When someone says “minimum wage,” what comes to mind? Do you think of teenagers flipping burgers? Or a single parent trying to feed several kids? While President Obama and other proponents of a higher minimum wage want you to visualize that single parent, the truth is that a burger-flipping teenager …
Married couples across the country will commemorate St. Valentine’s Day today by exchanging cards and flowers and raising a glass to love. But marriage also provides a host of social, economic, and even health benefits. As research on Heritage’s FamilyFacts.org demonstrates, married families tend to have better financial health, increased …
The collapse of marriage, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty—but government policy doesn’t reflect that reality, according to a special report released today by The Heritage Foundation. Nearly three out of four poor families with children in America …
A recent New York Times article about the growing marriage and class divide in America featured two middle-class families in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At the heart of the story are the disparate lives of their children. Jeremy, 12, and his brother, Justin, 10, are raised by married, college-educated parents. Kirsten, …
A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examines how single mothers’ religious participation may influence their young children’s behavioral outcomes. Using a Princeton University survey that followed over 1,100 urban single-mother families for the first five years of the children’s lives, the study finds that mothers’ religious …
New government data (PDF) reveals a continuing trend of declining marriage rates. More women have never been married, and cohabitation rates have increased steadily. And more children are born outside of marriage than ever before. The consequences of these trends include lower economic prosperity for families and an array of …
A recent New York Times article points out that divorce rates—once highest in metropolitan, big city areas—are now creeping upward in Middle America: Forty years ago, divorced people were more concentrated in cities and suburbs. But geographic distinctions have all but vanished, and now, for the first time, rural Americans …
On Thursday, The Washington Post heralded the findings of a new survey reporting on sexual activity in the United States. While the study pronounced such positive findings as an increase in abstinence among teens and college-age adults and a decrease in teen pregnancy, there is bleaker story that cannot be …
