A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Marriage and birth rates are both on the decline in the U.S. And that amounts to a crisis, at least according to The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that created Project 2025. Roger Severino is the foundation's vice president of economic and domestic policy.
ROGER SEVERINO: Well, this has been a slow-motion catastrophe where people are not getting married and not having children anywhere near the healthy levels we need for a fully flourishing society.
MARTÍNEZ: And in a new report, the foundation calls for tax incentives, welfare reforms - even a publicly funded marriage boot camp. The Heritage Foundation usually advocates for smaller government. In this case, Severino says, government has a role to play.
SEVERINO: We have to stop penalizing marriage in our welfare state, in our tax programs. Then you get the government to remove obstacles to family formation. And then what's innovative with our most recent proposals - you get the government off the sidelines and actually give active support with child credits and child care credits tied to marriage.
MARTÍNEZ: But would these policies work, and is the American family really in a crisis to begin with? I asked those questions to Jennifer Sciubba. She leads the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit statistics provider.
JENNIFER SCIUBBA: Well, crisis is certainly a word that's meant to evoke lots of emotions, but crisis is, of course, also relational. So some folks are feeling like there's a family crisis when their ideal version of the family is one that they see slipping away. And then others feel like the family is really flourishing because their ideal vision of the family is the increasing model out there. So I would say where you stand depends upon where you sit.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. They're saying that children in the U.S. are losing out on the benefits of living in the same household with a man and woman who are married to each other. What do they say are those benefits?
SCIUBBA: The authors do cite some work, particularly work from economist Melissa Kearney, that children who grow up in stable two-parent families, especially married biological parents, do show better average outcomes. But what Kearney's work also emphasizes is that what she calls a two-parent advantage is strongly tied to resources and stability. And so it actually ends up being an inequality story because the two-parent family structure is actually more common, which The Heritage Foundation report shows, among higher-income, college-educated adults.
MARTÍNEZ: Why wouldn't a child have the same advantages with two parents, regardless of sex and gender?
SCIUBBA: You can really see The Heritage Foundation grappling with a lot of this in the report. So certainly, there's a clear ideological bent around heterosexual marriage.
MARTÍNEZ: So OK. Let's get into some of the policies The Heritage Foundation says could encourage more Americans to get married and start a family. Some of them sound like pretty much boilerplate fiscal conservatism, like reforming the welfare system, eliminating regulations. Do policies like that, Jennifer, really encourage people to settle down and have kids?
SCIUBBA: I'm not sure we know. So they do cite research that looks at - so one thing we might want to note, actually, when we talk about marriage is that while it is down over time in the U.S., it also is down for particular groups and not others. So we do know that particularly Black women are less likely to marry now than in the past, but - whereas white women are much more likely to marry. So they do disaggregate some of that in the report, but we would probably learn a lot more about, you know, what does it take? Do the welfare reforms they are suggesting - as you say, it is very boilerplate, fiscal conservative - would that encourage Black women then to get married? We would not know the answer to that until that was actually done.
MARTÍNEZ: A lot of this talk about population shifts comes from conservative voices. Do you think progressives also believe that it's a problem that more people are foregoing marriage and kids?
SCIUBBA: Certainly, there's a lot of talk about it. But I think, similar to what is happening on the right, identifying what exactly that problem is is up in the air. So I think there's actually room for common ground. And in fact, in this Heritage Foundation report, there are some specific things that I would say are pulled right out of the progressive playbook. For example, the Heritage Foundation report really notes that families would do well to have access to high-quality child care, particularly for the child's first year of life. Additionally, there's a big emphasis in this report on flexible work arrangements. So that's another spot that could really find broad support across the U.S. political spectrum.
MARTÍNEZ: Jennifer Sciubba is president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau. Jennifer, thanks.
SCIUBBA: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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