Brad Wilcox, director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, recently co-authored an opinion piece for the Deseret News titled “You shouldn’t need Ballerina Farm money to put family first.”
The article mentions a meme about how the notion of a family living on one income is gone in today’s world.
In this episode of “Deseret Voices,” host Jane Clayson Johnson talks with Wilcox about policies that are impacting family budgets and what possible solutions are available.
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
Jane Clayson Johnson: Brad Wilcox, it’s so nice to have you with us. Thanks for being here.
Brad Wilcox: Jane, great to be with you today.
JCJ: So I’ll start with the reference that you recently made to a popular online meme. It compared the 1950s, where one income could support a family, own a home, buy a car, send the kids to college, with today, when two full-time incomes are often not enough. Do you think that that’s nostalgia misplaced, or does it capture how dramatically the economics of family life have changed?
BW: I want to kind of acknowledge the sort of the simple fact that a lot of kind of observers will push back against that meme. And they’ll say, look, you know, today’s Americans, today’s young adults are doing much better financially than their forebears back in the 1950s, for instance. We’re walking around with devices that are worth $1,000. Our cars are nicer. If we do own homes, they’re markedly bigger than the ones that we kind of lived in back in the 1950s. And so they kind of can tell us many ways in which financially we’re better off and many ways in which our standard of living is higher than it was back in the 1950s.
At the same time, I think what they don’t really acknowledge is that it’s much harder for ordinary, I think, middle-class families to have a conventional home, to have a conventional car, to afford a conventional college if they don’t have both parents in the workforce working full time.
JCJ: Research from the Institute for Family Studies found that actually only about 4 in 10 married couples with families with young children are getting by on one income, which is a record low. So how realistic is the one income family model today?
BW: It is hard for a lot of particularly working middle-class families to kind of get by without both parents working full time. So in terms of like this question about realism, again, if you would like to have a conventional car or two, if you would like to have the kind of home that, you know, most middle-class families now are buying when they’re buying such a home, it’s going to be oftentimes, you know, really challenging for you to do that on just one income.
And I’m concerned about that because what we are seeing as well as the only families that are managing to have typically two kids or more families where you have either one stay at home parent or one parent working just part time. And so the kind of idea that we should sort of expect all families to sort of in the sense of embrace two full-time working parents, I think, doesn’t factor in both the idea that a lot of families out there don’t want to do things that way.
The advantage that we see with having one parent at home full time or one parent working part time is that there is just more attention that’s going to be paid to the kids. There’s going to be less stress when it comes to juggling work and family responsibilities.
And then also it’s hard for, you know, such families to kind of have enough kids to kind of even keep our population at the replacement rate.
So I just think it’s unfortunate that it’s not easier for us as a country to kind of advance policies and cultural norms that would make it easier to have a parent at home, especially when you have young kids in the mix.
JCJ: So what has fundamentally shifted over the last generation that makes affordability for a family feel so much harder? Is it wages? Is it housing costs? Is it child care? Or is it the way that public policy now interacts with all three?
BW: So I think it’s all of that. So I think part of the story here is that we have regulations that make it pretty expensive to build homes in much of the country. And so it’s hard for developers to kind of build modestly sized and modestly priced homes that would be kind of within the reach of a working- and middle-class family, especially one that’s relying upon just one primary full-time breadwinners. And that’s part of the story.
There are also, of course, and laws that are making health care much more expensive nowadays and also making college much more expensive nowadays. So there’s a sort of a policy and a regulatory thicket, if you will, that’s pushing affordability out of grasp for many, I think, working- and middle-class families, especially ones that don’t have two full-time workers.
And then there is kind of a point that actually was made by, you know, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her daughter in a book a while back called “The Two-Income Trap,” which is just basically making the point that when you have a lot of families out there worth, you know, both partners are working full time, they do have more money to pay for big-ticket items like housing, and they are going to kind of, you know, in a sense, unwittingly drive up the cost of housing in many sort of metropolitan and more affluent locales. And that’s also part of the challenge facing us.
And then we haven’t really kind of embraced, from my perspective, you know, sufficiently generous policies, like a much more generous child tax credit that would sort of basically help to cover the costs of raising young children, especially, but also acknowledge that when oftentimes, you know, moms are out of the workforce, either, you know, on in sense, on a full-time basis, they’re stay-at-home moms, or working just part-time, you know, they are making a major financial sacrifice, they and their families more generally, that I think could be acknowledged, could be recognized by a more generous child tax, which we really haven’t gone down that route.
