalization and hand-wringing. And it mistakes an essentially religious change for a political one. Since most people no longer buy the "Sky daddy thinks you're sinning" model of social imperatives, and women are empowered to support themselves and decide if/when to have children, the stats on marriage and childbirth are changing. Yeah, so? Get over it.
2
At least some married, liberal couples deliberately choose not to have children. There are too many people on this planet. Population is the reason for all our environmental problems.
1
I'm liberal and married for 33 years to the same person. One progressive daughter has been married for 6 years.
Conservative Trump, whose current wife is 24 years younger than he is, is a philandering thrice-married misogynist. Should we also dredge up the allegations against the Bushes or maybe we can talk about Reagan's marriages? The late John McCain's marriages? How about America's mayor Rudy Giuliani? Is this his third divorce? Do we include the annulment from his cousin?
6
@Concerned Citizen ,
That's so true. Liberals never divorce. Only hypocritical conservatives who marry and then dump wives every 10 years. Shameful.
Perhaps marriage has declined because women can support themselves and that marriage almost always is a better deal for men than for women. Women do more housework and more emotional labor in a relationship than men do, on balance. And for what? We can get companionship when we want it, we have friends and social lives. Often times men are just a drag on what makes life worth living.
4
Setting aside the competing cultural and political takes that Mr. Douthat is describing - one does not have to marry to have children. Nor should anyone marry only in order to have children. Why not support couples living together without the messy legality of wedlock? Depending on the statistics one chooses, almost one in two marriages ends up in divorce. Doesn't look like a model to build a future on to me. And it lays bare the falsehood that marriage remains a strong institution. People exit it as quickly as they enter. Better to have children (if wanted) and a serious partner later in life, when the commitment to both is commiserate to the higher incomes and maturity (such as it is) two serious people bring to the table. In the end, you gotta love the one you're with, no matter the intellectual divide.
1
All the things that seem to go along with marriage and kids, like a house, a well-paying job, etc. isn't necessarily available to millennials. Childcare is the biggest concern my friends have, they're making arrangements to possibly have a nanny share.
I personally do not want a family or a husband, but feel coerced by society to do those things. Kudos to my fellow liberals for refusing to be pressured into it.
2
It's pretty obviously because "despite prosperity" is a shallow view of the economy. A robust economy that is only rewarding those at the top is not helping the middle class have the financial stability to have a family. If wages had gone up at all since the 80s to match inflation, marriage and birth rates would probably not be declining.
5
If Conservatives really cared about families, they would also care about health care and education. But they don't.
9
Ross, instead of lamenting the declining birth rate and blaming an "anti-marriage" stance, why not write about America's failure in taking care of the children who do exist. How many lack a good meal, a roof over their heads, a good education, affordable and accessible healthcare and of course, what every conservative wants to sweep under the rug... safety in a nation that values gun rights over children's lives. Surely a good Catholic like you would do more good writing about the need to take care of one another, something we liberals are for, not against.
10
Bottom line: Getting laid is awesome for both men and women. My wife and I have three kids with the youngest about to go off to college. However, we both had exceptionally fulfilling sex lives prior to meeting each other. I think that period of recreational sex for both of us lent itself to a fulfilling married life with a decent number of kids. And now we're getting busy more often, once again, and looking forward to the future together. And I bet we're not outliers.
4
@XXX Thanks to science - and no thanks to the Roman Catholic Church - children are not an automatic outcome of having sex. And sex certainly does not explain why more people are eschewing marriage. It's all about control.
2
It's interesting to note the states with the highest divorce rate are:
Nevada at 5.6
West Virginia at 5.2
Arkansas at 5.3
Idaho at 4.9
Oklahoma at 5.2
Nevada may be skewed bu outsiders coming in to get a divorce (I'm not sure, but the others are red states. The states with the lowest divorce rate:
Iowa at 2.4
Illinois at 2.6
Massachusetts at 2.7
North Dakota at 2.7
Pennsylvania at 2.8
North Dakota is a red state, Iowa is in-between, the other three are definitely blue states. This may have more to do with income, but I find it inconsistent with Mr. Douthout's premise.
NOTE: Figures from the CDC
4
@Concerned Citizen I should have put PA in with Iowa as a swing state. Good catch about the correlation of marriage rates with divorce rates in the low category. Among the high-rate states Nevada has the highest marriage rate and Arkansas and Idaho is substantially higher than the US average, while OK is about average and WV has a lower than average rate.
Still, I think this is a data point against the premise that liberals are necessarily anti-marriage.
I quite agree with the commenter, Richard Cohen, who asks who can afford to have children? In his first sentence Mr. Douthat refers to living "amid prosperity and low unemployment." Most of the jobs today are low income jobs. That is not prosperity. And low unemployment does not at all mean that people with jobs can support a family. It's a tough choice to make even for the many people who really want children.
My trick for managing to support two children was a hard and fast rule that as soon as I get to my desk each day I must forget for the next 9 hours that I have children and focus only on earning my salary. That was really hard to do when a child was sick or having trouble in school. But it was necessary because employers aren't keen on letting parents leave work and go take care of their kids. We managed, but if I had had much lower than a median income, things wouldn't have gone well. It does seems like today the choice to have a child has everything to do with the parent's income and job security, neither of which is in abundance these days.
11
Taking a look at existing tax laws should tell anyone - conservative or liberal - that this country, culture supports marriage.
4
Are conservatives against young people having enough money to get married? Why yes, Ross, yes they are. Conservatives are against minimum wages that provide for a decent living, and they are against affordable college. They are even in favour of the most-crushing inescapable loan rules to apply to young people in their most-marriageable years.
Conservatives hate families in general, of course; their policies are most-damaging to people getting started.
It was Ronald Reagan, obviously, who won the War On Marriage. Before Reagan, it was quite the stigma to be divorced, it would limit your social standing and your career prospects. Heck, a British King had to abdicate just to marry a previously-divorced woman just a few decades earlier.
But Reagan captured the evangelicals away from the Democrats with racist dog-whistling, and they put him in the White House, and it was no further stigma for divorced people to rise to any level at all. Now, multiply-divorced Republicans like Trump, Gingrich and Giuliani fill our airwaves and halls of power. (Still no divorced liberals in the white house...)
7
Ross, there is no "never-ending right-left debate about how to explain the decline of marriage."
Your framing has little to do with the realities of this millennium. Publish pieces like this in 1987 where they belong.
8
This essay is so flawed. It omits the effect effective birth control has had on the number of women marrying.
It fails to mention that marriage still is not a very good prospect for many women.
Modern women can't envision themselves drudging behind children and husband for the rest of their lives when they can have their own careers and a satisfying, good life without.
If conservatives were so concerned about floundering birthrates, they might give thought to the prohibitive cost of having children and provide paid maternity leave, subsidized day care, lowering cost of education, health care and housing.
Ah, but then that's when liberals turn into frothy-mouthed stalinesque socialists in the conservative view, isn't it? Asking the state to share the burden of childbirth is too much for conservatives to swallow. So, if you want children, you're on your own and good luck.
Conservatives, in lock step with religious gimcrackery, would force their will onto the rest of us who want to choose whether we will marry and have children. Companionship and love have nothing to do with a marriage ceremony.
And then there is the conservatives' rabid condemnation of same-sex marriage. Explain that, Douthat.
10
@George Dietz Conservatives would start with 2 year paid leave for new parents and subsidized child care. I'm embarrassed that the US is no better for working parents than when I had my first almost 30 years ago.
1
@Suburbs And way worse than most of the countries of Europe. We are certainly an "exceptional" country there as well as universal healthcare and low cost or free higher education. But we don't want no stinkin' socialists here, do we?
Remember how marital rape wasn't illegal in all 50 states until 1993? And how, in 11 states, marital rape is treated differently than non-marital rape? It's almost like marriage was once very oppressive and controlling and now, we are still fighting to undo the residual institutional enforcements of that time...
But yeah, MAGA or whatever.
7
My father was an orphan with an 8th-grade education. But he made enough to afford a decent house while my mother stayed home and raised their children. I have a BA and MBA from a top university but despite my far, far larger salary, I cannot afford a better house than he bought 60 years ago. Sweep all the moral and social arguments aside and you're left with economics. The middle and working classes have taken it in the neck for 50 years now, and their economic slide has been followed by a necessary reduction in child production. Where's the big mystery here?
8
Having kids is expensive. It has significantly grown more so in our lifetimes, as our schools and especially colleges have moved away from educational missions toward for-profit models in their pricing. The private university tuition for my BA was $18k in the 70's. Today it would be nearly $200k at my alma mater.
Living basics are also expensive. For the median person, in my lifetime, basic COL eats a much larger share of income than it did for my parents or grandparents. Health care is 18%+ of GDP, up from 9% in my childhood. Expected housing costs have risen from under 20% HHI in my youth to 30% or more.
If you want to encourage more reproductive behavior, you have to look at economics - specifically, the ability of a large growing family to thrive on one single income. In this economic environment, parenthood is easy to choose against.
Trying to put all sex back in the narrow neck marriage-only bottle is messy, unlikely to succeed and will prove out the laws of unintended consequence - MINO behaviors don't help a moral defense of marriage, and argue against it.
1
As much as "views on marriage" may have shifted, marriage and other life decisions of import continue to have tradeoffs. You can be a student or former student facing large loan repayment and marry a similarly-situated student or former student, but the two of you will have to deal with that double-indebtedness. Or you can not get married or you can get married only when you find someone without debt or wealthy enough to pay off your debt. You can marry someone with strong economic prospects, even if he or she is not wealthy now, and see how those prospects pan out. You can be a woman who wants to be a stay-at-home mom, and you can marry a person who is well-situated or not well-situated to complement that. You can decide you want to live in X place and only marry someone who wants to live there, or you can move to place Y where there might be better or worse prospects for finding a spouse or a job for you or your possible spouse. What you cannot do is have everything you want, all at once, where you want it, with the people you with whom you want to share it, and especially not after you have already made life decisions or accepted life restrictions that make things impossible. That applies both to "policy groups" and individual people.
2
The world has enough children. All the world's children need to be wanted.
Economics is key here in the U.S. Has Douthat visited the reality that most childbearing adults experience? Multiple jobs? Student debt? No real support for families? Where's the affordable childcare? Where's the paid family leave? What about commute times?
What study is he quoting that Rs marry and stay married more than Ds?! Blue collar workers, who tend to be Rs, don't marry these days because they can't afford to!
2
As for the liberal disinclination to credit conservative goals such as marriage-for-all, the reason for it is the same as the reason for all liberal objections to conservatism. Conservatives want to push power up toward people who already have it. In this case, it's men, or in general, patriarchy. Liberals ought to continue to criticize any maldistribution of power or wealth toward men and away from women. The patriarchal model/ideal of the male sole breadwinner is very damaging, even cruel, to those who don't fit into it, including men, but especially women.
6
I find almost nothing of what you say are facts to be true. I would have loved your source that claims conservatives are not only more like to marry (no contest) but more likely to stay married.
I know nobody who fits your multiple definitions of third wave liberalism on marriage. To the best of my knowledge, the primary difference between conservatives and liberals on marriage at this point is that conservatives marry for sex, status, or power, or a combination, while liberals marry to make a lifelong commitment. My ex-husband has done several things, among them written right-wing commentary for newspapers, including the LA Times. He believes a man should work, a woman should stay home with the kids, and the man should have all the affairs outside of marriage he wants while the woman should be chaste. He also claims our marriage of 9 years never happened, abortion should be illegal (but available to those who can pay to, for example, get rid of a girl child, which my refusal to do contributed to our divorce).
