What we learned about American families from 10 years of surveys

Jaxon Munns sometimes thinks about a quote he heard somewhere that says millennials were born at the best time possible to be a kid and the worst time possible to be an adult.

The Lehi, Utah, business and trademark attorney and his wife, Kristin, and their four sons are living in a rental because it’s a very tough time to buy a house on the Wasatch Front.

“I’m a partner in a law firm,” Munns said. “I have a very good above-average income and we’re still finding it really difficult to get into the kind of home that has the space and the yard and everything that our family needs.”

The Munnses are certainly not alone. The 10th edition of the annual American Family Survey, released Thursday in Washington, D.C., at the American Enterprise Institute, finds that economic challenges top the list of concerns for U.S. families, who rank the cost of having a family as most worrisome.

The survey is a nationally representative study of attitudes about family life in the U.S., asking about views ranging from contentious issues like abortion, social media and gender-affirming care for young people to how families view relationships, personal values, the policies they support and how they spend time together, among others. It was conducted August 22-29, 2024, by YouGov for Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, the university’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and Deseret News and included more than 3,000 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Like the rest of their generation, some things stacked up against them, Jaxon Munns said.

Jaxon, 31, and Kristin, 32, met in Alabama, where each was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dating didn’t even occur to them until they got home. They married a year to the day from their first date.

They were still college students at the time, and had their first son, Rawley, now 7, right after graduating from BYU, where Jaxon studied history and Kristin studied family life. Rawley now has three little brothers: Remington, 5, McKay, 3, and Stetson, 1. Next, the family moved to Spokane, Washington, so Jaxon could earn a law degree at Gonzaga. But timing is everything, and he passed the bar about the time COVID-19 and public officials shut the world down.

“So I didn’t have this opportunity to establish a career and for us to get into a financial place where we could get into a home at that point and then, really, the opportunity just kind of blew past us in a lot of ways,” Munns said. He wonders, he added, how people with a smaller income manage.

According to the survey, many really struggle.

A new top concern emerges

With a decade’s data, a few trends have emerged, including substantial increase in worries related to money and a decline in cultural concerns.

In 2024, more than 7 in 10 respondents said economic challenges are among the most important concerns families face nationwide, up 20 percentage points from the first survey in 2015. Half of Americans say the cost of raising a family is one of the top three challenges for families today. Fewer than half of Americans choose cultural challenges such as decline in religious faith or sexual permissiveness as a top concern, down from about 70% in 2015.

Consternation over the economy was so great it supplanted the perennial No. 1 choice: How other people teach and discipline their children is for the very first time the No. 2 concern. Inflation is instead top of mind.

“Inflation is clearly worrisome. Our survey is too blunt an instrument to causally prove exactly how this works, but it’s not hard to see the general outline, which is prices of everything go up. Your income doesn’t go up nearly as much, or it’s going to go up and catch up by the year 2028, not now. So you have a difficult time meeting all your obligations, and people are pretty worried about that,” said Jeremy C. Pope, co-author of the survey report with Christopher F. Karpowitz. The two are political science professors at BYU and scholars with both the center and the institute.

Pope said he thinks economic worries worked against Democrats in the last election, but that “economic discontent, if it continues, is going to rebound against Republicans too, because if you have a lot of economic stress, I doubt you’re sort of working out on a blackboard which party should I blame more? You just want it to get better. If you happen to be in an election and you’re voting, you’re probably irritated with whoever is in power.”

What didn’t change much

Amid changes over a decade, some findings regarding U.S. family life have been consistent, including attitudes about one’s own family life and that of families in general. Consistently, more respondents than not have given high marks to their families and marriages, but felt families and marriages in general struggle. “For reasons that are still not well understood, Americans maintain a great deal of personal optimism side by side with widespread pessimism about the state of marriage in the U.S. This pattern has held constant over the past 10 years,” says the report.

Among the survey’s other consistencies over time:

• The vast majority believe that raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.
• American families value identities as parents and partners more than other identities, whether career, religion, political party or something else.
• What family life looks like has been stable, with little sign of the storied partisan divide. Families tend to eat dinner together at least weekly, do chores and spend time together on activities at home.
• The number of families who worship together weekly hasn’t changed much. In 2015 and in 2024, the number hovers around just over a third.

