FAMILIES NEED A VIBE SHIFT

THE AUTHORS OF FOUR NEW BOOKSWITH 24 KIDS BETWEEN THEM-SAY THE AMERICAN FAMILY NEEDS A COURSE CORRECTION.

- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

IS THE AMERICAN family doomed?

Fewer than half of U.S. adults are married. The nation's fertility rate has fallen below replacement level. The percentage of children living with married parents has fallen drastically. There's no denying the trend lines.

That trajectory has spawned a public panic that sometimes verges on the apocalyptic, along with a related discussion about how best to use money and power to reverse course. Journalists, sociologists, and public intellectuals, most but not all of them right-of-center politically, have called for everything from tax credits to tariffs to transformations of the American welfare system in hopes of changing the way Americans conceptualize and form families.

But the declinist narrative doesn't tell the whole story and the calls for big, centralized solutions misunderstand the issues at hand. The relevant obstacles to more marriages, more babies, and more stable families can't be moved by tax incentives, marriage promotion campaigns, or federally subsidized day care.

Four new books about American families-written by people with different politics, different professional backgrounds, and 24 kids between them-make a compelling case that the American family needs a course correction.

But that correction won't come from any of the typical promarriage or pro-natalist policy prescriptions.

If it comes, the change will be the result of a ground-up transformation: a cultural paradigm in which family formation is understood as an individual choice but not a lonely one, and in which distributed cultural support provides what a top-down program handed down from Washington cannot.

What the American family needs is a vibe shift.

GET MARRIED, GET HAPPY?

MARRIAGE IS STILL the norm in America, but it is declining.