I noticed that you didn't bother to define traditional marriage. Let me add my ex-husband's definition to this article. It is a tool to empower and enable men to control as many women as possible while being financially responsible for only one of them.
What is your definition?
12
I really don’t feel that a decline in marriage and children are a bad thing. We have time to consider our choices and really really want children. We are ready for the effort. We aren’t being thrown into something at a young age because that’s what we are supposed to do. It will be better for future generations and better for the children in general. Maybe there should be a study and articles titled “A Decline in Bad Marriage and Unwanted Children”. Let’s thank the liberals.
6
There is nothing more full of hypocrisy than the Conservative stance on marriage, sex, and babies (having them and raising them).
Conservatives have sex outside of marriage, commit adultery, divorce multiple times, marry multiple times, have abortions (when pregnancies are inconvenient to careers, mistresses become pregnant, daughters are promiscuous, sons are sowing wild oats).
Conservatives are just as thankful for lenient divorce laws as Liberals. Ask Donald Trump, Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich.
Today as in the past Conservatives lament that immigrants and people of "lesser quality" have too many children which eventually may delude Conservative power in politics.
Conservatives are against abortion but their concern for the welfare of an unborn child ends when it exits the birth canal.
And of course Conservatives want less government unless it can be used to support (or should I say enforce) their ideas of morality (which they often do not practice). Conservatives would howl if the marriage deduction were eliminated in the Federal Income Tax law.
It has taken 60 years to come to the realization that marriage is not the ultimate goal in the lives of men and women.
Douthat's treatise, no matter how he tries to look at things from both a Conservative and Liberal view, is still an attack on Liberals and is disingenuous and garbage.
6
Most marriages statistically fail. I don't know why people still do it nowadays, whether you're a liberal or conservative.
5
it’s all about conservative economics, the conservatives war on the middle class has made child rearing unfeasible, you can either be poor and have children, or you can be in the middle class without children, it really is that simple, just look at a graph, as conservative economics took hold with nixon and then reagan, there was a corresponding decline in the social cohesion conservatives claim to love most, the key word there of course being claim, when faced with a choice between a healthy society or an oligarchy, conservatives chose oligarchy, so really all this conservative hans wringing and carping is just patently ridiculous
3
Poor third world countries have higher birthrates than richer ones like ours. So maybe we should increase poverty, since 7 billion or so people on this planet don't leave enough of a carbon footprint.
3
I refuse to give away my daughter as I never owned her.
5
This liberal, Catholic has been married for 27 years. I have four kids and work. Unlike many conservative make icons like Giuliani, Gingrich and Trump I actually walk the walk.
9
I like to listen to The Argument to hear Ross's thoughtful conservative points. I would like to hear a podcast with more than an "impressionistic" take on this topic, because foundational support for families seems to me like such a natural bridge between today's liberal and conservative divide. I don't think anyone has this topic completely figured out on their own. But it puzzles and saddens me when the policy work of the left to bolster families, women, children, living wages, stable homes, stable health care, time off, etc seems to be glossed over. These supportive, community-focused policies are a significant part of the left right now. How in the world can one look at that and conclude liberal interest in families is on the decline? Speaking for myself, there's a sharp liberal awareness of the inequalities that stand in the way of the American Dream. It feels dishonest to ask, "why aren't you talking about families?", when most of us are thinking, "why aren't you talking about all the things standing in the way of my family?"
I am glad Ross mentions the poison of associating "tradition" with white supremacy, sexism, and oppression. I hope it's not lost on us that this depressing baggage has contributed to marriage's troubles in our culture. The more we can make "families" a bipartisan issue, the better.
4
Wow! I don’t know where to begin. Marriage is a legal agreement between 2 people, with the laws of the state encouraging its maintenance; this is often not enough to prevent its dissolution. When the state and society support egalitarian marriage, where both parties help maintain the home and the lifestyle, people may be more interested in it. Children are another instance where society is not set up for equal distribution of childcare responsibilities; in addition to the governmental and societal restraints there is the world itself. Climate change is real and the world we see now will be very different in 30-50 years. Only the very wealthy will have a shield from this. Who wants to encourage child bearing under such circumstances.
2
I read Douthat's columns every time. I usually disagree, but also usually appreciate seeing the view from the other side. But this column is fundamentally wrong, partly because once again. Douthat lumps an entire group - liberals - into one monolithic mass, and then ascribes an absurdly simple opinion to all of them
I am a liberal (and a Christian, of Mr D will allow non-Catholics to be Christian). Almost all my friends are liberals. Most have children - even some of the LGBT ones.
I hope America can go forward in some kind of unity or mutual forbearance and respect once we dig put of the morass of trumpian and GOP corruption and polarization. But if we are to do so, sweeping generalization such as this article with its laughable generalized headline will have to go. Frankly, they're not even very Christian.
6
Funny point of view in this piece.
The "right" have shown no regard for God's Holy Commandment "thou shalt not commit adultery", which is an afront to marriage, in their unwavering support for Trump.
9
In this article by Mr. Douthat I have a problem with the definition of "liberal", in a social and political sense. Some Liberals are genuinely Progressive thinkers and doers, but many are nothing but All-knowing Logorrheics that grade into militant Vegans and leftist radical Democrats.
1
This is a sterile argument. Mr. Douthat's elaborate caricatures do little except to shore up boundaries rooted in ideology and tribe.
A more honest reckoning with marriage in America would deal with how marriage choices have become more fraught as women (overall) have grown in social and economic empowerment while increasing inequality (overall) has created dilemmas for millions of couples.
We don't need serious issues to be treated as proxy skirmishes in a partisan war.
3
So basically, Mr. Douthat, at the end of your column your true opinion comes out, that the "emerging phase" of Conservatism is welcoming to input from the left and that the "emerging phase" of liberalism is actually the scary thing that you have been calling the "nuanced progressivism" for years.
Mr. Douthat includes more veiled stereotypes to count here. Beyond overpopulation worldwide, climate, and economics, is the divide of living in a free country, and being expected to bow down to some god. I got married, though I cannot remember what year or day, at town hall, and my partner was expected to recite that she'd obey me and god. This was a civil ceremony mind you. Perhaps it's time to shift your mindset away from your Catholic faith when musing about culture Mr. Douthat. Your cultural standards are a bit suspect after watching your religion's hierarchy diddle young kids for ages. Constructs like marriage are anathema to free will. I understand society's need to encourage people to conform to a sound moral code, and to hold individuals responsible, but marriage in the form of religious dogma in my town hall is archaic and obsolete. Get with the program already!
Now, back to the real issues of birth rates. Just how many human beings can this planet sustain? This is the question which desperately needs answering. In my opinion, we're way past that number, and need a practical, moral, and fair way of addressing it, and soon. The climate tipping point was passed about 40 years ago.
5
Read your own newspaper, Douthat. Dr. Krugman has some things to say today relevant to this issue. Most of what happened on this issue is the result of forty years of Republican economic policy. The rest is reliable birth control.
3
As we stare down the dark tunnel of probability that is climate upheaval, you are seriously asking why people aren't having more children?!? we have long since exceeding our carrying capacity, we need to take care of those that are already here.
4
Past: You MUST get married. = Obligation
Now: You CAN get married. = Choice
Its a question about individual choice and self-determination over societal pressure. Both Liberals and Conservatives support this philosophy.
Its about pushing back against forced lifestyles, not marriages in particular. Your focus on marriages (one single effect) shows your misunderstanding of what the social change is really about.
3
Why would anybody mess up a perfectly good relationship by getting married? I see it nothing more than a business that gets you going in (churches, synagogues, mosques, catering halls, caterers, DJ's, etc) and gets you going out (lawyers, therapists and a gaggle of others).
It always struck me as conformist nonsense no matter the political or religious machinations one brings to the table.
But in the end... Whatever floats your boat, go for it! Married or not married. If ain't broke don't fix it.
2
A low birthrate is not a problem. There are plenty of immigrants willing to come to the US to keep up population numbers. I think conservative concern over the low birthrate might really be a fear of immigration.
5
Families having fewer children is something to celebrate. There is a limit to how many people our planet can support. If we don't slow the human birthrates worldwide, within a few decades virtually all birds and most insects will be extinct, and there will be nothing left of the Amazon rain forest.
290
@Paul Smith
Birth rates declining among the populations most likely to actually practice conservation kind of means that conservation is doomed in the long run, and not sustainable. That new tragedy of the commons should kind of concern you, if you're actually interested in conservation instead of, well, signaling one's virtue so to speak.
All those kids you're glad aren't being born? Oh, they're still being born. Just not to people who share your interests or ideology or priorities.
22
@Paul Smith People have been saying this for over 100 years, since Malthus, and it has never been true. Meanwhile it is true that an inverted population curve has dire consequences for the economy.
7
@Paul Smith Correct, and there will be nothing left for all those humans to eat!
11
I don't understand how the "cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges" a case about the fundamental rights of people to a monogamous marriage to the partner of their choice could possibly be anti-marriage or anti-natal since it seems like marriage equality has resulted in many more same sex couples choosing to have children than ever before. I am someone who thinks it is dangerous as a culture to treat childbearing as a lifestyle choice since we need to reproduce to ensure the preservation of the species plus it seems like a natural stage of life for any animal. But I am lost when it is suggested that legalizing same sex marriage is something that cuts against the goal that people marry and have children.
2
When looking for an explanation for the decline in popularity of marriage and child bearing it has always seemed to me that the triumph of consumerism in American society was a major factor. When one has been brainwashed to believe that it is necessary to have two cars, a comfortable home in a "good" neighborhood, time and money for exotic vacations, etc. etc. there is little room in a marriage for an offspring that will be dependent for at least two decades and require time and investment that will obviate much of consumerisms goals. It's either/or. Unless you are born to wealth you can't have both. Fewer people are willing to let the cost of child-bearing and raising interfere with their self- gratification. They don't know what they are missing!
@Del
We DO know what we are missing and are relieved we were able to dodge the bullet(s).
Progressive liberal here. Of course marriage and having children are declining. It's just to expensive. I'm married but we couldn't figure out how to make it work we needed two incomes and it was alot cheaper to rent or to buy a condo/house in at that time. My career during my child bearing years required alot of travel for weeks at a time. My job was difficult and required all my energy. I was the youngest of 5 women out of 50 doing this job so I had to be better than the average man doing this same job. My pay was okay but was lower than them and not enough to hire full time childcare. I also felt I might be let go if I got pregnant. My husband also worked 60-70 hour weeks in these years. We never had children and are GenX. Not to mention the healthcare system is totally broken being tied to ones job. If the country wants more children and people to get married we need universal healthcare and childcare to start and free college would really make a difference. This is really a no brainer. The people who don't get it are completely out of touch with what the younger generations are up against. Our system has failed the middle class and the poor are just out on the street. Conservative just means out of touch with reality these days.
7
Kudos to Mr. Douthat for being self-aware enough to also be self-deprecating. In an age when far too many people take themselves far too seriously, it is a credit to one’s character to still have a sense of humor.
It’s also somewhat commendable that a ‘culturally conservative’ columnist can acknowledge, however underhandedly, that feminism might ‘theoretically’ be congenial to perspectives like their own. It takes a real man to accept that their wife and daughters are people, too.
Personally, I have no objection to marriage; I just want the dowry that’s supposed to come with it. Doesn’t that make me the ‘real’ religious conservative?
I am on the radical side of liberal and I am very much in favor of marriage. It just took a long time before I found the right woman. We got married several times--first, a Jewish wedding in Tilden Park in Berkeley. Next, in San Francisco when the mayor legalized it, but then the state annulled it. A third time in Canada when that country legalized it. And a fourth in San Francisco when it became legal here again. I have been a co-parent to five children, and now have grandchildren--expecting 2 more of them in January.
