On July 4, 2026, Americans will remember how the Founding Fathers won their freedom and established ordered liberty through a system of limited government, federalism, and the rule of law. In understanding their crowning achievement, Americans must recognize that the Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them—an average of six each. Thus, when the men and women of the revolution sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to secure the blessings of liberty “for our posterity,” it was their children, and their children’s children, and an expanding circle of Americans stretching across untold generations, that they had in mind. The key to American greatness in the first 250 years remains the key to American greatness in the next 250 years: the family.

The Founders knew a hard truth: that when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself. This is fixed by the stubborn facts of human nature: It takes one fertile man and one fertile woman to reproduce, and young human beings are wholly dependent on others for many years after birth. One knows from universal experience that children are best raised in homes with their married mothers and fathers. Moreover, abundant social science research confirms that every alternative to the natural family with married parents has proven across space and time to be, on average, inferior for couples, and especially for any children that arise from their union.

For that reason, Aristotle grounds political order not in the palace or the marketplace but in the household (oikos). The family is the most natural of all associations for the supply of man’s everyday wants, the first building block of which society arises. Cicero, building on the observations of Aristotle, referred to the first society as marriage itself, and the home with children as the foundation of civil government, “the nursery, as it were, of the state.”

The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage—the committed union of one man and one woman—is its cornerstone. It is the seedbed of self-government. The home is where fathers, mothers, and their children cultivate virtue and practice cooperation, responsibility, stewardship, and self-reliance. Without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity. It lacks a storehouse of strong and brave men to protect itself from hostile aggressors at home and abroad. It lacks even the ingredients for responsible citizenship itself—without which no republic is possible. Despite their own radical philosophy, even the mad communist dictators of the 20th century, such as Stalin and Mao, could not eradicate the need for the family.

In many respects, a strong family—dependent on God and one another—is itself a declaration of independence. It advances the cause of liberty by minimizing the need for government in daily life. In the immortal words of John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The question that will determine the course of America’s future is: What happens to a nation when its citizens largely stop having children and, when they do, eschew marriage? These questions are not theoretical. This is the reality that the American republic now faces. Americans’ answer to the question of family will determine the health and survival of the republic.

The task of the authors of this Special Report is to propose ways to remove the many obstacles blocking the formation of healthy families, to make marriage and family life easier, and to restore family to the center of American life, in rhetoric and in reality.

The statistics on the American family are sobering. The percentage of married adults in this country has been on a steady decline since the 1960s and a third of young Americans are expected to never marry. Those who do decide to marry do so at later ages than their forebears, as evidenced by the fact the median age of first marriage has gone up by about eight years for women (to 28.6) and about seven years for men (to 30.5) in a generation.

These changes have transformed American family life. Married couples are still the most common household type, but married households are no longer the majority of U.S. households. In the 1950s and through the mid-1960s, around three-quarters of U.S. households included a married couple. Today, fewer than half of the nation’s roughly 132 million households are comprised of married couples. Cohabitation, in contrast, is on the rise. In fact, more Americans today are cohabiting than has ever been the case. These changes point to shifting priorities for men and women. But the people who feel them most are America’s children.

When the Moynihan report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” was published in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—then Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson—was so concerned about a 25 percent nonmarital birth rate for black women that he called for national action from the federal government. In the decades after the report was published, that rate has nearly tripled. The changes in marriage culture and family structure that have largely been associated with low-income neighborhoods in the country’s largest cities have taken on a new shape in recent decades. Today, the national nonmarital rate is 40 percent and one-quarter of American children live with a single parent—the highest rate in the world.

The practical result is that millions of children will never experience life with both parents, or stability in the home. Marriage no longer anchors childhood, and the results are clear: weaker educational attainment among children, higher poverty, and neighborhoods hollowed out by instability.

Alongside the decline in American marriage has come an even more precipitous drop in fertility. Unless reversed, deaths will soon outpace births, reshaping the American family from a source of abundance into a scarcity of both parents and children.

This dramatic turn away from marriage and family formation has many causes, but two stand out. The first was Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The rapid growth of the welfare state incentivized unwed childbearing, imposed devastating financial penalties on low-income people who got married, and discouraged able-bodied people from working.

The disruptions to American family life caused by bad public policy in the 1960s were exacerbated by cultural upheavals that radically changed social norms around sex, sexuality, marriage, children, and gender roles. Second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution promoted an individualistic, child-free, marriage-free, sexual “liberation” that promised to lead to an unparalleled era of consent-based human happiness and fulfillment. Over the course of 60 years, casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.

For most of human history, marriage was accepted as the lifelong union of one man and one woman. Almost all major cultures recognized it as ennobling and viewed it as the optimal social arrangement for the rearing of children. Americans considered parenthood the natural and desirable course of life for almost everyone. Even through most of the 20th century, Americans married during young adulthood and most children were born to married parents.

That life script has been flipped. Today, fewer than 50 percent of Americans believe that society is better off when people prioritize marriage. These new norms mean that many children today will have no concept of the traditional family name, family home, or family vacation, because their definition of family doesn’t include marriage and often, neither fathers nor siblings.

