Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: Marriage, Family, and Economics in America
7 Figures: Marriage, Family, and Economics in America
Nov 27, 2025 1:03 AM

The 2016 American Family Survey was designed to understand the “lived experiences of Americans in their relationships and families” andprovide “context for understanding Americans’ life choices, economic experiences, attitudes about their own relationships, and evaluations of the relationships they see around them.”

Here are seven figures you should know from this recently released survey:

1. When asked what specific challenges are making family life difficult, one-third (32 percent) said the costs associated with raising a family, one-fourth (27 percent) said high work demands and stress on parents, one-fifth (22 percent) said the lack of good jobs, and one in ten (10 percent) said lack of government programs to support families.

2. Overall, 27 percent said that the cost of raising a child/children is affordable for most people. But the responses varied considerably by political ideology: 39 percent for conservatives, 23 percent for moderates, and only 19 percent for liberals.

3. Conservatives were also more likely to say that it is important for parents to pass on their political values to their children. Almost half of conservatives (46 percent) said it was pared to 26 percent for moderates and 30 percent for liberals.

4. When asked if their partners support them in their child-rearing efforts, e respondents were substantially less likely to agree more likely to respond neutrally. A little over half of e respondents (59 percent) said they felt pared to more than 75 percent of middle and e Americans.

5. Just over one in ten respondents (13 percent) skipped meals because of a lack of funds or avoided going to the doctor because of the cost (14 percent). Smaller numbers were dislocated to the homes of family or friends (6 percent) or stayed at a shelter, in car, etc., even for one night (2 percent).

6. Respondents with children living at home were especially likely to have experienced an economic crisis. About 46 percent of respondents with children currently in the home said they had experienced at least one of the economic challenges pared with about 34 percent of respondents without children at home. Among low e respondents with children currently living in the home, more than 60 percent reported experiencing an economic crisis in the past year.

7. Four in ten respondents (40 percent) were unable to accrue savings for more than a month’s worth of their needs. This figure rises to nearly six in ten (59 percent) for those who are making less than $30,000 a year. But even among the highest e group (more than $100,000 per year), fifteen percent were unable to save for more than a month’s worth of their needs.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Samuel Gregg on the French church after Cardinal Barbarin
Earlier this month a French court convicted Cardinal Philippe Barbarin for failing to report alleged sexual abuse by a priest of his archdiocese. This has further fueled the sense that the Church faces one of its most serious crises since the Reformation, says Samuel Gregg in a new article for the Catholic Herald: Barbarin himself has been a larger-than-life figure in French Catholicism. Gifted in languages, an engaging public speaker, a missionary in Madagascar, and a marathon runner, he publicly...
Who was St. Patrick?
Did St. Patrick really drive all the snakes out of Ireland? Was he ever canonized a saint? Was he even Irish? In this short video Timothy Paul Jones answers those questions and more. ...
Is higher education ripe for creative destruction?
The recent revelations of a nationwide college admissions and testing bribery scheme have met with a variety of reactions. There have been conversations about fairness and privilege in admissions practices. There have been expressions of lack of surprise, cynicism, or “that’s just how the world works.” And there are already the beginnings of a class-action lawsuit by students who claim their college degrees have been devalued by the rigged admissions system. There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic...
What did the Christchurch mosque shooter believe? Inside the mind of a collectivist killer
As Muslims gathered for Friday prayers, a shooter livestreamed himself entering the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and killing 41 people with a semiautomatic weapon. He then drove to the Masjid mosque in nearby Linwood, where seven more have died. (An additional victim died off the premises, bringing the death toll to 49 as of this writing.) Police also found several improvised explosive devices on vehicles in the area. Authorities have arrested four people – three men...
Russ Roberts on Adam Smith and the limits of economics
Russ Roberts — economist and host of the excellent EconTalk podcast — wrote a penetrating essay on what we can learn from Adam Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. According to Roberts, [N]ot everything that is important can be quantified. I worry that as economists, we too often are like the drunk at 1 am looking for his keys under the glare of a streetlight. You go over to help and when you fail to find the keys...
Acton Line: Denmark isn’t socialist; Who is William Penn?
On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Acton’s senior editor, Rev. Ben Johnson, about a new study released by a free market think tank in Denmark, claiming that Denmark isn’t actually socialist. Although Denmark is regularly cited as a country whose socialist policies have done good, this isn’t the whole story. Denmark isn’t technically socialist, and the current welfare state program has done harm despite what you may have heard. After that, Alan R. Crippen, II, Chief...
The person at the center of the economy
When we think about economics we can tend to immediately focus on mathematics, data, and graphs, but at its core economics is the study of human action in a marketplace. Economics is a human science. Which means we need to have a clear vision of who the human person is and how he acts. Much of modern economic theory operates with the assumption of human beings as “rational maximizers.” This is called homo-economicus—economic man. Now the reduction of man to...
Huckleberry Finn’s moral conscience
Few authors could spin words as well as Mark Twain, but the image of the chronicler of the Mississippi is perhaps one more of style and storytelling than of depth. We don’t read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn and expect to find great moral insights or penetrating philosophy. Twain’s own preface to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn runs: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;...
How to make America smart again
Over the past week America has been fascinated and appalled by the latest college admissions cheating scandal. Much of the attention has been focused on the bribing of coaches to get kids into school with fake athletic credentials. But the even more absurd part of the scandal is that parents were paying between $15,000 and $75,000 per test to help their children get a better score on the SAT. The parents seem to believe that the SAT was a mere...
National health care topples a Nordic government
Failure to reform the national health system has ledthe government to collapse inone of the most statist governments following the Nordic model. Prime Minister Juha Sipiläof Finland and his cabinet members have resigned after failing to rein in the nation’s health care costs and provide petition. es as reports show private citizens in Finland increasingly turning to the free market to meet the shortfalls of the nationalized system. Sipilä’s proposal would give citizens – who may already choose between public-sector...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved