Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Parents, please note that this episode touches on some mature content, so please be cautious if you're listening with young children. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs.
Thanks for joining us this week on Family Policy Matters. A newly published report raises some serious concerns about Gen Z and what happens in the decade on average that many at that age date before marrying, if they ever get around to marrying. Marrying, that is. Hadley Heath Manning, a nationally recognized policy expert, commentator, and senior fellow for the organization Independent Women, is here today to discuss the Dating Decade Report. She has some sad news and some reflections on what we as a society can do to best support this generation, which is roughly 14 to 29 years old.
Hadley Heath Manning, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. First of all, will you tell us about this organization that you work with, Independent Women? What is that? Independent Women is a public policy organization that's been around since the early 1990s, and I've been privileged to work with this organization for over 15 years now.
But I have to say, Independent Women has grown.
So there are myriad ways to get involved with the organization, but I still love doing the sort of cultural commentary and public policy analysis piece.
So you just released a report, the Dating Decade Report. Tell us a little bit more about what you found. The big word that comes to mind is uncertain. I think the desire for family life is still there among many people who are age 18 to 29. And that's the group that we did some original polling with to ascertain exactly what their attitudes are.
You'll see in poll after poll that the majority of young people still want to get married and they still want to have kids. But what we also see is those things have fallen on the list of priorities for what they believe to be a good life. And I believe that a lot of that is rooted in uncertainty. They're not sure that marriage and family is in the cards for them. These are sort of natural milestones, life steps that for previous generations were kind of presumed to just come along and happen along the way.
And that's no longer the case. They're no longer guaranteed. When we asked people in Gen Z who said they did not want kids, and this was only about 12 to 13 percent of the respondents, why don't you want kids? The number one answer they gave us was, I don't think I'll be a good parent. And so that raises a lot of questions for me about what is our society telling young people that it means to be a good parent?
And what What is it that they think about themselves that's insufficient for this task of parenting? Let's talk about the reasons why you think they are doubting themselves. And we know from your report that this age has a higher percentage of divorced parents than previous generations. Is that partly to blame, do you think? Absolutely.
When we asked the group that said they did not want to get married, and there were only about 7% who definitively said they did not want to get married, there was another portion who said they did not know, but the overwhelming majority said, yes, I'm hopeful, I want to get married. Or about 18% of our respondents said they were already married.
So we were encouraged by that. But among those who said they didn't want to get married, divorce came up as one of their concerns. You know, it was third on the list, but over 20% of them and more of the young women said that they were concerned about the risk of divorce. And I can understand that. I mean, the way that many people in my generation, I'm an older millennial, the way we were raised, I can remember many of my friends experiencing the divorce of their parents as children.
And they've lived in a world where there's a mom's house and a dad's house.
Some of their parents have remarried, but I think taking that first step into marriage, you know, there's been Some additional risk that kids and young adults are thinking about there. I would also say, you know, as a big backdrop to this, and I work into this in the first section of the report: some of these steps, whether it's the step of getting married or having a child, these things are also much more optional today than they were in previous generations. And for women, some of the big changes have been around more educational and career opportunities and also around the advent and almost universal uptake of contraception. Because, you know, when my grandparents were being born, it was just sort of presumed that in a marriage that children would come along, but now it's something that people are opting into or opting out of. And so to have that level of control over whether you enter the stage of parenthood or not has, I think, caused a lot of people to put more hurdles in the way and to create more expectations for what they have to do to be ready to become parents.
And some other excellent scholars talk about marriage in this way. They say, are we encouraging people? To make marriage the cornerstone of life, something to build your life on? Or are we encouraging young people to think about marriage and parenthood as capstones to life, something that you only get to after you've checked another list of boxes? And in writing this report, I was most interested in those data points that you mentioned: that sexual debut and first marriage used to be concurrent events in a lot of human history, or they were very closely timed, maybe a couple years apart on average.
But now to have over a decade between the age of 17, which is about the average age that we see young adults initiating sex for the first time, and getting married at ages of 28 and 30 for women and men, respectively, that is a long period of time that we're asking young adults to navigate a lot of decisions about sex, about relationships, before they finally take those steps down the aisle. Quite often, at least in media and even in talking to people that are planning to divorce or have divorce, they think, you hear this, that as long as they get along with the other parent, you know, it really doesn't hurt. The kids for them to divorce, but that's not what I'm hearing from the statistics. You know, I think that recently there's been more and more attention to this, and I'm encouraged by that. You've probably heard of or maybe a part of the Them Before Us campaign, which focuses really on the effect of family life on children.
I'm encouraged by that. I think that acknowledging the harms of divorce is a necessary but not sufficient condition to help young adults get back on track in terms of family formation and creating strong, healthy marriages of their own. You know, it is one thing to talk about risk factors for divorce. And of course, having divorced parents is a risk factor. But we can also talk about the factors that create a strong marriage and the habits of a household that foster a good relationship between the husband and wife, between mom and dad.
I'm encouraged by those things. I try to follow those things in my own marriage. You know, I'm encouraged by the fact that people who attend church together as a married couple have a lower risk of divorce. I'm encouraged to know that couples who prioritize having regular date nights together and spending that one-on-one time together, that they have a lower risk of divorce. divorce.
So I think we should talk about the harms of divorce, absolutely, but we can also talk about steps that people can take, particularly those young adults who are entering into their first marriage and may not look at their own parents as the ideal example of where they want their marriage to go and what they want their marriage to look like. We can connect them with mentors and we can give them good ideas for how to strengthen their marriages.