However, I don't think my path to marital bliss is exactly what Father Douthat has in mind.
3
To find a mate and be attractive to them, you need time to engage in social occasions and you need a stable income that won't make you look like a potential burden.
As a young person, you can either work a job which leaves you time, but pays little, or you can work a high-paying job which is no longer 9-to-5 but is now 8-to-6 or -7 and you need to have your phone and be on call the rest of the time.
And those high paying jobs generally require higher education, at least 4 years or more, during which time you have the biological drive to procreate, but not the financial attributes to start a family.
These are also the generations that saw their parents divorce at least once. They are in no hurry to tie themselves down and repeat that mistake, so they court much longer and may be less forgiving of a potential partner's faults.
Add to that the world is on fire, wealth inequality, increasing right wing radicalism, climate change, and how many are eager to bring new life into the world?
3
Has a married liberal, I sincerely doubt liberals are against marriage, but I think most women are not real keen on marrying self-righteous men who don't respect them, their right to own bodies or their world view. That fact make, in and of itself makes them liberal.
It seems like Douthat wants to frame the entire issue of the dearth of babies and the decline wedlock along religious and political lines, with the absolute fore knowledge that by framing the debate along said lines he can smugly declare themselves correct in the long run.
He deserves some credit for being infinite more respectful of people he doesn't agree then William Barr.
But honestly conservatives, usually male, whether of the Barr or Douthat ilk, are looking at wedlock and childbearing has part of the wider political ideology is actually quite telling. They really seem to think that winning some cosmic argument about ideology matters.
Apparently in the midst of a steepening decline in marriage and rapidly falling birthrate they haven't noticed that they are winning the political argument "bigly."
1
It remains interesting that seemingly most conservatives view the entire world through the lens of sex. Marriage is not about sex, it is about building a partnership, a family, and a community. Having more choices about personal life leads to stronger marriages.
The people that I know that are not having children are choosing that path for two reasons, financial and fear of the future. With the climate becoming as extreme as politics, several of my friends children are opting out of having children out of concern for their potential safety and well being over time. That is not addressed here.
9
As others have pointed out, Douthat conflates two separate issues: marriage and children.
I am a Gen-Xer who waited until I turned 30 to marry after watching my parents' bitter divorce. Mine was the first generation of children whose parents divorced in large numbers. My mother was much happier but much poorer after the divorce, which was also fairly typical. It was hard for her to find a job since she'd been at home raising five children. I didn't want to rush into something that could wind up with me unable to earn a decent living and responsible for others' welfare. As for children, my husband and I delayed having any because we weren't making enough money. We managed one child before I was no longer fertile. My political affiliation had nothing to do with my decisions.
3
"Republicans marry more and divorce less than Democrats, ideological conservatives are much more likely to be married than ideological liberals, and conservatives are more than twice as likely to describe marriage as something “needed” for “strong families.”"
Republicans are on average a decade older. It stands to reason that their views on marriage would differ in the aggregate. I wonder how these statements would change if we controlled for age, education and income. Oh Edsal did.
Speaking as an unmarried genx in a monogamous relationship for a decade. Managing life’s complexities is stressful enough without the perception of entrapment or specter of divorce. Happy to trade the canned promise of marital security for our homemade version - one part volition, two parts love/loyalty, three parts hard work. Like marriage it flops some days. A little more than half the time it keeps us, um...balanced?
1
Don't assume that because the stock market is high and more people have minimum wage jobs that people are prospering. Studies show that young people have lower salaries than their parents at the same age, despite more education (and thus a lot more educational debt). Real estate is still extremely expensive.
6
It seems to me that most conservative thought and policy is based on how things never were, but should be (eg celibate priests).
9
Marriage is being selected based on economic class, not political class. My wife and I see our well-educated, high earning friends all behaving in a similar manner, regardless of politics or even sexuality. Our friends spend time choosing a good life partner, commit to marriage, and then bring kids into a stable home.
Our less educated, lower earning friends are more likely to have kids out of wedlock and without 2 parents in the home, regardless of marriage status. Those who get married are more likely to see it end in divorce, and the divorce brings on significant economic hardships (2 people earning $30k each can live a comfortable life with a shared home, but start to pay for 2 apartments and there is little left for other expenses).
Obviously, some of our more economically successful friends have had marriages end, sometimes in a acrimonious manner. But the dissolution of marriage doesn't result in bankruptcy or a significant change in the economic class of the children.
I largely think a lot of this is self selection. Delayed gratification required to complete a degree and even advanced degrees (wife's sorority sisters are all dentists, lawyer, or physicians - most of whom out-earn the husbands) will also make it more likely one will wait to for the better mate. Again, not universal, but in general this is true.
5
This column totally ignores the elephant in the room, which is the economy. The author says:
“But it does not feel like a coincidence that the new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing.”
but totally ignores the fact that most millennials (the people having kids today) have been trying to build careers on the post-recession economy. Just getting a good, stable job as a young person during the years since 2008 has been very difficult. I’m a well educated millennial, and many of my peers (who should be doing well) have had to switch jobs repeatedly, take part-time filler jobs and so on. That’s no basis for a family. As a result, my friends are either not having kids at all, or desperately having 1 kid when they are 34 or 35. The people who have kids just struggle even more. And yes, we are mostly all married.
3
Marriage is an intimate institution. To my mind, people used to get married because they didn't have a lot of other options. They looked for someone who would not hit them, drink their paycheck on Friday, or excessively philander (obviously taking a woman's perspective here). Getting divorced was not feasible for most. Of course the rate of marriage was higher, there were a lot of unhappy marriages!
Now that the marriage rate is lower, the happiness rate might be much higher. This liberal vs. conservative dichotomy Mr. Douthat is trying to apply feels very tortured.
4
To me, (nuclear) family size is to a large degree about (extended) family size.
I have three kids and my wife and I both work full time in the SF Bay Area. We have no nanny or help from our extended family. If we had one more kid, I would frankly drop dead. I just physically would not be able to handle all the work involved of being a co-equal parent to four kids and also having a full time job.
The reason for this is there is no support structure provided by government or society writ large for parents of children, or at a minimum for parents of young, not-yet-school-aged children. (And even with school-aged kids, there are a ridiculous number of days off and school goes from about 8:15 to 2:30, so good luck relying on that alone to get you through the night.) The world now just is not set up for two working parents.
Since you're on your own, you are left to non-governmental support structures - in particular, your family - to help, even in some small way, with your children.
Take a look at what types of subcultures typically have large families in America. Many of these - Hispanic and Filipino subcultures - have large extended family networks that share the burden of raising children and enable larger families. I think that explains a lot of what Ross is talking about, and likely tracks to the religiosity/conservatism that he seems to think is the main animating factor.
1
Marriage rates, like fertility and birth rates, go up and down with the economy (a better index than "housing starts"), and with young adults' hope in the future in general. This is not a right-left situation.
But it is an indication of what the economy is really like for most Americans, and of fears of many members of the millennial and post-millennial generations for the future of our country, environment and indeed planet.
I'm surprised at your will to see this as a "binary" conservative v. liberal situation.
2
Reproductive rights allow women to determine how many children they have. Not conservative religious doctrine or societies enforced norms.
Women have options for education and employment, not just marry young and have baby after baby, as the only goal in life.
Laws and society now accept divorce, because people wanted it.
Society now accepts single parenthood. Single women overwhelming choose to keep babies, rather than place them for adoption.
Liberals accept Marriage of all individuals, not just the conservative choice of a man and a women.
American society has evolved, deal with it.
Or step up to the plate and provide federal programs to support parents.
3
Mr. Douthat:
What does "a general advance in nuance" in conservative thinking mean? When do you suppose this trend will lead to actual social policy that would help support families? Talk is cheap.
5
We should be questioning the underlying problems, not the manifestations of our unhappiness. Sexual revolutions, divorce, disappearance of the "nuclear family" are perhaps what happens when people realize that marriage is not the only pathway to fulfillment and meaninfulness in life. Do we suppose that cave dwellers left mother and father and established a single-family cave dwelling with mom, dad and children?
Was King Henry the VIII all into monogamy and the perfect family unit?
Do we suppose that our great grandmothers and grandmothers were desirous of birthing 13, 18, or even 21 children?
No one group is destroying marriage - marriage is a construct that we created somewhere along the line, and while it suits some people, it certainly is not a universal desire, nor should it be.
Some of us want to believe that the lack of a nuclear family will bring about the deterioration of society; however, I believe our ancestors knew that it takes a village to raise children. As a community, we are all responsible for taking care of the future, i.e. the children. Additionally, extended family members are indispensable contributors to a child's life experiences.
Family is what you create; a family unit is not a pre-ordained, predestined definition created by society. When we send the message that only nuclear families count, while continuing to marginalize other types of families, we will perpetuate our unhappiness and despair.
5
Is the lack of marriage today really as complicated as this article articulates? A heuristic approach noting income inequality; slow or non-existent income growth which affects income for childcare; a reduced positive outlook for the future; the cost of living relative to income; education and career rather than children; the stress of raising a child other income concerns. Many apparently do not see the rewards in having a child.
4
I read much of this amused and smirking. Whether we are liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats we are subject to the same societal influences. We spend less real time together and more time in the virtual world of IPads and smart phones and easily arranged NSA "hookups". Women now largely are employed outside the home. Economic inequality weighs heavily on the decision to get married or even date as we go to the extremes of even asking the credit scores of a potential dating prospect. But in the end it has a silver lining Ross, the world is very overpopulated so we really don't need more babies. As other countries especially third world catch up with the rest of western civilization maybe their birth rates will decline as well and we will become sustainable. If not Mother Nature always has a cure.
2
And mother nature’s cure for our overpopulation will not be pretty.
1
I can't get through one paragraph from Ross without major disagreements. "Amidst prosperity", he writes.
Full stop. No hook. The disagreement is already too profound to buy any further argument. You have an odd conception of prosperity,Mr. Douthat. The reality is the "prosperity" is leaving the vast majority of Americans behind. Professionals who can't afford the cities they live in. Hospitals closing in rural areas. Teachers striking because they can't afford food. Working people paying more taxes than Amazon.com in one paycheck. They get nothing in return except a Russian like government that sends our tax dollars to only those who help the executive politically. Legalized bribery on every level - from super pacs to military aid to disaster aid, everything is transactional - and doesn't happen unless it benefits the executive and the oligarchs. Ecocide rockets on toward an uninhabitable world, and the suicide, opioid and homelessness epidemics continue unabated.
Meanwhile Trump shreds the alliances that gave us relative peace for more than half a century while the GOP calls any check on the executive "a coup".
Why would anyone want to bring Kids into the world right now? You'd have to believe in a powerful religious delusion telling a grand narrative of Deus Ex Machina to be excited about the experiences our children will endure in the not too distant future.
18
It is hard to hear but the concept of marriage is already over. It is no good for wives or husbands.
We are simply adjusting to the new future.
2
I frankly have a hard time understanding what marriage brings to many women. Many women I know who were married and now divorced tell stories of loss of independence far beyond that experienced by their former husbands, an expectation to work outside the home, but also to do 100% of the housework and to take care of the kids.
None of my sisters is now married and neither have any desire to remarry. They are far happier, better off financially and more mentally healthy.
I think the debate is much more complex than a liberal/conservative debate.
9
@Texas Duck - The bigger question is what does marriage bring to a man, when most men marry women with lower earnings, lose their independence, and then finally get financially slaughtered in divorce.
