The forecasts that one in three young adults in the United States will never marry represent a closure of the “American heart”, warned a prominent marriage researcher on Saturday, February 15.
“Love and marriage have crossed difficult times lately,” said Brad Wilcox, sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, during a panel entitled “Why have children?” in it New York Encounteran annual congress organized by members of the Communion and Liberation Catholic Movement.
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Wilcox, author of the 2024 book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (Consider: why Americans must challenge elites, form strong families and save civilization), was accompanied in the discussion by Nicholas Eberstadt, president of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, and Margarite Mooney, associate professor of congregational studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.
According to Wilcox, the fall in the fertility rate in the US, which is well below the replacement level, is a symptom of an American culture focused on “giving people more freedom to live their best lives, to What a single. ”
Eberstadt, who has investigated and written extensively about demography and economic development, said that “it is not impossible that, when the data of 2024, the entire planet, on average, is below the fertility replacement level.”
When noticing a “surprising” correlation between the decrease in birth and proliferation of smartphones, Eberstadt expressed concern that most people aware of the descending tendency of fertility “still do not seem to understand what this will mean for his society ”.
“Certainly, they have not thought about how to adapt to this or how to change it,” he added.
Marriage and family: more important than ever
Despite the challenges that young people face, such as the increase in economic inequality and the inability to disconnect from social networks, Wilcox said that marriage and family “matter more than ever”, and not only for the sake of Children, but also of adults.
A personal experience
In an interview after the panel, Wilcox told CNA – Ewtn News English – that he and his wife, who married at age 24, hoped to form a great Catholic family, but had difficulties with fertility. After four years of marriage, they adopted five children. Then, unexpectedly, they had twins and, later, two more children.
While Wilcox acknowledged that his family’s growth was “a great adjustment” and that raising adoptive and biological children has meant challenges, he described his experience of paternity as “magical.”
“I think that paternity really opens you to new experiences and new perspectives,” Wilcox reflected. “For many of us, we do not see the fullness of life until we have children, we create them and we see the world through their eyes.”
Wilcox shared some practical tips for young people who want to marry and have children.
“The fundamental point he would do is that they think of their strategy to go out with someone with the same intention with which they think of their education and career,” he told CNA.
According to Wilcox, it is ideal to meet and go out with people within a broader social network, either at work, the church or in another area, “where everyone is in the same team” and where “you can receive an approval or formal disapproval of friends who know those people. ”
The sociologist said that, in general, it does not approve appointment applications, since “they can generate unrealistic expectations about the person you could or should know.” In his opinion, when “people come out and socialize in a real world context, it is easier to find a good symmetrical compatibility.”
Ultimately, he said that, since people today are “much further away from a culture favorable to marriage”, those who aspire to marry and form a family must be more intentional in their planning to meet people and go out in quotes .
God has a “beautiful plan”
In an interview with CNA, Mooney shared her experience as a woman who wanted to have children but did not marry until her forty and so many years. He encouraged people to stay open to marriage, even at a more advanced age.
“As I come from a family with many children, I always knew that children are a blessing, a joy and a lot of work,” he said. “And as a single person, I simply looked for friends like Brad Wilcox, who had large families.” Mooney and Wilcox studied together at Princeton.
“Maybe I was used to chaos, and I found it comforting to be in a big family at dinner, with crafts ongoing and some child who sits in your lap even if you have not seen it in a time,” he said.
Mooney explained that, when her friends began to marry and she did not, she had to consciously fight against the feelings of jealousy or the idea that God was leaving her behind.
“I realized that there was some selfishness in those feelings of pain and that I needed to honor the desire to build relationships with children, even if they were not my biological children,” he explained.
Reflecting on his experience, Mooney said he was inspired by priests and religious who, although they renounce to have biological children, retain their maternal and paternal instincts in their work with children and young people.
“Instead of thinking about the child as someone who is going to fill me,” he reflected, “I realized that it was God who filled me, finding a way of expressing that desire.”
Finally, Mooney stressed that marriage and family are not guaranteed, but that does not mean that God does not have a beautiful plan for each person.
“I want women to know that this does not mean that God does not have a beautiful plan for their lives,” he said.
“Abrace yourself to the joy that can come to their lives, even if they reach an age or a situation in which they are single, without children or married without children, and that was not what they had planned,” he advised.
“When you are older, it is more difficult to risk, but you can still do it,” he concluded.
Translated and adapted by ACI Press. Originally published in CNA.
Low Elhabbal
Madalaine Elhabbal is a CNA journalist based in the Washington DC office in EWTN. He has published articles in Catholicvote and has also worked as a foreign language assistant in France. She is a graduate of Benedictine College.