With the decline in American marriage came an even more precipitous drop in the number of children brought into the world. Total fertility—the number of children born per woman—had been falling steadily since the Industrial Revolution but recovered significantly after the Great Depression and through the baby boom. It then cratered in the 1960s. By 2024, it hit a record low of 1.59 lifetime births per woman, which is far below the 2.1 required for a population to replace itself. If these trends continue as expected, deaths will outpace births within a decade, and the gap will widen non-linearly over the century. Put plainly, the current future of America consists of far fewer Americans.

So much of modern life has taken a non-shrinking population for granted that it is difficult to envision the future that awaits. For instance, when Social Security started, many able-bodied workers paid in for every retired person or widow. Today, there are so few workers per retiree that the program has been paying out more than it receives since 2010 with no end in sight. From schools, to banks, to churches, to sports leagues, to crowd-sourced apps, American society runs on a complex web of institutions and relations that presume net growth or stability, not decay and decline.

American family life is truly at a crossroads. One path is marked by unwed childbearing, low rates of marriage, low fertility, low commitment, and easy divorce. This path is associated with the view that family formation (or its avoidance) is primarily about fulfilling adult desires and adult needs. The other path elevates the family unit as an inherent good based on the commitment and sacrifice of husbands and wives for each other’s sake and for the sake of children that their union would welcome into the world. This path is associated with the view that all life is sacred and which sees the family as a source of fulfillment for adults because they direct their energies to the good of the family unit instead of to themselves alone. Underlying this view is a deep sense of gratitude in knowing that human beings are here by God’s grace, and that children are divine gifts.

This is the choice that Americans now face, and the stakes could not be higher. Americans can continue to dissipate their energy, as a spent force and a spent people, or reverse course and rebuild on a foundation of families and communities that will grow in size, strength, and resilience. Americans’ choices, both as individuals and as a nation, will determine their future.

In terms of policy, government can respond in one of two ways. The first strategy presumes that the current trajectory of the American family is effectively irreversible and immune to policy-driven reform. Similar to hospice care, this option will not seek to cure the disease, but to find ways to limit the damage before the patient inevitably succumbs. Intentionally or not, this is the default strategy the nation has been following to date.

The second option is to presume that if trends, policies, and influences led to the decline of marriage and family, then trends, policies, and influences can lead to its restoration. It appears that Americans have no other choice than to pursue this option because, as evidence in this Special Report shows, the only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can only happen with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage.

Some recognize the extreme gravity of the crisis and recommend extraordinary technical solutions. These include mass subsidies for IVF, egg freezing, and genetic screening, combined with a market for babies where people (usually men of means) contractually create many children across many partners or surrogates. The ultimate end of this form of “pro-natalism” envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom-ordered, lab-created babies on demand.

The solution to the devaluing and commoditization of children, however, cannot be to treat them even more like consumer goods. A babies-at-all-costs mentality would come at too great a cost, and not just financially, but morally and spiritually. Such an approach intentionally denies a right due to every child conceived—to be born and grow in relationship with his or her mother and father bound in marriage.

The evidence from history, sociology, and biology points in the same direction: The answer to the problem of loneliness and demographic decline must begin with marriage. Marriage between men and women maximizes not only their own wealth, health, and happiness, but also provides the ideal conditions for child flourishing. The stability created by marriage naturally increases the birth rate and reduces the abortion rate. Most Americans still say they would like a flourishing family of their own someday, and marriage is key to achieving that goal.

While government action helped to create the crisis, some doubt that government action can help to solve it. They look back to government attempts to “help” families in the 1960s and have good reason to be wary of federal intervention—whether from the political Left or Right—on matters of hearth and home. Concerns about unintended consequences and perverse incentives are hardly unfounded.

We, the authors of this Special Report, share these concerns. The family crisis has many causes and any proposed response comes with risks. Nevertheless, the decline in family formation is a serious cultural and collective action problem, for which prudent and focused government action is a crucial part of the solution. The purpose of this report is to lay out a vision for the government’s limited role in promoting a culture of marriage and intact families, not to create a complex maze of federal marriage programs. In many respects, the rules of agriculture apply to the hard work of creating a marriage culture. America’s key institutions must get serious about “planting” and “feeding” the virtues that strengthen families while ripping out the deadly weeds—the cultural toxins, perverse regulations, and policy incentives—that undermine those virtues.

The recommendations in this report are downstream from the transformative work that must be done in other parts of the culture. Families, communities, religious institutions, and other civic institutions must enrich the soil and plant the seeds of marriage and family. The government’s primary role is to clear the weeds and prevent its policies and programs from poisoning the ground. Unfortunately, except for radically redefining the institution, marriage is not currently a federal priority.

We, the authors, undertake these efforts motivated by both deep convictions about the importance of family and a profound sense of humility. We welcome comments and good faith criticisms because we realize that in a world of tremendous complexity and uncertainty, some of these proposals may not produce the results we expect and desire. Nevertheless, the times demand the courage to re-examine old orthodoxies and test new approaches. A problem of this magnitude requires a culture-wide Manhattan Project that marshals America’s political, social, and economic capital to restore the natural family.

The proposals follow three broad imperatives: (1) Stop punishing family formation (2) Restore the American Dream, and (3) Support marriage and working families. The country will need all of this, and an accompanying cultural renewal, to save and restore the American family.

Read the Full Paper