Millennials are the children of broken homes. My parents are divorced and it wreaked havoc on myself and my siblings. Most of my friends have a similar experience. We watched our parents squander the relatively easy hand they'd been dealt with an economy and social structure that made it fairly easy to achieve the stereotypical "American dream." Parents lost to alcoholism or some other excess.
Little wonder millennials are drinking less, taking fewer risks. When your foundation is destroyed it makes one hesitant to embark on a similar journey. Maybe we're just being more careful.
I will not take the chance of creating another broken home. I will not bring children into this world that I cannot give a better life than I had.
Moreover, as others have pointed out, the middle class dream is dead for most of us. I graduated college ten years ago. I will be paying off the last of my student loans shortly, and even then only after a modest inheritance from a grandparent who passed away recently.
People need to get real about what it costs to have a decent life in this country. I cracked six figures for the first time last year and am still struggling. The cost of living where I do is outrageous.
There's no place in this world for archaic conservative preachiness.
8
This is a classic mixing of three related but distinct problems to hold up socially conservative idealism.
1. Women do not need to marry (or stay in an abusive marriage) for the sake of economic support.
2. The US does NOT provide young parents the economic means or social empathy ESSENTIAL to bring up children.
3. The US is hostile to immigrant families who bring debt-free education, which helps social mobility, and have a community/family support system to create the "village". Must be our native-born kids, as the only babies that matter.
4
Regardless of political/social persuasion, there are basic facts that people need to consider in childbearing, or not: the world is vastly overpopulated with people, and overpopulation helps defeat the effectiveness of whatever measures we (humanity) take to ensure viable ecological health for future generations.
One reasonable estimate about 20 years ago regarding a sustainable level of humans guesstimated 2 billion people with the throughput levels of people in 1940 i.e. far below today's individual throughout levels.
So what info should people use to make childbearing choices?
Unfortunately, people are often being misled by economists espousing a very poorly thought-through motivational factor - the idea that humanity needs more youngsters to support oldsters. Wrong - we can easily fix that problem in a much more sustainable manner than creating more people.
My college thesis 45 years ago was on the economic effects of zero population growth. Overall: positive - given some very doable economic restructuring for quality, not quantity.
When are we going to get "woke" about the need for stabilizing populations, for ourselves and the planet's critters a.k.a. God's creation? One child average per couple is plenty for now until we stop depleting natural capital. It would give us a fighting chance towards sustainability.
It's not rocket science: how can we best take care of each other? With less folks to care for.
5
The reason millennials aren't getting married is debt. They are mired in student loan debt, unable to move onto the next phase in life. Look at the marriage rates of those who are debt free or have low debt vs. those burdened by debt. Look at the marriage rates of the people with careers vs. gig economy jobs. Look at the cost of raising a child, including college costs because you can't get a good job without a college education. Stop blaming people for the disaster that Reagan set into motion.
9
We humans have over-populated this planet's carrying capacity by upwards of 8X the ability of the natural systems on the planet to absorb us. Look around you. All natural systems are either failing (climate, oceans) or on the cusp of failure. In short, our unregulated population explosion is destroying the planet we live on. Is it any wonder adults don't want to bring children into a failing planet? As planet "titanic" steams toward the iceberg, there has been little done to change course.
4
Many of the stay at home moms from my sons grade school days are now divorced and trying to live on incomes lowered from being out of the workforce for 15 years. They tried the traditional route and now that their husbands are done with them - society thinks they are too old to hire and unskilled for todays world
So how did that work out for them? If that was your mom what would do as an adult?
11
We humans have over-populated this planet's carrying capacity by upwards of 8X the ability of the natural systems on the planet to absorb us. Look around you. All natural systems are either failing (climate, oceans) or on the cusp of failure. In short, our unregulated population explosion is destroying the planet we live on. Is it any wonder adults don't want to bring children into a failing planet? As planet "titanic" steams toward the iceberg, there has been little done to change course.
4
This is the section that made the least sense to me:
“But in general the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many..”
Consent is simply an agreement between individuals with free will, that both are interested in having sex. It only needs to be “bureaucratically supervised” in the case of a power imbalance between the genders. In the past, women often had little say in the matter, whether within wedlock or outside it. I imagine that most women would join me in welcoming a lifelong committed relationship with a man that respects me and treats me as an equal, rather than as a tool for pleasure and childbearing. There’s is a vague whiff of misogyny throughout this column that is very disturbing.
9
@Kianaki Kind of you to call it a "vague" whiff. Douthat struggles to recognize women as fully autonomous human beings. If we step outside the roles he finds comfort in, he is baffled.
2
It’s interesting to me that Ross always cites those who leave the churches as causing the decline of religious dominance in western society. Those who remain are the hapless victims of rabid atheists and non-theists. As one raised in a Roman Catholic household with a traditional familial structure (Father is breadwinner, Mother is homemaker), I must disagree. The decline of religious preeminence must be laid at the feet (altar?) of the leadership of those organized churches. As the congregants left, leadership failed to investigate causation and develop appropriate interventions to keep the flock together.
4
Oh, please. I married at 24 to a who would made a terrible father and I was sensible enough not to push for that then. I was $30,000 in student loan debt and working at jobs that made me about $17,000 a year and between us, we didn't have a reliable car, much less a house. Not to mention the periods of going without health insurance because it was too expensive. By the time I got out of that marriage, I was 32 and was still paying off debt and then got laid off. I retrained and six years later and got laid off again. It wasn't until I was in my early 40s that I could have been stable enough to have kids, when that can be a physical impossibility. I never wanted to be in impoverished single mother. Choice? Yeah, right.
14
Douthat's column reminded me of a study I read about decades ago. Researchers interviewed lots of long-married couples, people who had been together 40-50 years. They felt that they'd accomplished something in the longevity of their marriages. But asked if they would do it over again, most said no.
My oldest aunt, now many years dead, now, told of how my grandmother spent most of her adult life pregnant, miscarrying or having babies and caring for them. This shocked my father, her brother. But small wonder my aunt didn't go on to marry or have children.
As to why marriage might be something the right wants to use against the left, that's no surprise. Wedge politics has always worked for them. Douthat is no different in his specious condemnation of what "the left" has done to marriage.
6
@Steve , agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion that the right is always looking for new wedge issues, since they cannot defend, run or win on their policy positions. But I would like to add that statistically marriage is most common and stable among the better educated and more well to do-- who tend to cluster along the coasts and are majority liberal. The unwed motherhood and high divorce rates tend to be in the confederate states, like MS, and/or the dying areas of the rural midwest.
4
Perhaps the reasons are more simple: 1) Most women are no longer uneducated and beholden to men. Very simply: Most women don’t -need- a man the way they did 50 years ago. 2) Liberals may be more realistic about the limits of ‘love.’ My conservative (single) friends are doggedly looking for lifelong soulmates. My liberal friends tend to be much more pragmatic about love, partnerships, and even breakups. ‘He’s a great person, but we’re just on different trajectories.’ Plenty of people have unhappy marriages, but my conservative friends tend to stay in them longer.
6
"As a conservative I think this liberalism-of-nuance had real limits. In particular, its favored model of marriage... was linked inextricably to the educated class’s privilege and ambitious self-control and didn’t work as well outside the precincts of the meritocracy."
So, if one is not rich and educated, one must get married because conservatives say so?
2
Marriage is what you think it is. It can be an economic, political social, spiritual or oppressive arrangement. Every human should be free to chose what works. And the heck with cultural, society or conservative expectations.
5
The piece is interested but misguided. Many educated liberals value marriage and stay married (more so than "red families"). But as women are more educated and more financially independent, they refuse to be in ANY SORT OF marriage and demand equality and strong relationships in that marriage. In fact, they demand what marriage should be: an oath to faithfulness and to mutual love and support. The standards for a successful marriage are now higher, which is a good thing. I think Ross would be well founded to listen to women. They want what they deserve in a relationship: love, support and equality. If the marriage works on that, it is successful and ultimately the ideal model. BUT if the husband is a deadbeat who does not stay faithful, does not respect the marriage or does not support his family, then the institution of marriage is no longer sufficient to be respected solely as such and it fails. The dynamic in the marriage has changed tremendously and this is what is missing here: the husband is asked to contribute more to the family and the marriage. The wife will support the husband if he supports her in more ways than just earning an income.
Now- on the question of kids and marriage: policies encouraging natality is what works. Look at France. If it is hard for a wife who works to have more than two kids, she will not have a third. She wishes for a third, but she is pragmatic about what can be done. Help her, and she will have the third child she wished for.
3
Absent from this article is the discussion of highly-educated professionals in long-lasting marriages with children.
In my experience, many professionals marry others in their fields. Their “double minds” are part of their success, and they need both professionals to afford and raise children. Michelle Obama is part of Obama’s success. He needed her intellectually to get where he did.
Here in Seattle these married professionals are liberals. They are committed to their children and families and marriages. They share insight into their fields and support each other professionally.
I believe studies show the more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to stay married. And high education is now correlated with liberal politics.
Liberals are not solely responsible for the death of marriage. Most long lasting marriages I know are among liberals.
5
So one attributes declining fertility to the decline of marriage because they "track." And then one investigates, via speculation, why marriage has "declined." But what if the people who already don't feel the need for children have less incentive to get married? Maybe you've got your causation backwards.
Yes, advanced societies tend to have lower birthrates. For some reason, we still don't want immigration. For some reason we don't want to spend money to educate people, or to keep them healthy, or to support them as they move or adapt their skills in a changing economy. Forgive me for thinking that the most important unit in society is the individual. Families and other social institutions that support individual growth and happiness are good things. But the family is good insofar as it supports the individuals in it, not the other way around.
3
I take issue with the premise of a "baby bust," as if reduced fertility rates are a bad thing. If reduced fertility rates are the choice of the potential parents, then they are, on balance, a good thing. Fewer people at once means better conditions for more people over more generations in the long run. So if you care about human (or other species) welfare, fewer people at once is a good idea. Adjustments to retirement support systems, shifts in geopolitical power structures associated with growing and shrinking populations, relative trivia about economic "growth" rates etc. are almost trivial compared to the long-term implications of degradation of the planet's potential to support life. By any objective measure the present population is nonsustainable. If it was sustainable, we wouldn't be depleting the soils, aquifers, fisheries, forests, and nonrenewable resources such as phosphorus, or driving other species extinct, or changing the atmospheric composition of the atmosphere or the ocean. (I know, the problem isn't just population, it's population and consumption, but this article is about the number of births in a wealthy country where individual consumption is high.)
7
Hi Ross,
Thanks for the mention of "the period of reconsideration" and the "third phase" that is nameless. The fraught politics aside, the trend is always toward more for all sides. More liberty AND fear for liberals, more affiliation with churches, political groups, family focused activities AND fear for conservatives.
I work with young people as a psychotherapist, fear is what prevents many of them from having children. My own children fear bringing children into the world, and they grew up in an intact, two parent, hetero family that functioned well.
I hope that we can begin to dial back fear in our world someday very soon...
2
The importance of marriage dates to a time when the roles of men and women were clearly defined and rarely challenged. Thankfully all that has changed, and will continue to change. Far from being something to be concerned about, falling birth and marriage rates are a sign of progress.
3
I wish that the Institute for Family Studies published their methodology, because the I am not confident that the numbers they reference tell the entire story. I suspect this because I also work with "multivariate models" like the IFS does.