“Most families are doing OK. On a bunch of different surveys, we find that every family has some problems. They’re not all inundated with problems. They have different problems, and they support each other, and they deal with their problems. Most families are just better than if they didn’t have the family,” Pope said.

The Munnses certainly can’t imagine not having their high-energy boys. Sometimes, when Jaxon comes home tired, he wishes he’d have a few minutes to rest and regroup. But the upside of being what he calls “Frontdoor Famous,” referring to a song, is that his boys are thrilled to see him. He feels that way about them, too.

How families struggle

As many as one-fifth of respondents said they had to borrow money to pay bills or couldn’t pay a full bill in the past year. Slightly more than 1 in 8 said they were hungry but could not afford food or to see a doctor. As many as 1 in 20 struggled with housing costs. For 3%, the situation was so dire they stayed in a shelter.

In recent years, the survey found aid provided during the pandemic helped lower those numbers, but when it passed, they went up again.

Not unexpectedly, income mattered, with those in households making less than $40,000 “dramatically more likely” to experience an economic challenge, the report found. In 2024, 56% of those with low income had at least one such experience. But so did one-fourth of the high income group, with household earnings above $80,000.

Both marital status and whether families had children at home mattered. Married couples were close to 20 percentage points less likely to experience a crisis than those who were not married, regardless of whether they had children. Having children increased the likelihood of experiencing a crisis by about 17 percentage points. Those least likely to have a crisis were married Americans without kids at home. Among those who are unmarried and have kids, nearly 6 in 10 said they had a crisis in the last year; the report described their situation as “quite precarious.”

For the lowest-income households with children, marital status made little difference to economic challenges: About two-thirds faced at least one. Where marriage makes a difference is in the likelihood one would be in the lowest-income category — 13%, compared to 52% of unmarried parents. Nearly 60% of married couples have household incomes above $80,000.

The survey found partisan differences in economic worries. For instance, 68% of Republicans were “very worried” about inflation when the survey was conducted last summer, compared to 41% of Democrats. But high numbers of both parties were at least somewhat worried, with just 7% of Republicans and 18% of Democrats saying not at all.

They’re not expecting things to turn around soon. Just over half believed their incomes will fall behind in the next year. The researchers said they found “only weak evidence” that the answers were impacted by marital status or family arrangements. Income drove responses.

“People continue to worry about inflation, even though rates of inflation have declined considerably over the last couple of years,” Karpowitz said.

Jaxon said he and Kristin want their boys to know that there are always things you can do to take some control of your challenges, including finances. They want them to see that their parents tackle every challenge with optimism and a plan. They share common goals and talk them through. They’re a team.

What worries American families

The survey asked people to pick three issues they consider most important for families. The 12 choices broadly fit into economics, culture and family structure. For most of the survey’s lifespan, cultural issues outpaced other categories, driven primarily by concerns about how others parent. In 2015, more than 70% put a cultural issue on their top 3 list. This year, no single item from that category was chosen by more than 20%.

Lack of government programs to support families led the results, selected by 50%, up from 25% in 2015. The others, in order, were parents not teaching or disciplining their children sufficiently (40%), costs associated with raising a family (33%), more children growing up in single-parent homes (25%), difficulty finding quality time with family in the digital age (21%), decline in religious faith and church attendance (20%), high work demands and stress on parents (16%), widespread availability and use of drugs and alcohol (15%), crime and other threats to personal safety (also 15%), lack of good jobs (14%), sexual permissiveness in society (13%) and changes in definitions of marriage and family (12%).

In the recent survey, people were also randomly assigned to look at their family or families in general, using a different curated list of potential trouble spots. Again, costs associated with raising a family led the list, but within one’s own family just over a third picked it, compared to nearly half of those who considered families in general. More people said mental or physical health struggles are challenging for their families (32%) compared to families in general (23%). Lack of good wages or jobs was roughly equal at around 22%. Those asked about families in general were more likely to say high work demands or stress on parents is a challenge (25%) than were those considering their families (19%).

