Institute for Family Studies

Visitors to the American Colonies in the mid-18th century were astonished by the families they encountered. Schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger, dispatched in 1750 by the Duke of Wuertenberg to report on German settlers in Pennsylvania, was typical. “It must be confessed that the female sex in this new country is very fruitful,” he wrote.

In The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place, Michael Dolan shares that in researching his book he discovered that what he thought was as American as “a greenback dollar” turned out to be instantiated across epochs and cultures. What Dolan learned notwithstanding, there remains something powerfully American about front porches—even when they don’t have the signature American flag flapping in the breeze.

On June 18th, the Institute for Family Studies submitted another amicus brief in support of Texas’s “App Store Accountability Act,” this time in support of the state’s ability to enforce the law while it awaits the Fifth Circuit’s decision regarding the law’s constitutionality. The case in question involves an emergency appeal by the plaintiffs to the Supreme Court after the 5th Circuit overturned a lower court’s injunction against the law pending its ruling on the merits.

On the same day last month, two prominent opinion writers both addressed the U.S. fertility decline: Louise Perry wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Falling birth rates are a mystery,” while Jessica Grose at the New York Times stated that it is “not a mystery” why fertility rates are falling, pointing to the significant drop in teen births as the most likely culprit. From a demographer’s perspective, the U.S. fertility decline is not a mystery at all.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Jefferson enshrined “the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. But today, the news is grim on the happiness front. By almost every measure, Americans are losing that pursuit. The U.S. depression rate is near record highs. The World Happiness Rankings put America much lower than countries of comparable wealth. Optimism is at historic lows. We are in the midst of a “happiness crash,” in the words of University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman.

We’ll be brief: IFS needs your support. We’re not only sounding the alarm about America’s marriage and family crisis—we're coming up with research-supported ways to solve it. That work is only possible with the support of IFS readers like you. There are just five days left in our Mothers and Fathers Appeal, which aims to raise $25,000 in critical support by Father’s Day (June 21). Will you give now?

Where have all the children gone? Ask one parent in Houston and another in Los Angeles, and you will get very different answers—not just about how many children there are, but about where in each city you will find them. New data let us see this geography for the first time at the scale of a single neighborhood.

Marriage in the U.S. has been declining for decades. In 1962, more than 90% of Americans ages 30–35 had ever married. Today, only 55% have. But the decline hasn’t been even. While marriage rates have fallen across all groups, the drop has been much steeper for the working class. It’s common to hear people explain the economic divide in marriage as being due to declining wages among working-class men.

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely automating labor or replacing creativity. It is beginning to mediate humanity’s relationship with the sacred itself. The rise of AI monks, chatbot spiritual advisers, and machine-generated worship services are examples that raise a deeper question: what happens when technology no longer assists religious life but begins to replace it?

Men in America are not 'alright.' Whether it is men falling behind in the job market, not attending college, or never leaving their childhood home, American men are clearly in trouble. But not all men have been equally hit. Working-class men have especially faced the brunt of the “happiness recession.” Experts from all leanings have provided explanations for why men, especially blue-collar men, are doing so poorly. Economists point to data that show how the working class has been left behind.