Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

Published: Nov. 27, 2023, 11 a.m.

b'There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture, like, for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce, people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming more secular because people leave religion in adulthood.\\n\\nAre these ideas actually born out by the data?\\n\\nToday we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out what\\u2019s going on in population, relationship, and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he\\u2019s discovered in his research and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually correlated with a higher chance of divorce, the effect that marrying later has on fertility, why the drop in the number of kids people are having isn\\u2019t only about cost but also about the rise in high intensity parenting, and how the increase in societal secularization can actually be traced to kids, not adults.s'