Public policy for family equality

Abstract

W. Bradford Wilcox and Alan Hawkins (hereafter, WH) introduce a marriage paradox: in the United States, the benefits to marriage are increasing and its social value remains high, but people are increasingly disinclined to get married. Why? My response is that the gains to marriage are uneven and uncertain, and for today's adults, getting and staying married is largely predicated on costly prior personal achievements that are out of reach for many. WH propose strategies to make marriage more desirable and accessible and thereby improve personal welfare and population well-being. I suggest that instead we target well-being directly. Doing so may increase marriage among those who desire it while also ensuring that achievement, fulfillment, and security are not dependent upon family structure.

WH argue that stable marriage causally improves well-being because it is an institution with legally and normatively enforceable bonds where family members share resources, time, and care efficiently and effectively. Meta-analyses and other comprehensive reviews also provide evidence that marriage improves economic security and health relative to remaining unpartnered or divorcing. But there are many caveats. The magnitude and scope of these effects diminish in study designs that rigorously account for selection mechanisms and use plausible comparison groups (McLanahan et al., 2013; Raley & Sweeney, 2020; Smock & Schwartz, 2020). Studies have often reported average effects that overlook sociodemographic variation in the returns to marriage (Baker & O'Connell, 2022; Cross et al., 2022) and the harm that comes from remaining in a poor-quality marriage (Williams, 2003). And WH appear to focus on families headed by couples in a shared first marriage with all children in common. Repartnered families do not gain from marriage in equal measure (Ginther & Pollak, 2004; Raley & Sweeney, 2020).

Another perspective generally missing from comparisons of married and non-married households is that many of the apparent benefits to marriage arise from and contribute to deeply-rooted social inequality in ways that may actually be counterproductive to marriage formation and satisfaction. For example, as WH note, married men and fathers earn more than unmarried and childless men. Yet for women, a longstanding motherhood wage penalty persists (Cukrowska-Torzewska & Matysiak, 2020). Gendered market responses to marriage and parenthood reflect outmoded expectations about role specialization in families and distort how different-sex, dual-earner couples make decisions about parental leave, family caregiving, and housework. These constrained choice sets clash with contemporary preferences for an egalitarian distribution of household labor, leading to shared frustration and within-family inequality among married couples and diminished enthusiasm for marriage among unmarried people, especially women without a college degree (Pedulla & Thébaud, 2015; Pessin, 2018).

Further, WH note that the benefits to marriage are increasing for parents and children relative to other family arrangements, and they illustrate this point with the example of a growing disparity in children's college completion. What explains this trend? The cost of college, 70% of which is covered privately by families and students on average (Sallie Mae, 2023), may be a contributing factor. One response would be to encourage parents to marry and remain married to amass college savings together and avoid foreclosing on their children's educational opportunities (also see Kearney, 2023; Wilcox, 2024). I would endorse an alternative response: to identify where public policy can intervene to disrupt the association between parents’ marriage and children's college completion by reducing the amount and share of postsecondary education costs that parents and students bear (Cooper, 2019).

Why should we invest in strategies to disrupt the association between marriage and well-being rather than to improve well-being through marriage promotion? Among other reasons, there is little evidence that marriage promotion works. WH propose several mechanisms that focus on public education and training to encourage marriage formation and persistence. These recommendations assume that (a) unmarried people are unaware of or uninterested in marriage's purported benefits and (b) marriage promotion programming is effective. Indeed, on the same premise, the Administration for Children and Families has funded Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programming since 2001. Yet meta-analyses indicate that these programs have had only small positive effects on communication and relationship quality in selective populations and no effect on marriage uptake, and marriage promotion curricula may even diminish father involvement (Arnold & Beelmann, 2019; Hawkins et al., 2022). A recent National Academies of Sciences (2024) report evaluated marriage promotion as a strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty and summarized the situation this way: “While it appears that married, two-parent family structures may, in fact, reduce intergenerational poverty, we lack direct evidence of policies and programs that are capable of promoting such structures” (p. 174).

Programs to intervene directly on marriage are unlikely to increase marriage formation or improve population well-being. But WH also advocate for two strategies that might do both: eliminating marriage penalties in public means-tested programs and addressing housing unaffordability. Initiatives such as these can increase family income, assets, and residential stability, all of which can have positive effects for adults and children—regardless of whether one lives in a married-couple family.