So you also mentioned the idea of family and having children as a capstone idea rather than a let's do life together kind of thing. Talk a little bit more about that. Like where did that concept come from and do you really think that's kind of how people are thinking about it these days? I do think that that's a big part of the culture around marriage and family today. And again, I think a lot of it goes back to the greater level of control that we have over our bodies due to the advent and huge uptake of contraception.
We've reduced tremendously the risk of unplanned pregnancy and in so doing, we've created more of a divide between the act of sex and the risk of pregnancy. Mm. And this, for a lot of people, I think, creates a situation where marriage is optional. In my research for this report, I was sort of surprised to find that in the 1930s and 40s, if a young woman became pregnant, about half of the time that union resulted in a marriage before the birth of the child. You know, we might call this a shotgun wedding in colloquial terms.
But today, that figure is under 10%. Today, if a young woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, it is not likely that the father of the child will marry her before the child is born. And so, I think the ages at which people are welcoming a first child have vacillated, but they have dipped below the age at average first marriage. And so, I think it comes down to, yes, a different cultural view of marriage as a capstone, but also a view of marriage that is marriage is optional. It's not necessary to be the bedrock foundation of a family.
It's not necessary to welcome children. It's not necessary for the fulfillment of an individual. You know, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that it is. I'm Christian, I'm familiar with single people in the Bible, like St. Paul, who dedicated their whole lives to the church and to their communities.
And I have a lot of single friends, and their lives are just as valuable as anybody else's, obviously. But I think for many young people today, they're expressing a desire for that long-term companionship and commitment and stability that marriage can bring. And they're not getting there. And so I was interested in exploring the reasons why. Why are they not getting to fulfill the dreams that they have for marriage?
And part of it is that our social and cultural view of marriage is that it's just not necessary. I read something that you had written where you talked a little bit about how intentional this generation is about their careers. And they don't think that it's okay to be intentional about finding that mate or that husband or wife, which I thought was very interesting. Yeah, I had some advice given to me when I was a young college student. Stop worrying so much about, you know, what's going on with your boyfriend because almost everybody gets married.
You know, the advice I was given is those things will just Happen. They will just come along, you know. And I thought, looking back, I think that was not great advice because it is no longer true that these things simply come along or just happen.
Some of the technological changes that we're seeing with regard to how people relate to each other, the very nature of human connection has changed a lot over the course of the past 10 or 20 years with young adults spending more time online than any other generation. And those connections definitely allow us a much greater reach, you know, much greater breadth of connection. I could say that I'm connected to thousands of people through my phone, through my social media networks, right? But the depth of those connections is another issue. And to a certain degree, I think the relationships that we have, the connections I should say, that we have online have actually been counterproductive to deep human connection.
Even the online dating scene, you know, I think we've already seen the peak of that. I think a lot of the younger Gen Z people who are entering the dating pool now are recognizing that while online Dating does provide a good avenue for making that initial match or connection with someone. It's actually not the best way to deepen the relationship. Moving that relationship to real life, where you can have in-person conversations about things that really matter, that's the appropriate next step.
So, I'm very interested in where we go from here, but I do see just the very beginning of what I think is a backlash to the direction that we have gone. And of course, the COVID pandemic made this so much worse where we just lost touch with other people. And that impacted Gen Z tremendously, of course. We've got a lot that we could talk about as far as the problem, but let's talk a little bit about some of the solutions. Are there some policy issues that we can bring up in our states or on the federal level that could help to change how this generation is thinking about marriage?
Well, there's a very encouraging and interesting debate going on among public policy analysts and advocates about pronatal policies, about policies intended to boost the birth rate. And while that's not really the focus of my paper, I do. Think that efforts to make family life easier and to normalize family life in our society will help people form families, even if it doesn't ultimately boost the birth rate. I do think centering family life in all of the places where people are-whether that's in our school system or in our workplaces or in our churches-and giving people the opportunity to see examples that they can learn from, to have mentorship. I think the way that we talk about sex ed in schools is important, but I think we should be careful in all of our public policy not to presume that people are just individual widgets.
You know, we're not. We're people who have connections in our communities and to our families. And one example of a public policy that I think has very broad support that we could change would be to mitigate the impact of marriage penalties in our social welfare programs. We do not want the government to be discouraging anybody from getting married by reducing their benefits. Essentially, if they decide to get married.
On the other hand, I don't know that the government really has a very strong role to play in incentivizing marriage financially or incentivizing births financially. I haven't seen a lot of good evidence that this is a strong, cost-effective policy, but we can certainly make life easier for families by greater workplace flexibility, for example, or allowing people to bring their kids along when they need to. You know, I think one thing that young adults look at, they look at the lives of people like me who do have young children and they say, oh, that looks stressful. That looks hard. And if we can make life less stressful and less hard for young families, then the people who are coming behind us will see that and will say, you know, maybe that is doable.
Maybe that's feasible for me too.
Well, we're just about out of time. Before we go, Hadley Heathmanning, where can our listeners go if they want to learn more about the Dating Decade report, the Independent Women, that organization that sponsored the report, and also some of the good work that you're doing? They can go to independentwomen.com and I encourage them to go to the page about the Dating Decade Report. All right. Hadley Heath Manning, Senior Fellow for Independent Women, thank you so much for being with us today on family policy matters.
Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy.
Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