I think the IFS study is what Mr. Douthat is referring to when he talks about conservatives being much more likely to be married. The IFS says: "conservatives (62%) are much more likely than liberals (39%) or moderates (46%) to be married"
Conservatives are also: 1) much likely to be older, 2) much likelier to be rural, where age of marriage is younger and 3) yes, likelier to have traditional, hierarchical values.
It is ironic that a column dedicated to adding "nuance" to the argument about ideological splits in marriage rests in part on an analysis (again, I haven't seen the model, so I don't know for sure) that seems to have used overly broad strokes.
6
Its mainly the money honey.It takes about $200,000to raise a child including a good education. Many see this and say NO Way!
Child a care provided in many countries so mothers can work?Not here.not in the USA. Reasonable health care for children?No, very high health care costs sometimes 30% of income. Education?Most need a private school to succeed and the public schools are a mess. College?only if you make lots of money. Most with debts so high they cannot consider the cost of a child.They will work for years to pay off their education.
Many get a less then adequate salary and need food stamps.
Its not conservative or liberal, its our backward government willing to spend billions on war machines not people. I most say that the Repubs are way more guilty of this then Dems.
7
@Richard Head Your town has excellent public schools yet you are correct that those with money still spend it and send the kids to private.
Lawyers, for example, send their kids to private. That is why they must have a super high income and even if they have a staff cannot afford to pay them much. (So much inequality)
I'm a liberal who is not against marriage or having children. I'm against people feeling pressured to be married or have children if that is something they don't want.
12
What a question! I will ascertain that our society presents endless choices---and a lot of bad ones that are made inadvertently (as has always been the case)---and some of the most divorced political figureheads are "conservatives"... are singlehood +/or divorce merely an unintended (or not) consequence of the social marketplace? More choices, longer lifespans? Also see Henry the VIII.
1
We do forget that the secular divergence from “religion” in the 20th century was not against religion as religion but against the institutions, militancy, and authoritarianism. This is much the same as Martin Luther objecting to the Catholic Church not Jesus Christ.
Most of the apparently political, religious and cultural battles can be reduced to the conflict of the group vs. the individual, the authoritarian father vs the loving mother, the “just” god of the Old Testament vs the loving and forgiving god of the the new. After all the story of Jesus as told in all the accepted versions of the new testament has but one instance, the driving of the merchants from the temple, which was not loving and/or forgiving.
In my personal experience, I have found quite telling, the attitude towards children: whether they are raw material that must be bent to moral virtue and cognitive excellence or, on the other hand, whether all these good things are in their nature and need only be nurtured. Of course, as with polarities,in general, a grain of salt may work well.
2
Your article ignores some realities that have contributed to the lower birthrate. It now takes two wage earners to support a family at the same level that one person could supply when I was a growing up (the '50s and '60s). This fact leads to other problems. Women in this country don't get paid for the time they take off to have a baby, and the cost of childcare is extremely high, when you're lucky enough to find it. Also, women have been increasing their education in recent decades as a way of trying to make decent salaries, and when they finally get started in a good career, are reluctant to get on the "mommy track." This all leads to couples having fewer children, or putting off children, sometimes until it's too late. Even conservatives are doing these things because of the difficulties of having children and remaining in the middle class.
5
Not mentioned is the failure of society both left and right to establish a set of rules within the social service system that does not punish marriage or cohabitation. The beauty of for example Andrew Yang’s basic income is that is allows for the elimination of a welfare system that rewards single parent households and punishes households where low paid working fathers live.
3
Raising children in stable, loving, two-parent families is ideal, and nobody would disagree with that. The worries about declining fertility rates are misplaced, though.
Constant growth in the human population is unsustainable and should not be a goal. Reducing the net growth of human populations across the world to zero should be our goal.
Over time, even a tiny growth rate will eventually lead to far too many humans for our planet to sustain - it's basic math.
13
Women are healthier single. Women's health and safety is routinely pushed to the back burner in the U.S. Maternal mortality rates are abysmal for a supposedly developed country. Honestly, Douthat's obsession aside, what's in it for women? I'm a parent. I chose to stay unmarried because it was going to be challenging enough raising a child without making it a disaster by getting married and being married doesn't always mean two people raising a child. Too often it's one adult getting stuck dealing with one actual child and an adult who behaves like one. My daughter will probably get married, that's her choice, and they want kids. People need to look at this issue honestly, without the rose-tinted specs in the way.
3
Worth noting that "sterility and loneliness" are the growth medium of the technological order. We won't look to politics (or religion or tradition) to fix the decline in marriage and reproduction. We'll look to technology, oblivious as ever. We'll never have that rueful awakening Douthat probably hopes we'll have. Tech has trained us to expect easy fixes. On that point, it's gotten way ahead of liberal and conservative ideologies and their easy fixes.
1
My 'wife' and I just celebrated thirty years together. Our anniversary is the day we met; we never married. We raised two kids, now 23 and 25, and we've been entirely monogamous and fully committed to each other and our kids.
I suspect there are many reasons people choose not to get married. For me, the act of marriage seemed meaningless and irrelevant; an institution that brings nothing to my relationship other than certain legal protections that are fully achievable by other means. It seemed superfluous.
The legacy of our decision has affected our kids in pleasantly surprising ways. They recognized that a relationship is built and maintained day by day, through shared joys, mutual respect, and constructively working through conflicts and differences. They've seen their parents disagree, but they've never heard them fight. They've adopted that in their own relationships.
Too often we rely on institutions to provide what we can only provide for ourselves.
10
Funny thinking there. Maybe it has more to do with watching half of every marriage end in divorce, often messy and filled with resent, that we're more reluctant to just marry someone with as little concern and forethought as sharing an uber pool ride.
Same with having kids. We're thinking about their lives and waiting until we can provide them a real opportunity to succeed instead of getting by while popping them out to go through a severally underfunded education system and eventually work in service jobs. We can't even consider "getting by" with both of us working full time to spend 80% of our income on mortgage, food and other basic living costs.
3
Liberal Democrat here, two sons with advanced degrees who make more than I ever did. One stepson living at home applying for Masters programs. Both wives had/have successful careers. Men, I think tend to need marriage more as a foundation for their stability. Male 25 to 54 labor market participation is low and high school graduate wages are stagnant. There is still the concept of a good catch. Marriage rates are down but it probably has very little to do with political culture and even if it does, what, you going to argue us liberals out of existence with theology, good luck with that.
2
No worries, Ross. As conservatives have children and liberals don’t, conservatives will eventually have full control over culture and politics in this country and everything will be great again. Best of luck with the climate, though.
4
I’m long past retirement age now but I remember with pain the years I spent trying to keep my job and please my bosses, including working overtime and traveling. Trying to find places to send my son after school and on days off was near impossible. He became a latch key kid soon enough. I was horrified when my son had a child of his own. This is a country that punishes you for not being able to pay for your own healthcare and education, that has raised the cost of housing to unaffordable levels. Having children in such a place is irresponsible.
6
@Jc, your comment is the saddest and meanest I think I have ever read in the NYT. To be "horrified" at your son having a child is simply put, cruel. How about welcoming the little one as the gift he or she is? How about helping where you can and being engaged with this new life?
@karen You understand me too quickly. I do all I can physically, emotionally and financially to help out. At the age of 81 I forego much to help out. That doesn't mean I think this is a good place to raise a child. The social deficiencies, the lack of empathy are not mine.
2
I just love it when conservative white men explain liberalism to us.
Douthat's and Barr's religion would deny contraception to women. (It also denies women any say in that religion's tenets. Coincidence?) Less contraception results in more babies!
Stigma of being pregnant out of wedlock results in more marriages.
But political big-money conservatism has also led to devaluing labor and cutting government support for mothers and children, making it almost impossible for women in working class families to stay home and take care of multiple small children. Working class people pay payroll taxes, not income taxes, so conservative tax policies are also worthless to encourage childbearing as well.
Women still want children, but we can't afford them. We want to get married, but to people who love us and support us emotionally, not to people who got us pregnant when we were in the throes of teenage passion.
Finally, pregnancy and childbirth are not just expensive, they are physically difficult and sometimes fatal.
You just don't get us, do you? Maybe if you gave us more respect and less paternal mansplaining, you could get more babies out of us.
17
Marriage has been a socioeconomic contract between heterosexual men and women -- until quite recently in its history. Women no longer "need" men to provide for them; that's clear. At the same time, the two-job or two-career household, such a necessity these days, makes traditional forms of marriage impossible, including the form of marriage meant to conceive and raise children as replacements for oneself and as a state-sanctioned institution for the expression of one's sexuality. The latter is no longer necessary now, given that birth control, in all its forms, including abortion, is so widely available. And then there is the difficult choice to procreate in the face of economic hardships currently in all but the upper classes -- not to mention the evolving threat of climate crisis and its attendant annihilation of a livable planet in the near term. The conservative philosophy always is to buttress an institution at all costs--absurdly--as historical conditions keep changing. There are many other institutions we have seen fit to abandon. Maybe it's time to stop privileging marriage as an outmoded one as well. People will continue to get married, though, so long as the institution provides them with incentives and advantages. Maybe those should be re-examined as unfair to those who are not married.
2
I don't know why marriage is in decline, but I do wonder at the usefulness of the liberal v. conservative distinctions. Here in the heart of the Bible Belt (Alabama), it seems that the trend among working class couples is to have children but not marry. It's not because these couples are "liberal" in their political outlook. The ones I know would describe themselves as Christian believers, and I doubt any would vote for a Democrat. Yet they prefer not to marry.
It's funny to me that liberal ideology could be blamed for undermining marriage in the Deep South without changing the region's attitudes toward anything else--Obama Care, gun control, minimum wage increase, etc.
5
Are Conservatives against freedom? If the author meant to be provocative with this title, he has succeeded very well.
Such rhetorical questions don't serve our public discourse well at all. It is precisely the way that the GOP handles any criticism of their leader: 'do you see who made the charge and how low they are?'
GOP politicians turn congressional oversight into an occasion for mudslinging. Douthat turns sociology into an opportunity to blur the line between observation and ideology.
4
30 years of tax cuts for every problem policies have resulted in a society where people cannot afford traditional lives. Many communities are ravaged by prescription drug crises. Most people spend way too much time looking at social media. Those with careers often have crushing debt from the school that got them there.
the world has drastically changed in the past 20 years and "traditional" marriage is more and more a fantasy from the past.
more progressive policies, at the cost of moving tax rates back to sane historic levels, would provide more social safety nets, assistant with education and health care, and general support of working people. These types policies would make traditional marriage more attainable, and thus more prevalent.
Or are you talking about the kind of traditional marriage when men owned women who could not vote, own land, get a loan, or say no to sex.
I don't think you have any point at all other than to trot out right wing tropes and find a way a way to twist them into blaming liberals. Because that's what you get paid to do.
8
The current world population is approximately 7.7 billion people & is projected at 9.7 billion in thirty years. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs the United States has a current growth of 0 to 1%. When social conservatives carry on about family decline and falling birth rates they’re talking about “white” people not humanity in general. The fascinating thing is that the very people who best fit the social conservatives criteria of stability and fertility are Hispanic families. When economic and community stability are factored in these families thrive. So immigration can offset declining birth rates and provide stability to a work force that is seriously lacking in some sectors. Except, well you see they ain’t “white” enough and as Trump has repeatedly said they are mostly “bad” people.
Humanity’s growth rate has exceeded the planet’s support capacity, factor in environmental impacts and climate change and its a disaster. But for social conservatives the real problem is there’s just not enough “white” people reproducing and its all those “evil” liberals fault. That and their other favorite bugaboo those African American freeloaders.