JCJ: Some of the things that actually make family life more affordable: housing, child care, health care, are typically policies that Democrats have promoted. Do Republicans need to be more willing to legislate in those areas?
BW: It’s a complicated question. So I do think when it comes to some of these things, there’s no question that Democrats in states like Minnesota, states like New York, states like California have done more to advance either modest child tax credits, to advance things like paid parental leave, and even to kind of advance subsidies, more generous subsidies that are available kind of at the federal level when it comes to child care. So I think we can take some lessons from these often blue states when it comes to family policy.
The problem though is that we are seeing kind of at scale more families are leaving blue states, red states than vice versa. Like so U-Haul has just released its sort of annual report about 2025 and finds that there are the most U-Haul rentals coming from California, leaving the state, and the most people are kind of bringing their U-Hauls into Texas. And it kind of just is one way of understanding that even though many blue states have policies that are geared towards helping families with things like paid parental leave or a child tax credit, what they’re often missing is lower taxes, more educational choice options, more job opportunities and also more affordable single-family housing.
JCJ: A U-Haul exodus. I find that interesting.
BW: Yeah. And it’s, again, it does tell us too that a lot of the policies, to be frank, I think the left thinks are the most important for families end up being disconfirmed by watching what people are doing rather than what they’re saying. So oftentimes these Democratic policies pull really well with families. But again, if you look at what their what their walk is rather than their talk or what their U-Haul is rather than what their polling response is, what you’re seeing is that the total mix of policies and economic opportunities that red states offer tend to often be more attractive than what blue states are doing.
What red states have often done better is they’ve had fewer regulations when it comes to things like housing. They make it easier for developers to develop homes that can kind of fit into a middle-class or working-class family’s budget. And that kind of like orientation towards regulations is one I think that, you know, Republicans and red states can kind of continue to sort of advance. At the same time, it’s, I think, wise to think about some modest steps they can take with, for instance, maybe a state-based paid parental leave up to nine weeks for moms that would be kind of helpful in helping the families in the red states kind of do this work-family juggle that we’re talking about today.
JCJ: You know, Republicans often criticize the child tax credit as too much government. Is there a case for conservatives to take on those issues that Democrats have, well, historically sort of embraced, especially in this period of affordability when there is a real crisis? Food’s up, housing’s up, everything seems to cost more.
BW: You know, I think part of the concern that conservatives have and Republicans have is from their perspective, this seems like one more government expense, you know, in an age where we are spending, you know, deficit spending, obviously, and also one where there’s not evidence, you know, from their perspective, that these kinds of measures really can kind of move the dial when it comes to fertility. But in looking at 17 different countries, my colleague Dr. Stone did find that things like the child tax credit can actually boost the birth rate and we’re right now below the replacement rate.
So I think it’s findings like that from Lyman Stone that would kind of, I think, lead us to sort of reconsider the value of the child tax credit and to do more to expand it. And then also to acknowledge too that there are a good number of families out there who are reporting that they’re not able to kind of achieve their ideal work-family balance because of financial pressures. And this is the kind of approach where you kind of give families the money, allow them to make the choice about how best to sort of, you know, handle that money, and you don’t kind of impose a one-size-fits-all model on families. So I think these are the kinds of things that should encourage Republicans to revisit any kind of skepticism they might have regarding the child tax credit.
JCJ: Did you say we’re below the replacement rate in the United States?
BW: We are. So right now the you know, the fertility rate in the United States is at 1.6 babies per woman on average, and that’s well below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies. So the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that by 2030 we’ll be seeing more deaths than births and that by 20-, I think it’s 56, the CBO is projecting, we’re gonna begin to see the country shrinking in population. So two sobering projections from the CBO that tell us that we’re heading towards demographic problems here in the U.S. now.
JCJ: And the implications of that are what?
BW: Well, there are a couple. One is economic stagnation. For instance, as Japan saw dramatic declines in fertility, that means the young adult population obviously starts to decline. And young adults are often powering things like entrepreneurial activity, new businesses. So just having, you know, fewer young adults in the mix, it would also mean too that we’re going to have fewer people who are paying taxes. And that’s going to put limits in the government’s capacity to fund things like Medicare and Social Security as well. So I think that’s going to kind of pose real financial challenges, even greater challenges to the federal government.
