Penna Dexter

New research on family life shows that COVID-19 has exacerbated a growing divide in family formation, with higher-income, better-educated Americans more interested in getting married and having children than those with less education and lower incomes.

Marriage rates are falling. Birth and fertility rates are at record lows. The fertility rate is only about 1.7 children per woman. well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

All kinds of problems result from this decline in family formation, many of them economic.

But New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says most research portends a “potentially disastrous long-term cost” for the poor and least-educated Americans for whom “singlehood and isolation define middle and old age.“

The pandemic contributed to these trends. Dating became more difficult when institutions where relationships often form — churches, colleges, and community organizations — closed or moved online.

Ross Douthat warns that these institutions likely won’t resume the robust role they once played in matchmaking. Now, he writes, they’re “pushing people more and more into virtual spaces and virtual marriage markets that, on the evidence we have, aren’t doing a particularly good job of paring men and women off.”

The pandemic fueled government “stimulus” spending that allowed many Americans to delay their return to work. This had the undesirable effect of encouraging more working-class men to drop out of the workforce.

The research shows more women than men are now returning to church. But, more men than women are finding themselves in a lifestyle labeled NEET:  Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

And not getting married or starting families.

There’s talk of a government-provided guaranteed income to relieve this downward pressure on the desire to form families. But would this alleviate what Ross Douthat described as the “family-unfriendliness” of men making low annual incomes?  Would it change the minds of “more than half of single men making less than $50,000” per year who report they don’t want to have children?

Probably not.