Other challenges chosen more often by those considering families generally were social media or online-related items (20% vs. 15% in own family), lack of religious faith or church attendance (17% vs. 9%), children growing up without two parents at home (26% vs. 7%), drugs and alcohol (12% vs. 7%), sexual permissiveness and infidelity (15% vs. 4%), parents’ lack of commitment (20% vs. 4%), violence and abuse (14% vs. 3%) and lack of educational opportunities (4% vs. 3%).

Tensions and disagreements were seen more often as a concern in one’s own family than families generally (18% vs. 10%). The same was true of difficulty finding quality family time, (18% vs. 13%).

“The partisan differences are really interesting,” Karpowitz said. “When we ask people to evaluate the challenges facing their own families, they are very small. Democrats are a little more likely than Republicans to say that they’ve had some health struggles in the past year, or that that’s a challenge for their family.

“When they’re asked about families generally, we see big partisan differences, Democrats being much more worried about economic challenges and Republicans a lot more worried about cultural or structural things like lack of two-parent homes, or lack of religious faith, or declining church attendance. When people are thinking about marriage and family generally, they often view those things through partisan lenses. When they think about their own family, they have a lot of experience to draw from. It turns out those partisan differences just aren’t as big, and there really isn’t a red type of family and blue type of family when it comes to the day-to-day life of Americans in their homes.”

What families do together

Karpowitz said that what people do together has been pretty constant over the decade. High percentages of people — 8 in 10 —report they eat dinner as a family at least weekly, that they work together around the house on a regular basis, that they spend time at home watching TV or playing games together. “It’s hard to find very many things that 8 in 10 Americans can agree on, and that’s true across parties, right?” he said.

In a politically polarized environment, “we actually think it’s worth noting this is a point of common experience for people,” he added.

People care a lot about their identities as parents or as spouses or partners — more than about other identities, including career, religious or party identity. “The fact of the matter is, people value their identities as family members more than these other things. They spend time together. Parents tend to say they love raising their children, that they spend time working on their relationship and those are things we have in common as Americans that I think is important,” said Karpowitz.

Fewer people creating families

Despite lots of consistency, “what is changing is that we’re getting slightly fewer families every year. People are putting forming families off a little more every year,” Pope said. “Millennials and Gen Z are not getting married at the same rate. And I do think in the longer term this will produce some negative effects for people. I don’t really worry about the health of families so much as I worry about getting people into the institution.”

He and Karpowitz have talked a lot recently about what it would take to provide concrete supports for families that would make both marriage and having children more likely.

The U.S. has joined most of the world in declining birth rates, which could portend all kinds of future problems, from not having the workforce needed for economic growth to an inadequate safety net for older people. Births and immigration are how populations grow or at least stay stable. The U.S. is below the 2.1 average births per woman that keeps the population stable.

But while he would like to see more supports for families, Pope said he’s skeptical government can do much to convince couples to have more children.

“The survey data, I think bears that out. There’s only about a quarter of the public that wants government to tell you to have more kids. I think the idea that you can get government to accomplish this and have an effect is pie in the sky. The best you can hope for is to create a situation where people feel comfortable being married and feel like there’s a strong safety net that will help them weather things and help them build extended family connections that will make things okay.”

Abortion, transgender care and social media

Karpowitz said what stood out in the survey in questions on abortion was that extremes on either side are not popular. Only 15% total said there should either be abortion for anyone who wants one or no abortion at all.

Pope agreed. “It’s very clear, no matter how you ask this, when you give options in the middle, the public says things like, we’d like it through about 13 weeks, or we’d like it legal in most cases but not every case. Sometimes they’ll say legal in all cases, but when you give them a specific case, they’ll say, ‘I didn’t mean that case.’”

The upshot, per Pope, is “you do only have about 15% of the public that wants to take a truly doctrinaire position about no abortions or abortions for everybody all the time.”

He said most people have some idea of when they think a woman should be able to get an abortion. “They all define what ‘really needed one’ is or what the time limit should be differently. But I think that’s the way most people think about it.”

Karpowitz noted a “lot of angst about social media as an issue, but not a lot of certainty about exactly what to do. Should we ban it for children or not? There’s a fair amount of support for that, but a lot of uncertainty as well.”

That’s also what the survey found regarding gender-affirming care for young people, he said.

The report, which consists of various fact sheets, is available online at Deseret.com/Americanfamilysurvey. More survey data will be released in coming weeks.