In a brief new paper, sociologists Joanna R. Pepin and Philip N. Cohen highlight a new and worrisome trend: Fewer high-school seniors think they will get married one day, per the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey. Fewer of them think they’d make a good spouse, too.
These trends are important in themselves. As Pepin and Cohen point out, the data may portend further declines in the marriage rate. I wanted to float some hypotheses about why they might be happening, too.
First, could declining marriage expectations track the “Great Awokening”—the rise of left-wing sentiment among young people, especially women, in the past 10 years or so? The MTF data show growing liberal identification among young women (rising from about 20 to 30% in the past decade), and other evidence suggests liberals are less likely to marry, so it would make sense for declining marriage intentions to be bundled with these larger phenomena.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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