In this op-ed Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families summarizes the massive changes to marriage, childbearing, and family formation over the last 40 years. These changes are associated with some positive developments for adults—more jobs and higher wages for women, more engagement with family and household responsibilities for men—but the results […]

Trends in marriage and fertility pose long-term risks to the financial and fiscal health of the world's wealthiest nations – from China and Japan to Germany and the United States – and are implicated in the recent global economic slowdown, according to a new report released today. The Sustainable Demographic Dividend: What Do Marriage & […]

"The number of Americans who have children and live together without marrying has increased twelvefold since 1970," Sabrina Tavernise wrote in The New York Times recently, adding that "children now are more likely to have unmarried parents than divorced ones." Is that cause for concern? Does marriage contribute to a stable environment, or is it […]

Now that government belt-tightening has become a national obsession, divorce-reform advocates are making the argument that they can be part of the solution. Divorce is costly for everyone, they argue, and encouraging troubled couples to try to work things out could benefit the national bottom line. The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new […]

Co-sponsored by the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, this new report by a group of 18 family scholars summarizes new findings from the social sciences on divorce, cohabitation, and marriage in the U.S. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, director […]