You’ve probably seen the meme online: An attractive, happy family from the 1950s with the headline, “Once upon a time, in the ‘50s, a family could own a home, a car and send the kids to college, all on one income. But now that one-income dream is gone.”
The idea is that, today, it is basically impossible for a married couple with children to get by on less than two full-time incomes and live a comfortable lifestyle. That is, unless you have Ballerina Farm-level money.
After all, the thinking goes, the only way that women like Hannah Neeleman can succeed as a “tradwife” is by marrying into money or making lots of it as an online influencer. For mere middle-class mortals aiming to raise a family, getting by comfortably on one income is near impossible.
Michael Green highlighted the challenge in a recent Free Press article, entitled “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty.” He argues that it was possible 60 years ago, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, to live a decent family-first lifestyle with one breadwinner, because life was cheaper then:
“As the story goes, housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little … Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. College tuition could be covered with a summer job."
Today, however, surging housing and health care costs, exorbitantly priced cars and sky-high college tuition make it impossible to support a family on one middle-class job while still enjoying all these basic comforts. In Green’s words, a “second income (has become) mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided.”
His argument — and the broader idea that it’s now harder to support a family than it used to be — generated serious pushback from libertarian economists like Tyler Cowen and liberal journalists like Matthew Yglesias. They argue that most Americans with and without families are doing well, and that our objective standard of living has never been better. Americans live in bigger homes than ever, eat out frequently, and carry $1,100 computerized phones around in their pockets today. By these measures, we’re way better off than the families of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
So why does getting by on one income feel so impossible?
Yglesias contends this is an issue of material expectations rather than financial reality. It’s easy to live a “tradlife” in contemporary America, he says — it would just require a financial haircut, and people don’t want to take one.
“Nothing is stopping a typical married American couple from accepting 1960s material conditions in exchange for one parent being a full-time homemaker,” Yglesias argues. Even after adjusting for inflation, he calculates that a single male earner today still makes more than men made in the 1970s. “The issue is that living that lifestyle — never taking plane trips for vacation, rarely dining out, having a small house — would mean living like a poor person by today’s standards.”
In other words, our shared definition of the good life has risen proportionate to our collective wealth. Everyone is richer than people used to be, which has made today’s higher standards the norm. The hitch is that our new, higher standards almost certainly require that most families rely on two full-time workers or be relatively “poor,” and “people don’t want to do that.” In fact, this really turns out to be true.
Critics of ‘50s family nostalgia are technically correct about some of the material points: yes, we are a richer society today. But this whole argument misses three deeper truths that have a bearing not only on the lives of those who are sacrificing to raise their families on one income but also on the future of our civilization.
First, the relative economic status of one-earner families really has plummeted. In 1960, 60% of one-earner married couples aged 25–34 were living apart from their parents in a home they owned, according to the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS). In 1980 it was 72%. But in 2024, this number had fallen to 53%.
For two-earner couples, it was 50% in 1960, 70% in 1980, and 62% today: Whereas one-earner couples were actually more likely to own a home in 1960 and equally likely in 1980, today’s one-earner couples are 10 percentage points behind two-earner couples.
The same story holds for income: In 1960, two-earner couples earned 17% more than one-earner couples; in 1980, it was a similar 20% more and in 2024, the difference was a whopping 42%. An unanticipated consequence of women’s entrance into the workforce has been that one-earner families (whether the breadwinner is male or female) really have fallen economically behind.
Second, Yglesias overlooks the power of status when it comes to encouraging people to invest in a way of life. Perhaps related to their relatively lower economic position, right now, men and especially women who are most dedicated to living a family-first lifestyle pay a big price in status as well — a price they did not pay in 1950. Marriage and motherhood, and particularly stay-at-home motherhood, have become, as the legal scholar Erica Bachiochi argues, “low-status,” particularly in the eyes of the most privileged.
In her words, women “whose chief desires are, say, a good marriage and happy children now take on a low status — especially when they forego paid labor entirely to dedicate themselves to the goods of care in the home.” As societal expectations for standard of living (and standard of parenting) are increasingly set by households with two 21st century incomes, one-earner families face increasingly punishing tradeoffs in social status.
This status dynamic, plus the economic challenges of embracing a more tradlife, helps explain why fewer families are choosing to live on less than two full-time incomes. Indeed, new Institute for Family Studies research indicates that only about 4 in 10 married families with young children are getting by on one-income (“trad families”) or on one full-time worker and one part-time worker (“neotrad families”), a near-record low.
The problem, thirdly, with the eroding cultural and economic place of trad and neotrad families in American society is that it is they who are most devoted to actually having and raising the next generation. In fact, the only American families reproducing well above the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman are those with a married mom at home who works either part-time or not at all.
Trad and neotrad families are quite literally shouldering the heaviest burden of sustaining society, and it’s often a thankless job. In this way, these middle-class families experience a sort of Western analog to “dhimmitude” status, the historic Islamic practice of according diminished social status to non-Muslims living under Islamic rule and requiring them to pay a special tax.
It should be noted that, as we show above, there is barely any “fertility penalty” for families with “1.5” workers: Nothing we are arguing here would prevent a “stay at home parent” from maintaining a foot in the door with their career, through flexible, remote or part-time work. Most married moms say they desire to work part time or stay at home over working full time, and the evidence shows that this strategy of maintaining economic options is perfectly consistent with civilizationally sustainable fertility rates.
Economically, American trad families (and, in fact, parents of children all over the developed world) pay an economic “tax” insofar as they forego work in the marketplace to focus on raising the next generation, which will then support and sustain the generations that follow. This foregone income means that the rising productivity benefits of the 21st century do not flow to one-earner households as much, and it’s more difficult for them and their families to enjoy the new social standard of living, reinforcing their lower social status.
It appears that Tyler Cowen and Matt Yglesias share our desire to make family-first living both more desirable and more achievable for Americans: Yglesias’ “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger” cited one of us extensively in a chapter on pronatal policy, and Cowen’s emergent venture’s fund provided the seed money for IFS’ pronatalism initiative. As such, they and other economists and scholars ought to consider how to improve both the social status and the financial fortunes of those Americans who are doing the most to keep our country on a sustainable demographic path.
To ease financial concerns for more would-be trad families, policymakers ought to boost the Child Tax Credit to $4,500, allow single-earner families to access the Child and Dependent Care Credit for their own childcare expenses (like preschool and summer camp), and provide a Social Security Care Credit to stay-at-home parents worth up to five years of their mean wage prior to having children.
They should also strip local zoning regulations that have pushed the price of single-family homes way up; median home prices have outpaced median household income growth by nearly 2 to 1 since 2000 (177% versus 92%), with real housing costs rising even faster than real incomes, according to one study.
The broader point is that public policy should aim to both reduce the costs of raising children and lend greater material support to families making the biggest financial sacrifices to raise the next generation. We may just find boosting the economic feasibility of family life has the added benefit of promoting the social status of marriage and parenthood, too. We tend to support what we admire, and we tend to admire what we support.
Culturally speaking, we can raise the social status of family life by modeling it well, and portraying it more positively in media. Arthur Brooks, the director of Harvard’s Leadership and Happiness Lab, writing recently about the impacts of divorce on kids, said, “Children don’t become who we tell them to be, they become who they see.” It’s a sound principle: More people will choose a family-first life when it is regarded as both normative and the fast-track to the “good life.”
And it is: The happiest women in America are married mothers; and the healthiest societies in the world — the only ones that have a chance, actually, at sustaining themselves over the long term — are those that celebrate them.
Brad Wilcox is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of "Get Married." Maria Baer is director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. Lyman Stone is a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.