On Thursday, many Americans likely partook of “the mother of all family dinners.” That’s the term Dr. Anne Fishel, author and co-founder of the Family Dinner Project, uses to describe the Thanksgiving tradition of turkey and trimmings that brings family and friends together in homes across the country.
Amid changing demographics and social mores, this intergenerational American rite offers a lens into patterns of marriage and family. And this year, the outlook for both institutions is positive, according to several recent surveys.
“Despite shifting norms, most U.S. adults still see marriage as a meaningful foundation for family life and child-rearing,” the Barna Group reported in November. And 81% of Generation Z respondents, it said, “believe in marriage and hope to wed someday, … [though] many are reimagining what family looks like.”
“Divorce is down, as is single parenthood, and the share of kids being raised in stable married families is ticking up,” researchers wrote in a July article by the American Enterprise Institute. “Marital stability looks much different than it did 30 years ago,” these authors noted in another blog, yet “new marriages are stronger today than every decade since the 1950s.”
This bodes well for families – and for America’s children. “Children simply do better … if they have married parents,” according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
However, education and economics do play a role. For children of college-educated parents, 81% live with both parents. That drops to about 50% for children of parents with a high school education or less.
The Georgia Center for Opportunity stated, “Two-parent households provide a significant ‘privilege’ for children, leading to better educational and economic outcomes, [and] lower rates of incarceration.”
Harvard University anthropologist Joseph Henrich has concluded much the same about the security and nurturing power of a stable marriage and home. “In many ways, marriage represents the keystone institution for most – though not all – societies and may be the most primeval of human institutions,” he has written.
Surveys find that “family” and “family time” score the highest among several values that Americans hold dear. In 2023, Pew reported, 73% of American adults ranked family time as one of the most important aspects of their life.
This sentiment appears to reflect the thought of this newspaper’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy. “Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections,” she wrote.
