Marriage & Family Trends

Hello everyone! For a long time, I have been writing reports and papers with the intent to turn them in to a professor for a grade. While this does count for a grade, I now get the chance to share my own learning and thoughts with all of you. I hope that if you enjoy this blog that you will do three things...

1. Comment (I would love to hear your thoughts).

2. Return for more! Each week I will have new content that you will not want to miss!

3. Most importantly, share it with friends or families that may benefit from this information. We can cause a rippling effect that will change the world. Valuable information not shared is valuable information wasted. Do your part to share what you learn here with others!

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Let us get started...

What is the ideal family? Is there a certain number of children you must have? Can we evaluate someone's happiness just by looking at the family they have? What are the trends we see in society when it comes to marriage and family life? 

If we look at marriage from the very beginning, we get Adam and Eve, who were married in the garden of Eden. Throughout the years much has changed. It is my personal philosophy that the family is God given and essential to our earthly happiness and our eternal progression. In recent years certain thoughts and changes in societal norms have taken the forefront on attacking what the traditional family is. The world wants to redefine marriage to allow aspects that were not a part of what God intended. 

One of these shifting trends is the age at which we marry. Younger people are waiting to get married. I learned recently that the average marriage age for women today is 28 and 30 for men. While I know that young single adults (YSA) wait, I had not thought that it was that late in their lives. We also must consider families or organizations that promote family and marriage will be on the lower side of this average. Wanting to get to the bottom of this I asked my family for help. I wanted to see how realistic this change was, so I asked when my grandparents were married, my own parents, and then I compared it to people I knew that were getting married today. What I found was interesting. My grandpa on my mother’s side was 23 and my grandma was 22 when they got married in 1964. My own mother and father were ages 23 and 20 in 1995 when they were married. Lastly, I looked at my brother's marriage that took place last year in 2021. He was 24 years old while his wife was 22. While it's not a big gap (like 28-30) there are a few years of difference supporting the trend we are seeing. 

So why then are people postponing marriages? Let's look at what I feel are some of the major reasons!

There is a fear of divorce with younger people. Leading couples to cohabit and live with each other before putting a ring on the finger and going to the courthouse to sign a couple pieces of paper. Research that I studied recently showed that 60-80% of couples cohabit before getting married. These people are 3 times as likely to see a divorce later in their lives. There is a myth that says that about 50% of all marriages will end in divorce. This statistic is a general overview of all marriages. What we are actually seeing is a trend that young people can expect 24% of their marriages will end in divorce. It is not as high as it seems! Nations that look at the United States and say that we have an issue with families because of our high divorce rates need to realize that we don't only have the highest divorce rate, but the highest rate of marriages. Because not as many people are getting married today, we are seeing our nation's divorce rates going down as a whole. 

There is a push for education and work experience. It can be expensive to raise a young family, have a house, and pay for gas. It is becoming more important for a man and woman to get stable in life with a career before making the step to have a family. This is one reason why not as many children are being born today as before. The average fertility rate for a woman in the United States is about 1.7. This becomes a scary fact when we notice that for a population to stay stable in each location the fertility rate needed is at least 2.1. We have been on a downhill climb. 

Marriage and family trends will continue to change over time, just as they have been. We live in a day and time where the traditional family is under attack. My advice is not to get scared by these worldly trends, but rather make the time to focus on the relationships that matter the most to you. Because you can create your own family trends that will have a lasting impact for generations.