Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

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.

Are these ideas actually born out by the data?

Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out what’s going on in population, relationship, and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he’s 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’t 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.

Resources Related to the EpisodeRelated articles by Lyman Stone:Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?Why Canadian Women Aren’t Having the Children They DesireFor Fertility, Marriage Still MattersToo Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not If You Avoid Cohabiting FirstWhat the Latest Current Population Survey Tells Us About the Future of FertilitySecularization Begins at HomeAoM Article: The Surprising Benefits of Marrying YoungAoM Article: How to Test Your Relationship Without Moving In TogetherAoM Podcast #349: The Problem With Ambiguity in Relationships with Scott StanleyConnect With Lyman StoneLyman on Twitter