But I think beyond that, the biggest concern that I have is that we are now seeing more evidence that both getting married and having children is linked to more happiness or relative happiness for American adults and that single and childless adults are seeing their happiness rates fall pretty precipitously.
JCJ: Can you tell me more about that research? I find that really interesting.
BW: So I have a book called “Get Married” that I just published in 2024. And in the book, I talk about data showing that married folks are almost twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to unmarried folks. There’s a lot of research showing that there’s certainly a correlation between being married and being happy. And of course, we can debate about that correlation as causal. But there’s also kind of a fairly longstanding body of research that suggests that across much of the 20th century, parents actually were less happy on a kind of moment by moment basis than childless adults. But that relationship has switched in recent years and we’re now seeing, too, that parents are reporting if they’re happier than childless adults.
And I think what’s been happening is that the relationship between kind of being in a family and being happier has become more salient, Jane, really in the last 15 years or so now and that’s because the rise of the digital revolution where people are spending, you know, too much time on these devices, you know, on our iPhones and other of screens has made many Americans less happy and more lonely.
And I think that people who are married with kids just have more opportunities both in their own apartments and homes, but more generally as they kind of do things with their spouse or take their kids to youth soccer or a school concert or if they’re religious, a Sunday service, have more opportunities to be out and about too with their spouse and children.
JCJ: I do know a lot of young people, young adults, who might be offended to hear you say that. They say, “I’m perfectly happy. I don’t need to be married.”
BW: Of course, and we all know folks who are married with kids who are miserable and folks who are single and childless or flourishing, right? But I’m just saying on average, when you look at data, what’s called the General Social Survey, it’s sort of a classic barometer of American social attitudes, including reports of happiness. We do see a growing divide.
JCJ: President Trump has positioned himself as a champion for American families. He’s called himself the fertilization president. He supported IVF. He’s talked about giving medals to women who have many children. Vice President JD Vance, one of his first speeches as vice president, said he wants more babies in the U.S. He said parenting must be more affordable. How would you assess the Trump administration’s actual record on family affordability beyond all the rhetoric?
BW: Yeah, I would say they haven’t done a good job in the first year of, you know, their administration and really advancing policies, sort of targeting marriage, targeting child rearing or childbearing and also sort of tackling this family affordability issue. And in a recent survey conducted by the Deseret News on the American family, what we see is that Americans are expressing growing concerns about family affordability. They’re having the sense, it’s just really hard today to raise kids and to find a home that would be suitable for one’s family. So I don’t think that this administration has done enough to kind of fulfill the promises they made both in the 2024 campaign and in the first weeks of their administration.
So there are a number of us in kind of the family policy world who’ve basically talked about the importance of encouraging the Trump administration to make a kind of family policy pivot, where they get behind some real policies that would make it easier to afford a home in the U.S. and also easier to kind of bear the cost associated with raising kids, particularly younger children under the age of 5.
JCJ: Yeah, I suspect some parents hear the vice president say, “We want more babies” and say, “Well, then help us afford them.”
BW: Yes, that’s, I think, precisely the point, 100%.
JCJ: So the rhetoric has been strong, but the follow through has been uneven at best.
BW: They’ve often talked a good talk, but haven’t yet walked a good walk when it comes to family policies, I would say, talking about this administration.
And the big question too, again, to go back to our earlier conversation about the sort of red state versus blue state is to sort of understand and appreciate that what matters is not just things like the child tax credit, but also creating a context where the cost of goods that families are paying is, you know, moving in a better direction, where it’s easier to afford a home, and where employment is heading in the right direction. Now, in fairness, on some things, for instance, like the cost of energy, I do think that this administration’s policies have pushed the economy in the right direction. We’ve seen things like, you know, the cost of gas coming down in real terms in this administration. So there are some ways in which I think they have addressed the cost of living issues. But there are other areas when it comes to things like the cost of housing, or in kind of being open to a more generous child tax credit, where we haven’t seen steps yet taken by the administration in line with where they kind of promised we would be when they’re running for office in 2024.
JCJ: Talk to me more about housing. Young families consistently say that housing costs are one of the biggest barriers to marriage and children. Why hasn’t housing policy been treated as a real family issue by Republicans, and does that need to change?
