Americans increasingly believe in marriage before children

OPINION:

In a survey released in August, Gallup offered encouraging news for our nation’s future — particularly for our children.

The survey found that 39% of Americans now say it is very important for a couple to be legally married before having children, up 10 percentage points from 2020.

In addition, there was a drop in the percentages of Americans who say that it is morally acceptable to have children outside of marriage. In 2020, 66% of Americans said it was morally acceptable. That percentage is now 58%.

Although I wish that these figures were 100% or 0%, the changes are significant. The increased understanding that marriage should occur before pregnancy means more children will grow up in a stable, married, two-parent environment. Such an environment has been shown repeatedly to increase children’s ability to thrive.

Although much work remains to further reduce the number of children born outside of marriage, it is good to see these numbers moving in a positive direction. Stable families are one of the main foundations of a stable society, as children grow up in a secure environment with both a father and a mother to guide them.

Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow emeritus at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, wrote in an analysis, “The short answer is that marriage still matters. And depending on what metric you examine, marriage can matter a lot.”

Ms. Sawhill continued, “The finding that children who are born to married parents tend to enjoy better life outcomes is consistent with existing research that has established that children who grow up in two-parent homes are more likely to graduate from college and work and are less likely to have children young, be depressed, be convicted for committing a crime, or end up poor as adults on average.”

Interestingly, the Gallup survey found that although the number of Americans who believe couples should get married before having children has increased, this shift has occurred at a time when many people now in the prime marriage and child-raising stage of life grew up in homes where this was not the case.

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The survey found that 82% of respondents said their parents were married at the time of their birth, a decline of 10 percentage points from 2006. In addition, 67% said they were raised in a two-parent household, down from 75% in the previous poll.

This juxtaposition leads me to ponder this question: Have these adults who were born out of wedlock or who did not enjoy the benefits of a stable, two-parent home come to realize, based on their personal experience, that marriage should come before having children?

Often, one learns from personal failures or the fallout of others’ failures, whether observed firsthand or experienced. If this is the case, I would then expect these positive numbers to increase over the next few years, as more children enter the world with married — rather than just “committed” — parents, and grow up to realize the benefits of stable homes.

This trend would have all sorts of positive ramifications for American society, as Ms. Sawhill pointed out: reduced government dependence, reduced childhood alienation, lower crime rates and better educational outcomes. All have trended downward with the continued breakdown of the married, two-parent family.

As James Q. Wilson wrote in his essay “Why We Don’t Marry”: “The right way for a culture to restore itself is for it to be rebuilt, not from the top down by government policies, but from the bottom up by personal decisions.”

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The personal decision to wait to have children until marriage will rebuild our culture upon a firm foundation. That is why the news from Gallup is so encouraging to me and should be to all Americans, regardless of political or religious affiliation.

The decision will be a societal healing balm as current and future children flourish in the security of living in a married, two-parent home.

• Timothy S. Goeglein is the vice president of government and external relations at Focus on the Family and the co-author of a new book, “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family” (Fidelis, 2026).