Sorry Ross I’m not buying it, like the phony war on Christmas the war on marriage and families is another ginned up exercise in social conservative outrage and victimization designed to spin up support for Trump. That and to mask their outright hostility to any marriage or family that challenges their orthodoxy.
10
Allow me to add some more nuance to the debate.
Conservative, debt inducing, tax cuts that disincentivize home ownership might be contributing here. Another addition to the general unaffordable economics of raising a family in the US is not going to inspire making babies.
3
I believe birth rates and marriage have declined as more women ask what's in it for them. I have no children, and did not marry until my mid-40's, so I was able to advance in my career and earning potential unchecked by children and the societal and gender-based pressure to be the primary caretaker. Young women see that marriage and children are not an even divide of responsibilities, even if the woman is the primary breadwinner. Also, the costs of child care are prohibitive even when both parents work in our current wage-poor society. Divorce is another factor, where women often get the short end of the stick, financially and in levels of childcare responsibility. So, count me un-surprised to see birth and marriage rates falling.
7
Perhaps rather than trying to figure out the big picture, take a look at some of the smaller ones. In other words? Talk to some young couples who are choosing not to have children... or to have one child when they hit their late 30's.
When I do, I do hear a lot about the future of the planet. A lot of smart young people are looking at global warming and pollution, at the anticipated battles for resources in our overcrowded planet, flooded along the edges. In the States, having come out of a major recession, they are now looking at a dysfunctional government and a president who is unraveling the environmental laws and the social support system as quickly as he can. Even if they imagine the chaos president and his inept group of governors gone in the next year, or in five years, they see the damage done.
But leaving the politics aside, leaving the doom and gloom aside, these young people may not see the joy of procreating, of having childre. They may see it as a stressful add-on to a life that is already burdened with paying the bills and juggling their commutes and living in an undersized apartment.
Given what is going on, I respect their decisions. I no longer counter with; well maybe your child will be the one who makes the difference... Try talking to these people who are not procreating and listen to them; in the small anecdotes you may find larger truths.
5
Don't know if liberals are against marriage, but I do know marriage is a lot easier with universal health care, a living wage, paid parental leave, fair taxes, clean air and water and good public schools.
Maybe its even better without the government checking on family planning and structure.
8
Douthat's not-very-well-disguised Catholic prejudice is that "wedlock" ratified by the state is not only socially and biologically superior but was the norm before the 1960s. This is based on a historical misconception. As Suzannah Lipscomb points out in her recent book about sixteenth century France, "'clandestine' marriage made in secret, without [parental] consent or witnesses, may have been the subject of disapproval, but was still a [legally] valid match," in the eyes of both the church and the state. It was only in the 1700s that the norm of a state marriage certificate became widespread, largely to make taxation easier. Christian ideologues ought to realize that their commitments to wedlock and a weakened state are mutually contradictory.
2
Douthat writes,
"The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s O.K. to worry about...."
He then argues destruction of conservative values may have led to a decline in birth rates, which he seems to regard as "obviously" a bad thing.
Although all of the Times Pick comments take issue with his defense of "family values" as envisioned by conservatives.
But maybe what is wrong about Douthat's essay that it is "obvious" that the US needs more births.
Again and again, Trump is criticized because he denies climate change as a hoax.
But both liberals and conservatives seem to hold the view that population growth has had no impact, or only a minor impact on climate change. What if they are wrong?
In 1972, the book "Limits to Growth" argued that population growth could not continue indefinitely, that if people did not use birth control, death rates would rise due to lack of food or water, increased numbers of wars, or destruction of the environment. Mathematical models for several scenarios were discussed, many of which suggested that population would exhibit overshoot and collapse, as population temporarily exceeded carrying capacity for earth.
Global warming predicts that temperatures will rise 3-5 degrees C by 2100. This will destroy some coastal cities and make parts of the tropics uninhabitable due to excessive heat.
Maybe we should have fewer children now to mitigate the effects.
6
I was married twice. At 23 to my college sweetheart, kid at 24, divorced at 27 (she cheated). I remarried at 28, kids at 28 and 31, divorced at 48 (she cheated, including during the therapy session period). I've now been in a nearly 6-year relationship. She was married once for 2 years. We're not married, and we may not get married. Why should we? We're both romantic, and believe in commitment. We don't need a legal paper to tell us that or force us to stay together because the cost of tearing that paper apart is so high (at least for the breadwinner if there is only one). When you're not married you generally stay together because you want to, not because you have to. It should not prevent you from having kids if you want to (and take the right steps that both parents acknowledge their parenthood and responsibilities, should the informal union cease).
2
I have another theory about why marriage and birth rates are declining: we are emphasizing the virtues of fulfilling, passionate careers, world travel, hobbies--individual happiness. It's not that these are bad things by any means, but the narrative children have been hearing the past, say, 35 years at least (since I was a kid), was that these things were of upmost importance.
Being a family person, by contrast, is mundane and can even get in the way. I know many people who let a relationship fail because they wouldn't compromise on career aspirations, and several who cite love of travel as a reason for forgoing or limiting kids.
Again, these priorities aren't "wrong", but are counter to the birthrate. If we want a higher marriage rate or birthrate, we need to change the narrative to value marriage and children above other things.
I don't buy the argument that kids are too expensive to have these days. If kids are a priority, you find a way. I always knew that I wanted to be a mom--it was my #1 life goal. I left San Francisco for the midwest so I could afford 3 kids. I love my career but would happily give it up if it ever conflicted with my life goal of having kids. I also know that you don't need to own a house, or pay for their college educations, to have kids.
When something is important, you find a way. When something isn't, you find excuses.
5
@Itsy Human population is not on the decline, it's on the rise, with another projected two billion people expected by 2050, so really conservatives are only talking about a declining birthrate among a certain segment of society. If having children is your number one goal in life, that's great. Parenting should be a calling in my opinion and more people who enter into it should be as passionate about it as you are. But I'm also grateful for the growing number of people who have rejected the narrative that's one happiness and fulfillment in life can only be achieved through the birthing of another human being. The concerns that many people have in not bringing children into this world are valid and deserve to be respected and considered with far more seriousness. Dismissing out of hand the crushing debt that many millenials face is not helpful to dialogue. I make an above average hourly wage, but as a single person, still cannot afford the average rents where I live combined with the burden of my student loans. Why would I add a child into the mix? I grew up with the stress of watching my mother struggle to take care of us after my dad left. Not a life I'd ever willfully choose for myself. Conservatives should respect that choice instead of maligning it. There will always be sufficient people on the planet that do wish to have children. Humanity is not going to collapse because of declining birth rates, but may very well do so because of the opposite.
1
If you're going to report on the debate and describe the positions and how developed and how they relate to each other. then do that and leave out the superficial, annoying drive'by evaluations.
If you want to do criticism and evaluation of a view, then spend some time describing the view so we can understand the evaluation.
If you don't have space for more than an "impressionistic" account, then don't do it until you have more space.
Try to focus.
I'm not sure a left-right divide really helps understand who gets married and who stays married or why.
France has a higher birthrate than the United States. Why? Certainly not because of traditional values (and France for 200 years had a low birthrate by Western standards). People in France feel they can afford babies and do to state provision of health care, day care, and education.
People make decisions about marriage and children out of their own personal circumstances and what feels normatively right to them. I don't think people feel marriage or children or wrong, but they do now feel that not being married and not having kids is at least an okay option (though I doubt the ideal for most). So they need to believe that economically marriage and children will work for them and not be a financial disaster (kids are expensive as is being married to someone that is long-term unemployed or has an addiction). People are scared. The Great Recession permanent damage is very real.
3
There are two different issues here: 1. The reason for the decline in marriage and childbearing; and 2. Liberal and conservative views abut marriage. The reason for the decline in marriage is not profoundly philosophical. It is economic. Since working class women are, by and large, more employable than working class men, they don't need to get married to be supported. Economically, at least, men without professional training are more of a drag than a help. And jobs available to working class people in general don't pay very well, so who can afford to have children. The situation is entirely different for the upper-middle class, which continues to reproduce as though nothing had happened.
461
@Richard Cohen
Economically, without those working class "men without professional training", willing/having to do those lower rung jobs, your world wouldn't exist.
Tell me, who decided they shouldn't be paid well?!
I know I couldn't survive, nor in the manner of luxury without those low paid blue collar workers.
The "professional class", many who are paper pushers and profiteers...yeah, without many of them, life would continue without missing a beat.
Who's the economic drag Richard?!
20
Richard,
I agree with you except for the last line - where I’m from, the upper middle class are having fewer kids than middle, lower middle etc., although they’re staying married longer.
People don’t always make rational decisions about having kids and marrying. I don’t see much of a class pattern in that.
P.s. married 32 years, parents were married almost 67, in-laws married 62, son and daughter-in-law married 2 and he’s still in his twenties - all flaming liberals who believe in love.
43
@Richard Cohen
I come from a middle class family of 6 kids from the boomer generation. You boast of the low unemployment numbers, true, and "prosperity" unevenly distributed.My parents were frugal but during their time one could be middle to lower middle class and survive with a large family.
I am the youngest of six and had my family started their journey 20 years later then they did I would never been born. The cost of health insurance alone would have prevented them from going ahead with kids 5 and 6. They could afford to send their kids to private school through 8th grade which would have been impossible today. My parents were depression kids. They made every penny count. But 6 kids in today"s economic climate would have led to bankruptcy.
It isn't economics alone that leads to smaller families, cultural changes factor in of course. But the shrinking middle class, skyrocketing health care costs, housing price increases, lack of benefits with the gig economy, less job security, shrinking union participation, are major factors in the trend towards smaller families.
37
Yes the marriage rate is down, but the divorce rate is also significantly down from highs in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Speaking as someone who grew up in that period I would posit that a key part of this may move beyond the right left divide. Those of us who grew up when divorce rates were at record levels recognized that marriage at a young age or because social convention said it is the path to travel is not necessarily healthy. People waiting longer to marry in part accounts for the decline of both marriage rates and divorce rates. That isn't a conservative or liberal nor an economic read.
6
What we’re talking about here is choice. As it becomes more socially acceptable to not have kids, not get married, more people will choose those options. Maybe what we are witnessing here is equilibrium.
Among all the women I know who have chosen to not have kids, myself included, none of us are doing so as a political or cultural statement. It is because we want to live the life we imagine for ourselves, and for literally the first time in ALL OF HISTORY, we can actually do that. It is amazing and should be celebrated.
17
Why does the religious right think everything they don't like would be fixed if people just got married and went to church?
If the GOP and its evangelical base want to support marriage and the birth of children, how about enacting laws that support parents? Parental leave, tax policies that help people afford good childcare, help with skyrocketing tuition and college debt and, of course, help with health care and the creation of insurance markets so people can easily buy insurance outside of their jobs? These are all things that the GOP generally has opposed over decades in the name of (take your pick) capitalism, anti-socialism, religious freedom and job creation.
What the GOP really wants to do is create an economic system where women have to stay home with their children because they can't afford not to. They think this will encourage more marriages and more children to be born. Men go to work, everybody will find the church, and we return to the 1950s again.
There is nothing nuanced about the GOP's plan. It has been the same for decades.
856
Jack, the emerging change in the Republican Party is to address many of the issues you raise. It sets aside pure economics from some social interaction. The tussle, even here in ND, is how much to allow government involvement. For instance, I fully support community run and even subsidized day care as a way to support young families. However, I have no interest in state or federal grants to subsidize them. That usually brings a whole bunch of strings.
2
@Paul Overby I agree. I have no interest in state or federal grants to subsidize churches, corporations, the military or ranching. That usually brings a whole bunch of strings.