BW: Yeah, I think it does need to change, although, again, I think we have to recognize that in general, it’s really blue regions that have done worse on the housing front than red regions, right? And so I was, for instance, in California at an event in the Bay Area and was speaking to a developer and he was saying that before he begins, you know, building a house, he’s got to pay about $100,000 worth of regulatory related fees in California. And if you were to talk to a builder in, you know, in South Carolina, for instance, or in Arkansas, for instance, they would be facing much lower, you know, costs when it comes to, you know, getting a home started. So certainly in general, Republicans actually tend to do better on this score than, you know, than the Democrats do.
But there’s just no question that in states from Utah to Texas to Massachusetts to California, that policymakers, you know, across, you know, partisan lines, especially at local levels, I think could be pressured to reduce the regulatory burdens that developers face to make it easier to build homes on smaller lots, to make it easier to have what are called ADUs or like, you know, sort of extra dwellings, you know, on property. So grandma could live there or an adult son could live on a property, for instance.
JCJ: So have you seen the structural changes that you’re speaking about at the local level? Have you seen that happen? Are there examples where that has actually made a difference?
BW: Well, I do know that Gov. Cox is, I think, considering actually pressuring from the state level localities in Utah, for instance, to kind of make some real concrete moves to reduce that regulatory burden. And I think if he can do that, that would be great. You know, most state leaders, both the kind of the legislative and the sort of gubernatorial level have been reluctant to really kind of lean hard into their localities to reduce the regulations.
JCJ: Why the reluctance? Why the hesitation to put that in insert that pressure?
BW: Well, you know, for many Americans, particularly, and frankly, many older and affluent Americans, their biggest asset is their home. And it is a simple law of supply and demand that if you start supplying more homes in any given locality, you’re often going to reduce the value of the home where people are currently residing. And so it can be sort of awkward and unattractive, you know, for people who already kind of have theirs, if you all have a decent home and a good neighborhood, you know, they’re reluctant both to sort of lose some value in their home. They’re also going to be worried about more traffic and other annoyances that they would associate with, you know, opening up, you know, new land or reducing regulations that might lead to more housing being built.
But I think we have to just face the fact that unless we can really bring down the cost of single-family housing, young adults say they’re often reluctant to have a kid or to have the kids they would like to have.
And so because, you know, it’s hard for them to afford a, you know, a decent home, they’ll often just have one kid or maybe two kids at most, but you know, they’re not going to push the limits there. And we do see here that there’s just something about having a single-family home. That’s just much more appealing for young adults when it comes to thinking about having kids than having those kids in an apartment. So it’s really not enough to kind of expand the supply of apartments with multifamily dwellings. It’s really more about figuring out ways to reduce the regulations and to increase the land supply that would make it easier for localities to allow developers to build affordable single-family homes that would be kind of within reach of working-class and middle-class families.
JCJ: I mean, it is the American dream, really.
BW: Precisely. It is. Yep.
JCJ: Let me move on to paid parental leave. Most wealthy countries around the world guarantee paid parental leave. And Democrats have pushed for it here in the United States. Republicans have largely resisted. Why has it been such a hard sell for the GOP?
BW: You know, I think the Republican Party has been historically much more the party of business. And I think the concern is that adding paid parental leave to the mix would be a burden on business, particularly on smaller businesses who often don’t have a lot of employees and would worry about kind of losing an employee to some kind of paid parental leave. But we do see evidence from, you know, California and elsewhere that, you know, a modest paid parental leave program doesn’t seem to be a real big burden on businesses in general. And so I think it’s for that reason in part, along with the fact that looks like paid parental leave is linked to better outcomes for moms and for babies, that Republicans who, especially Republicans who would sort of champion themselves as defenders of the family should work with their Democratic colleagues to figure out a modest paid parental leave policy as we kind of move forward here in the next Congress.
JCJ: You know, it’s interesting, I think younger conservatives tend to be more open to policies like paid parental leave and other things that support families. Is there a generational divide happening inside the GOP?
BW: Yes, 100%, Jane.
Yeah, I was meeting with a member of the Utah congressional delegation, shall we say, and talking to a staffer and this staffer who was you my age, know probably in his late 50s was kind of poo-pooing the idea that we really needed, you know child tax credits or other kinds of measures to kind of help American families to sort of recounting that in his own experience they were able to have kids without sort of factoring in, know public policies of one sort or another. And by contrast when you talk to younger Republicans on Capitol Hill you often will hear from them that they are 100% into kind of doing more to advance policies that would make it easier for younger families to go ahead and get married and have the kids that they would like to have. So there is definitely a generational divide where older Republican staffers and often Congressmen and senators are less sympathetic to the idea that the government can play a role here, whereas younger Republicans are often much more open to that idea.
