The rise of out-of-wedlock births is a big concern. Single-parent families are the leading cause of poverty in the U.S. And do we really want a future where marriage is considered optional when having children?

To look for trends, the Scandinavian countries are always worth looking at. In the last 15 years, Sweden and Norway both have had a rapid decline in marriage. Today the majority of children are born out-of-wedlock. The welfare state enables single mothers to raise children while not living in poverty. Starting at age one, publicly funded daycare centers will take care of your kids. So in a sense, the state begins raising future generations. Again, is this something that we want in America’s future?

Here, Stanley Kurtz at the Hoover Institution describes the phases that countries go through regarding the decline in marriage and the attendant increases in out-of-wedlock children:

SINCE LIBERALIZING DIVORCE in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Nordic countries have been the leading edge of marital change. Drawing on the Swedish experience, Kathleen Kiernan, the British demographer, uses a four-stage model by which to gauge a country’s movement toward Swedish levels of out-of-wedlock births.

In stage one, cohabitation is seen as a deviant or avant-garde practice, and the vast majority of the population produces children within marriage. Italy is at this first stage. In the second stage, cohabitation serves as a testing period before marriage, and is generally a childless phase. Bracketing the problem of underclass single parenthood, America is largely at this second stage. In stage three, cohabitation becomes increasingly acceptable, and parenting is no longer automatically associated with marriage. Norway was at this third stage, but with recent demographic and legal changes has entered stage four. In the fourth stage (Sweden and Denmark), marriage and cohabitation become practically indistinguishable, with many, perhaps even most, children born and raised outside of marriage. According to Kiernan, these stages may vary in duration, yet once a country has reached a stage, return to an earlier phase is unlikely. (She offers no examples of stage reversal.) Yet once a stage has been reached, earlier phases coexist.

A point to keep in mind here is that social policies matter. Western nations, with their massive welfare states, seem adept at screwing up families - especially among the poor. When the state undermines the utility of marriage, the result will always be fewer marriages and more out-of-wedlock children.

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