120
@Paul Overby Who do you suggest provides the subsidies then?
48
I am a single mother by choice who has an ok-paying job and would love to have more children (and would have enjoyed doing so with a partner but am quite happy with just the two of us) but
a) post natal care is expensive (even with good insurance, I still owe $6k for the birth of my kid),
b) daycare is expensive,
c) preschool will be expensive when we get there,
d) I own a (110+ year-old) house, a (used) car, and too many degrees that yield $275,000 in debt, which is definitely not in proportion to my less than $70k/year income.
Moreover, my parents' (one a liberal and one a conservative) 23 year marriage ended in divorce, and both sets of grandparents (liberal and conservative) were unhappily married for decades.
7
I'm an early 40s woman who opted out of trying to start a family, after confronting the great recession in my early thirties. At that time, serious dating and marriage prospects were slim to nil in my area. Nearly all were even more tenuously employed that I was. I began dating someone who reversed his position on having children, and in my own tenuous employment situation in the mid-aughts, I didn't move on when I could have. It's unlikely I would have found a suitable parenting match then, and I actually didn't until my late 30s when I met my current husband. Both of us were still smarting financially from being hit by the recession in our 30s. We were further deterred by the financial prospect of costly fertility treatments followed by exorbitant child care costs. To say nothing of the cost of housing in an area with good schools, as well as saving for college. We do share occasional regret about missing out on a family.
Conservatives need to look at the economic constraints facing those individuals who choose to opt out.
3
Liberal here, married 42 years. We have five children, three have children, two chose not to. Our oldest daughter knew she's not maternal so no children. Should she have had children anyways knowing she was not "mother" material.
Our middle daughter has been married for 15 years. She and her husband chose not to have children due to both medical reasons the fact that they can't afford daycare but also can't afford to be a one income household.
Our youngest has one child, working full time and going to college as well. She isn't married to the father of her little girl but they are still a couple and intend to marry. Her fiancé is an excellent father and his parents absolutely adore their one grandchild. Our other two children have 7 between them, our daughter is now pregnant with her fifth (birth control failure) baby.
Marriage doesn't make a good parent, a committed parent makes a good parent. Divorce is no less harmful to a child than non married parents going their separate ways.
Marriage doesn't fix all ills. It's not a magic wand that fixes economic hardship or the daily stress of being a parent responsible for another living being. No-one has the right to force or coerce adults into having children that they know they can't afford, not just economically but physically and emotionally. It's far better to leave this decision to those who know best, the ones who would be parents. They shouldn't be guilted into having children. It's not you decision, it's theirs.
735
@sharon So true, marriage doesn't fix all ills. And marriage doesn't make a good parent. Many people I grew up with thrived later in life in spite of their parents. I was really fortunate to have great parents and four siblings, however, I knew plenty of larger families in my Catholic parish where there was a little wild west going on in the families. Lack of supervision, adult alcoholism, etc. Rearing children isn't easy.
16
@sharon
I agree with you in principle. Marriage is primarily a personal and symbolic gesture. However, I'll qualify that statement by saying there are very important legal and economic reasons why marriage is preferable. I'll give you one example.
A married father can add his name to a birth certificate without a legal declaration of paternity signed by both parents. This may seem like an administrative convenience. However, without the father's name on the birth certificate, the child is going to have a hard time drawing his social security if daddy gets hit by a bus tomorrow. Depressing thought but that's how these things work.
That's just one example. We can go down a rabbit hole on taxes too. We can then discuss health insurance and employment. Your child is disadvantaged if the parents aren't married. I'm not saying that's the way things should be. However, conservative policy encourages things to be that way.
The family might not work out but policy certainly favors one legal status over the other. That's ultimately why gay marriage was eventually allowed. There is quantifiable penalty to gay couples who are legally banned from getting married.
10
@Andy
True but that isn't Ross's argument. I was raised Catholic. He's a typical Catholic prude. I'm sure he believes that the unmarried are living in sin and that's his only concern. He probably couldn't care less about the protections you mention. Our granddaughter's last name is her fathers, he is listed on the birth certificate as her father so I imagine she would get SS benefits if, as you say God forbid, something were to happen to him.
About the rest you mention I'm not sure. But there can be downsides as well. If your spouse is a deadbeat you will be liable for his/her bills, even if divorced. You can lose everything if they are bankrupted by medical debt. A friend who lost her husband to cancer has tremendous medical debt during his last months of life and after he died. Had they lived together and she were the outright owner of their home no lien could have been attached to the property. So there are some advantages to a live-in partner. The pendulum can swing both ways.
I'm not arguing against marriage. I love being married and wouldn't change a thing but as I stated in my above comment it's not a magic wand that makes everything A-o.k. as Douthat likes to pretend.
8
"Survival Of The Fittest"
In the USA, in a globalized economy perhaps the fittest, (as a group) are those reproducing and migrating to greener pastures wherever they may find them.
Many Americans see themselves struggling for survival more as individuals, than as members of a group or even a team of just two.
2
Maybe Mr. Douthat is making a case for more immigrants?
:-)
10
@Independent
No, that's what "nuanced" means here: studiously avoiding the underlying white nationalism of fear-mongering declining birth rates by not saying whose and assuming all the right people understand the trope of perilous depopulation in a world with no shortage of people giving birth.
2
Oh yes, another column in which Douthat's liberal strawman gets what's coming to her. (Do not doubt that Douthat's strawman is gendered, mostly female but invariably other than cis male.) This time a more "nuanced" beating. Nuanced, as in "enhanced interrogation techniques," waterboarding with a doctor present. Have no fear. Though Douthat wades through evidence that his strawman may have been expiring on the table as left and right views of marriage commit before his eyes some kind of ideological miscegenation, borrowing arguments and views from each other, in the end, Douthat shocks his strawman back to life as "trends within elite progressivism." Hooray, the end of civilization is still near for our "society already shadowed by sterility and loneliness."
I cannot recall reading a more condescending, patronizing, ultimately self-flattering argument in print, at least not one printed in this century or the last. Consider Douthat's authorial stance. In this piece, he appoints himself not only keeper of the herd, but keeper of the keepers of the herd, fretting whether the ebbs and flows he discerns in their views will find true to purposes he deems himself alone capable of discerning. The hubris is stunning. By the end, he figures himself as Ezekiel, God's watchman, whose charge is not to dissuade us from our peril but to watch and warn us that our destruction and damnation might be more complete. It "will be, shall we say, interesting to watch."
10
Americans only have "prosperity and full unemployment" in a vacuous sense (albeit a vacuous sense based on a couple of metrics which those with power love to believe). If we're all so prosperous and fully employed, why are we so miserable?
4
supposedly my son's girlfriend has north of 50 k in school debt. And you think they could afford kids? lol
2
An excellent article, both in its analysis of issues and its willingness to reach out to other viewpoints. Douthat is becoming a major columnist -- he reminds me of the early David Brooks.
1
Was it just me or was this very densely written and hard to follow?
10
@Daniel -- and how about the over-use of the word "nuance." A somewhat weak word in any context, but used over and over? I lost count quite frankly!
1
@Daniel. It wasn't just you. A lot of big words that were intended to obscure the fact that the author longs for the 1950s.
2
So-called conservatives elected, and continue to support, a man who has been married three times, has cheated on all three, and very possibly has had involvement in Jeffrey Epstein's sex ring, His current wife reportedly is living with their son and her parents in Maryland. At every rally, he denigrates some woman or another, calling them "nasty" and worse.
Not a day goes by that we don't hear of a GOP politician or evangelical pastor or youth conselor addressed for child pornography, rape or other sexual assault, attempting to contact underage girls (or boys), or similar sex crimes.
So spare me the self-righteousness about marriage. When these people clean up their act, they can lecture the rest of us. Until then, it's physician, heal thyself.
12
It's funny --most of the gay couples that I know who decide to have children have to get married as it's excessively complicated to do a second parent adoption when you aren't married. Who was it again that dissented in the gay marriage ruling in 2015?
5
Ross, you betray yourself by opening your editorial by defining yourself as a "weirdo Catholic columnist." Then you rant at liberals s who have decided that they have the right to determine how many children they bring into this world. Of course a "Good Catholic" does not have that right. The world's population is ever climbing no matter what the Catholic Church claims. Sensible people who care about quality of life and the protection of our environments clearly see that the continues high worldwide birth rate is destroying this planet.
One has to ask why the Catholic Church, with its untold wealth is not on the forefront of family planning, education, good medical cares, a healthy environment and jobs.
By the Way, fertility rates have not declined. What has declined is the birth rate because people are throwing off the medieval opposition to birth control by the Catholic Church and planning their families based on their own needs.
5
I await a future article by the conservative/religionist columnist on the “damage by example” perpetrated on the country by the profoundly dysfunctional First Family: A husband and father in name only, a deviant liar thrice married with a rich background of adulterous, libertine conduct, whose pathological narcissism allows no space for any caring, loving relationship with either wife or child; A wife encased in a sad, purely transactional relationship highlighted by her constant consumerism and who, as the centerpiece of her official duties as the First Lady, grossly champions without irony against unacceptable, cyber youth behaviors that her husband commits on a daily basis; A young son, tragically growing up in the public fishbowl of such a “family” who, if he somehow miraculously manages to escape permanent personal damage from his harmful exposure to such a dad and mom, will have indeed been blessed to have done so. This is but another case of the societal coarsening perpetuated upon us by the “ever widening conservatism”, as exemplified by the amoral and immoral, adult White House occupants. Make America Great Again!
7
Douthat is nothing is not a sophist.
As a cultural conservative, he needs to figure out some way to blame social liberalism for everything bad. His tortured logic and arguments are an excellent example of sophistry.
It couldn't possibly be the corporatist Republican Party's destruction of the social safety net, which makes having children practically difficult, and their leadership in the destruction of the planet, which makes having children philosophically and existentially questionable.
4
"Are Liberals Against Marriage?"
I sincerely hope it wasn't you who wrote that headline, Ross.
The answer, though, is a resonding "YES!"
Liberals are against marriage for everybody EXCEPT for those who WANT to get married.
2
Disjointed gibberish.
Biologically, no marriage is needed to conceive a child. Full stop.
The rest is societal pressures from religious groups that profit by keeping the "opium" flowing.
Take Iceland for example 70% of the children are born out of wedlock , yet a fertility rate of 2.0 is maintained:
(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html) and https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2018/06/04/to-marry-or-not-to-marry-consensual-union-is-popular-in-iceland/
So a stable population is not dependent on marriage, a rich religious caste is.
4
In case no one has brought this up; Massachusetts, home of the "Godless Liberals" has the lowest divorce rate in the United States. And the best Public Schools. There could be a link there.
8
As a Millenial I think there are three major factors keeping people from having kids. One, home ownership and the huge barrier to entry. Two, child care costs and availability. Three, the responsibility of paying for a child's college tuition. There needs to be a system where no parent is expected to pay for college tuition and where the costs are lower for students.
This article discusses theoretical arguments and general trends, with the intention of figuring out how to reverse the societal trends that the author disapproves of.
One importantl source of these trends is the personal choice that has been made available in the last 60 years. It won't be easy to reverse this change.
More children born into relatively well-off families would consume more resources and put additional pressure on the earth's environment. Immigrants, if allowed entry, could easily counter any unwanted downward trend in population that Mr. Douthat sees.
Whether or not marriage works for you is personal. For me, marriage (1961-1967) was a prison & a trap. I had 2 children. My father (very old-world) helped my ex to get my 2 children from me, while admitting that he didn't respect the man. My life & the lives of my children would have been much better if the institution of marriage had not existed.