JCJ: It does seem that there are some who are quite tone deaf to what families are going through, the affordability crisis that many are enduring right now. Do you agree with that? I mean, are they not paying attention?
BW: I think a lot of older Republicans just have no clue when it comes to understanding how difficult a lot of young adults are finding it when it comes to navigating today’s labor market, you know, finding a decent job and when it comes to finding an affordable single-family home.
JCJ: And do you think that could reshape the future of the party?
BW: Yes, it certainly can, I think, reshape the future of the party. I think we will see, of within the next decade or so, more Republicans getting behind measures that make it easier to afford starting a family in America today.
I think what is the big question, though, beyond the ones that we’ve been discussing when it comes to families, what are we going to do when it comes to entitlement reform? So right now, working-aged Americans who are married with kids like myself are paying a lot of taxes to cover Medicare and Social Security benefits that are going to retirees who are often quite affluent. And if you look at the flows of taxes being paid and government spending going out to wealthy retirees, it’s pretty striking to see this visualized.
And so I think we are going to see a kind of backlash building among younger taxpayers that’s going to lead us, especially as things like Social Security become insolvent by 2033, to revisit how we’re handling Social Security and Medicare and to really pare back benefits for wealthy retirees who could afford to pay for these things with their own savings and assets.
JCJ: But entitlement reform has really always been the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to touch it. Nobody wants to go there.
BW: Yeah, no Republicans or Democrats really want to touch this, just given the fact that retirees vote, you know, at high levels and are not open to this kind of conversation. But I’m just sort of saying there’s going to come a point at which, you know, I think for very real financial reasons, both in terms of federal solvency, but also in terms of just people coming to realize that they’re literally paying taxes that are going to, you know, the folks in their communities who are retired and quite affluent. And they’re struggling, you know, to pay these taxes. I think there’s going to become a dynamic that’s going to make this whole current pattern no longer tenable.
And so unless and until, I think, Republicans can really wrap their heads around these affordability issues, they’re gonna begin to suffer at the ballot box with younger adults who are often struggling in the family affordability.
JCJ: Well, President Trump seems to not want to hear that very much either.
BW: His first comments around that issue were, I think, pretty tone deaf, Jane, 100% would agree with you there. But he has, I think, kind of been adjusting.
And his comments recently about going after BlackRock and other kinds of large companies that have been investing in single family housing to rent those homes rather than to sell them, I think is an indication that his political antennae are up and that he is trying to figure out new ways for his administration to address this.
JCJ: You know, Republicans tend to frame the family decline or issues related to it as a values problem. Democrats frame it as a cost problem. Which explanation better fits what families are actually saying?
BW: I mean, I don’t want to be too cute here, but I think they’re both correct. I mean, I think that there is definitely a cultural story here. So the Institute for Family Studies just came out with some research indicating that there’s a growing left-right divide when it comes to both marriage and parenthood. So back in 1980, for instance, there was only a 5 percentage point gap between liberal and conservative young women in the odds that they were moms. Today, there’s a 41 percentage point gap where conservative women are much more likely to be mothers than their fellow liberal female young adults.
So I think that’s kind of one sign that culture does matter.
JCJ: Brad, you also note that families who are most committed to having children are often the ones who are paying the biggest economic and social price.
BW: The idea here is simple. It’s just that people who are having more than two kids, who are having at least one parent either be at home full time or be at home part time, they are sacrificing a lot financially to raise the next generation. And I think that’s particularly worth noting in a day and age when we are below replacement. There are some families who are having three, four, five, and more kids and sacrificing a lot both financially and practically to do so. And I would just like to see a sort of a cultural environment and a policy environment where those sacrifices were more likely to be sort of acknowledged and celebrated rather than kind of minimized and often stigmatized.
I think the thing I want to just underline is that we’re kind of moving into a family moment in the United States where we are sort of navigating unchartered waters demographically. Where we’re seeing fertility below replacement, deaths outpacing births. We’re also projecting a record share of young adults will never get married.
And so I think this is a pretty sobering moment. And I would just like to encourage Americans to kind of do all that they can from a cultural perspective, but also from a policy perspective, to make marriage and family life both more attractive and more affordable for young women and men today.
JCJ: Brad Wilcox, thank you very much.
BW: Thank you, Jane. Good to be with you.