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 Episode

• Related articles by Lyman Stone:
  • Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?
  • Why Canadian Women Aren’t Having the Children They Desire
  • For Fertility, Marriage Still Matters
  • Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not If You Avoid Cohabiting First
  • What the Latest Current Population Survey Tells Us About the Future of Fertility
  • Secularization Begins at Home
• AoM Article: The Surprising Benefits of Marrying Young
• AoM Article: How to Test Your Relationship Without Moving In Together
• AoM Podcast #349: The Problem With Ambiguity in Relationships with Scott Stanley

Connect With Lyman Stone

• Lyman on Twitter