2
As a serious Catholic, Mr. Douthat ought to know about the Manichean heresy, so stoutly dismantled by Saint Augustine. Unfortunately, Douthat continues to hold, obsessively, to the Manichean-like idea that the world is divided between liberals and conservatives, left and right, etc. For all his talk about "nuance" in this article, he still abides by his Manichean view of the world, and his analysis is poisoned by it.
A government-sponsored marriage and fertility policy , subsidizing pregnancy leave, infant care and pre-school, would benefit everyone. Left out of Douthat's analysis, of course, given his Manicheanism, is the difference between people who choose to have babies as single people, who are wealthy or otherwise advantaged, and people who make those choices who are not. This is not a conservative-liberal issue.
1
Mr Douthat who just endorsed socialism lite and Sanders is a prime exhibit of the decay of the traditional conservative Republican orthodoxy and explanation of the ease of Trump’s takeover of the party.
In which alternate universe of dinner parties he attends or NYT water cooler conversations he has it is presumed that voters care about what liberals think or don’t about marriage or how they live their private lives or the culture wars they wage on twitter and that voters place these concerns above their saving, investments and health and freedom of the economy and economic growth? On what imaginary scale Trump’s style, narcissism and faux pas outweigh allowing China to rob us blind? Macron, the leader of free world and of France, the peak of our civilization ( as per Mr. Mr. Douthat’s colleague Paul Krugman) anyone?
The concerns of our elites are becoming comedic.
Versailles Christmas of 1778.
1
Interesting article. What are the data on unmarried yet in a stable relationship (living together as unmarried partners and parents) with child(ren)? This type of family was not included in your article, yet this is the type of family I often see. This is also common in several European countries as well.
2
OMG, is there anything left in life that isn't dragged into the left-wing battle? Tortuous philosophical postulating and esoteric polemical hypothesizing miss the forest for the trees: women now have choices. If the Rosy Riveters were able to keep their WWII job, we would have had more of a baby-blip instead of boom.
We’ve got it backwards between human nature with human policies.
Human nature is the biological and emotional need to intimately connect with another human. It will happen on its own terms, whether through some religious-cultural-social construct such has marriage or in less formal, but no less valid, arrangements that have worked well for other cultures. To keep human needs chained in outmoded structures and prevent the evolution of more adaptive arrangement means inflicting a lot of misery and damage to stop the inevitable -- in a bid to keep power.
What was not inevitable were the policy decisions that gave away our nation’s economic security and transferred our wealth. The first generation likely to economically underperform its parents can be forgiven for not rushing in marriage and family. The long term looks worse with more of the same economics plus the fallout from climate destruction.
We need to switch it up and focus on policy decisions; human nature will take care of itself without the interference from conservatives, economists, or journalists.
4
The hypothesis that political philosophy drives child-rearing decisions seems a little silly. Economics, culture, family and community support, childhood and family experience, relationship stability, career expectations and opportunities... All these factors and a million more are mile ahead of political views in whether a couple decides to have a child.
The thought that young couples are standing by to act on whatever Gloria Steinem or Newt Gingrich think about children is a myth.
5
There are so many reasons and few have anything to do with liberal status. For one, helicopter parents have raised a generation of 30-year old children -- living at home, dependent on their parents. For another, millennials may not have money but they care deeply about personal happiness and they often seem more willing to walk away than to stay; this is mostly jobs but relationships too (swipe, swipe). And seriously, how many are really benefiting from the economy and low interest rates? Clearly, the upper strata of society, but most working class people are struggling. 40 hours at minimum wage won't allow a nice apartment, let alone a home and car. Add student debt and marriage seems like a risky proposition. The old adage of two can live as cheaply as one is simply false.
6
The comments are much more accurate and insightful than the essay. People don't make hugely important decisions based on some learned doctrine: they try to do what makes sense in their situation. And I agree, a declining birth rate is an achievement. Conservatives, as obsessed with procreation as they are with fossil fuel, have locked themselves into a worldview that is no longer even feasible.
6
Quite a mishmash in this article. I know, both being very liberal, my wife and I have been married 31 years and in the 90s when we were discussing children our choice to have 1 child only was based on the direction the world was heading. Growing exploitation and competition for resources meant that the planet needs less people and we were inclined to do our part. So sure I guess our beliefs influenced us. Now our conservative daughter has a totally different approach. She is establishing here career and saving for retirement from her early age (late 20's) when I ask her she says that there might not be a social safety next so she has to focus on saving. She figures that in her thirties if she wants she can have a child or two. She also says climate change is a major factor in she sees the changes and thinks about what it will be like on planet earth when her kids inherit it. I think there is a generation divide when it comes to climate change and younger people have different choices to make than we did. They know more and more everyday that we are making the earth harder to live on so for them it is a tougher decision to bring children into it. Wealth inequality has also skewed the veiw of the young and many are working really hard not to be left behind by neo-liberalism.
3
I am a liberal. I am a feminist. I also happen to be in a very traditional marriage. My husband and I met in college. I was 18. We got married when I was 22 and have been married 30+ years. I've been a stay at home mom/caregiver/wife for 20+. This situation wasn't a choice. It was created by life circumstance and a great deal of privilege. I have to tell you, even in this rarified air -- it ain't easy and it certainly isn't for everyone. The truth is raising children, no matter your circumstances, is really hard. It should never be assumed or obligatory. Solid, healthy marriages depend in a myriad of factors which cannot be distilled down to conservative or liberal thought. Neither can parenting. To say there is one modality that serves all, is simplistic and potentially dangerous. When it comes to children, the truth is as a society we don't really value them. If we did, the people who are in the position of caring for them would be supported and revered. Teachers, nurses, caregivers, mental health professionals, parents. We would have better schools and healthcare. We would have better food, water and air. We would support children growing into the best people they can be -- no matter what color, religion, sexual orientation or expression. We would cultivate commonality and stop screaming at each other. And we would definitely stop pretending that God loves some people more than others just because they meet the expectations of religious men.
22
@Rachael Cudlitz I have a similar background. Married 20 years. I am a professional who now works part-time so that I can spend time with our kids. Your comment is exactly correct.
Ross Douthat fails to talk about the environment discouraging young people to form partnerships and become parents. Our young people graduate from college with substantial debt and hopes of finding well-paying jobs. As time goes by, the debt looms larger and jobs that pay enough to support a family diminish. There's no job security. Getting married and starting a family pose huge risks. To afford child rearing, both parents must work and even then most of one parent's salary is allocated to child care. Some young people view the environmental deterioration of our planet as a moral imperative not to bring a child into the world, but to adopt a child. Politically, our nation does not support families and children.
9
Ross, why do you assume that a lower rate of reproduction is a problem that needs fixing? Sure, P.D. James wrote a dystopian novel about it, but that is a work of fiction. With that type of evidentiary basis, one could also assume that pre-teens lost in the woods will go bonkers and start killing each other off in a William Golding-esque manner. Both assumptions are equally bad.
4
My partner and I are in our early-to-mid 30s, have been together for over 12 years, and both have six figure jobs and plenty of savings (ie we could easily afford marriage and kids). We live together, love each other, and may or may not have kids someday.
We have chosen not to marry mainly because we just don't see a point. Additionally, I feel uneasy about all the things that go along with marriage, such as wearing a white dress to represent "purity," bridesmaids, and all that other sexist nonsense. If someone else wants to do it, go right ahead, but it's not really for me. If we do get married, we'll have a rave with our friends in the woods and there won't be anything religious or sexist about it.
7
In wealthier societies, marriage quite clearly evolved from an institution based on "security, stability, and raising children" to one significantly based on meeting each other's needs for "love and intimacy." That wasn't a liberal, progressive, or conservative evolution, but a widespread acknowledgement that person equals person.
3
@Seth EIsenberg , I believe that "person equals person," married or not. And even in "evolved" America, divorce is extremely common and often acrimonious. At its best, marriage is great. At its worst, dreadful and even deadly. The greatest threat to a young woman's life, statistically, is violence at the hands of her partner, even today. And emotional and verbal abuse occurs invisibly, as well. One person's vow may become another person's torment. For those who are happy in marriage, the messy truth is hard to see, perhaps, but it's far from invisible to those who look beyond their own fortunate case.
3
@jb Thank you for commenting. I am grateful to have found happiness in marriage after much pain, growth, and more for which the word "torment" often applied. I didn't in any way mean to imply that "person equals person" is limited or defined by marriage. The recognition that marriage has evolved into relationships between peers (in many societies) is about the institution itself.
In a country with such a weak safety net, traditional marriage can leave a woman financially vulnerable. If her husband dies, becomes disabled, leaves her or divorces and she has no career or solid way to make money, she is vulnerable. This has always been the case for women, and I see feminism as a positive because it provides another path for women, married or not. In some cultures, family plays a bigger role in supporting widows than it does in the USA, because regardless of whether one is liberal or conservative, Americans are on the whole much, much more individualistic than people in many other societies. We don't like to ask for help, and we don't like to offer it to anyone we perceive as "undeserving".
5
Marriage for a woman is different than that of a man.Being single and carefree at 70 and watching my married friends still slaving away fior their husbands makes me double glad I am not in their shoes. When women are given treatment in a marriage things could change. If men stayed home with the children as much as women do now. Maybe if the goverment wants more children, provide daycare. Housework done by two is fast and fun. Ditto with shared cooking and yardwork. If it is children you want, make it easier on single mom's.
7
Douthat rights, "in general the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of 'consent.' And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many[.]"
In a word, nonsense.
Douthat is at pains to legitimize his theorizing by presenting an overview of the literature on marriage. But as a trained sociologist and historian who was raised in a New Testament Catholic tradition, I find it stunning that nowhere in his 1,806-word essay--which accuses Liberals of a decidedly dry and dispassionate view of marriage--does Douthat mention the word "love."
Is this coincidence? I think not. Like virtually every Conservative pseudo-scholar, Douthat seems incapable of entertaining the notion that the common denominator of every successful marriage--whether heterosexual, same-sex, religiously sanctioned or strictly secular--is love.
How Douthat and his ilk manage this is beyond me, for there is no biblical passage dealing with marriage that doesn't turn on the concept of love: “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love." 1 Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." John 15:12: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you."
Time for a new paradigm, Douthat.
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Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich are clearly NOT against marriage; so far, they've each had THREE of them!
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Oh come on! Not one word about the role of our "winner take all" economy of inequality in deferring and devaluing marriage - in the only developed country in the world the where your conservative heroes have successfully lobbied relentlessly against paid family leave? Talk about folks who won't concede anything! At least you semi-endorse (parenthetically) the idea that maybe equality for women is an "eventual" possibility you could live with.
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"Are Liberals Against Marriage?"
No.
In Washington state, since the legalization of same-sex marriage, 10-20% of all marriage licenses have been issued to same-sex couples.
Next question?
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Marriage is only one choice, now. There are many other choices. And that's a good thing. Young women have discovered it feels pretty nice to be in charge of your own life and your own money, and they are not eager to give that control up for marriage Neither are young men. Children are expensive, and we are currently making this planet into a garbage pit. Its no wonder marriage and children are moving down the list of wants and needs of the educated humans with choices.
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When a right wing ideologue like Douthat starts with his a priori conclusion and works backwards, using cherry-picked, out of context and outright distorted facts, what he creates is not an argument undergirded by a pyramid of solid evidence, but a dogmatic statement floating on an unsustainable cloud of ideological bubbles. While the bubbles may be mesmerizing to the Right, they do not constitute an honest assessment and will eventually pop, leaving the ideologue’s preferred conclusion sitting in a soggy puddle.
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