The Nuclear Option --- Young men and women are deferring or avoiding marriage, pouring their energies into 'self-care' and pets. What is causing this epochal shift away from the family?

"Get Married

By Brad Wilcox

Broadside, 320 pages, $32

Family Unfriendly

By Timothy P. Carney

Harper, 368 pages, $29.99

A society may demonstrate brio in dramatic ways -- by putting up spectacular buildings, say, or sending astronauts into space -- but perhaps the most powerful expression of cultural confidence is one that takes place on a smaller scale: men and women committing themselves to one another in marriage, building families with children and grandchildren. These are acts of self-belief and demonstrations of hope for the future. By this measure, Americans show themselves to be increasingly uncertain and unconfident.

Marriage is disappearing from vast swaths of the populace, denying millions of men and women and children its comforts and protection. An unprecedented fertility drought, meanwhile, means that more Americans are dying every day than are being born.

"The American heart is closing before our very eyes," writes Brad Wilcox in "Get Married," an urgent polemic that marshals anecdote, testimony and social-science data to make the case for wedlock in a culture increasingly averse to it. Mr. Wilcox calls the shift away from marriage "epochal" and writes that Americans are at risk of forgoing "all the fruits that follow from this most fundamental social institution: children, kin, financial stability, and innumerable opportunities to love and be loved by another."

Mr. Wilcox traces the origins of the shift to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the vogue for divorce in the 1970s, from which emerged notions about marriage that have become lodged in the national understanding: that men and women enjoy more happiness, wealth and sex outside wedlock; that family structure has no bearing on human flourishing; that religious marriage is oppressive; that children are expensive little annoyances that ruin the fun.

A professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, Mr. Wilcox uses charts, graphs and lively, info-packed text to give the lie to these immiserating ideas. He finds, among other things, that married men and women are wealthier than their unmarried or divorced peers; that married couples with children are happier than childless spouses; that children from intact families are more likely to finish college and dramatically less likely to be abused than those from other types of household.

In urging defiance of antimatrimonial and antinatal attitudes, Mr. Wilcox decries the hypocrisy of influential elites who inveigh against marriage in public while enjoying its advantages in private. Throughout "Get Married" readers will encounter journalists, academics and influencers who, like members of some sort of malignant orchestra, have combined to play an insistent jangling tune warning the susceptible that marriage and children will trap them, stunt them and rob them of time and money.

"There is zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man," declares a strident social-media figure. A piece in the New York Times extols the "freedom, personal control and self-realization" of living alone. The Atlantic presents "The Case Against Marriage," while Time magazine talks of "Having It All Without Having Children." The dismal melody is insidious -- and it's catching. Countless young men and women are deferring or avoiding marriage altogether, pouring their conjugal and parental energies into elaborate modes of "self-care" and the cosseting of pets. Marriage rates are near the historic lows reached in the plague year 2020 (around 34 single people out of every 1,000 marry every year, down from twice that in 1980). 

Among poor and working-class Americans, marriage rates are in what Mr. Wilcox calls "free fall." Fewer than 40% of working-class adults, and just over 25% of poor adults, between the ages of 18 and 55 are married.

As with marriage, so with children. "Birthrates collapsed in 2020 and 2021," writes Timothy Carney in "Family Unfriendly," a book that anatomizes the ways in which American society makes it difficult for couples to have and enjoy children. Each day in December 2020, nearly 8% fewer babies were born than on the same date a year before, according to the Census Bureau; a similar comparison for 2021 shows a further decline of more than 9%. Discouragements include tax penalties, social norms that demand children be continually supervised, and laws requiring bulky car seats that effectively limit the number of children who can fit in a vehicle. More broadly, a dismal "culture of sterility" defames children as vectors of disease and climate-endangering emitters of greenhouse gases.

Mr. Carney, a married father of six who is a columnist for the Washington Examiner (where my husband is editor), regrets the rise of travel team sports, a pricey and demanding mode of cultivating juvenile athletes that has become notorious for wrecking family calendars. 

The author and his wife have consciously reverted to the old pre-frantic -- which is to say, 1970s and earlier -- mode of life, opting to live near relatives in a family-oriented Catholic parish and letting their children run in and out of neighbors' houses and play outside rather than driving them to scheduled and chaperoned activities.

Illustrative personal anecdotes and those of fellow travelers are woven throughout "Family Unfriendly," as are sneers from the commentariat. ("Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet," lectures one prominent writer.) Mr. Carney is particularly good on the grim ramifications of low birth rates, which mark not only the United States but also countries across the world, including India and South Korea. Fewer children now means fewer adults later, of course, and fewer adults means fewer workers. But human beings are not merely cogs or widgets whose value derives from their contribution to economic life. 

Forgone marriages and children mean foregone human connections, greater loneliness and atomization, fewer opportunities for love and serendipity and joy. 

Nor, Mr. Carney notes, has rising secularism ushered in an earthly paradise: "A de-Christianizing America was supposed to be a happier, more liberated, brighter one. Instead it's an America that traded out hope and love of mankind for self-loathing and a constant terror of the coming inferno."

All is not lost, though. Messrs. Wilcox and Carney both take heart -- and put heart into the reader -- by identifying individuals and communities that are bucking the trends. 

 What Mr. Wilcox calls "family-first marriage" is flourishing among Asian-Americans, conservatives, religious believers and those scarred by parental divorce in their own childhoods. For his part, Mr. Carney celebrates the life-embracing ethos of family-focused neighborhoods in, among other places, Ohio, Idaho and the nation of Israel.

"Get Married" and "Family Unfriendly" have other similarities, not least the cover art -- sky blue on top, grassy green below -- that make them look like commercial twins. Both books lend themselves to readerly dipping-in rather than a single engrossing read. 

And in both, amid the flurry of data points, the authors strive to plumb the depths of cultural distress -- Mr. Carney calls it "civilizational sadness" -- evinced by the spreading avoidance of family formation.

There is more to be said and thought on the subject -- and surely room in the market for even more profound philosophical and historical explorations of what looks like a kind of mass self-alienation. Marriage and children are not for everyone; nor are they available to everyone. But throughout human history, most men and women have entrusted their deepest loyalties and fiercest affections to their husbands and wives and children, and looked to family for meaning and purpose. Why should we want to be different?" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Nuclear Option --- Young men and women are deferring or avoiding marriage, pouring their energies into 'self-care' and pets. What is causing this epochal shift away from the family? Meghan Cox Gurdon.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Mar 2024: C.7.