Why Trump’s Plan to Increase Marriages With Children Is Doomed to Fail

The proposal, rooted in the pronatalist movement, aims to improve marriage and birth outcomes without addressing underlying economic inequalities.

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The Trump administration is exploring strategies to encourage Americans to marry and have more children, according to the New York Times. Some of the tactics under consideration include scholarships, cash payments and menstrual cycle training.

This policy approach resonates with the palpable fear among many white Americans of a future where the U.S. population will become “majority-minority” by 2045. Studies have shown that white participants are more likely to report feeling their social status threatened and to perceive the faces of mixed-race individuals as nonwhite.

The push for more marriages and children isn’t about Black or brown families. A social fear of a “minority-white” nation gave rise to pronatalism, a movement embraced by some on the political right to address declining birth rates in industrialized countries—primarily among white populations. Anti-immigrant, pro-life and white nationalist groups have found common cause in pronatalism, viewing it as a way to preserve racial and cultural dominance.

Outside of its political dimensions, the policy proposal wrongly presumes that marriage and birth outcomes are primarily the result of individual choices among the middle class, disconnected from the broader economic and social barriers that facilitate or discourage marriage and child rearing. The wealthiest people who don’t need incentives are choosing not to have children. For everyone else, getting married and raising a child requires more than incentives.

True progress around marriage and childrearing requires addressing systemic inequities such as income inequality, biased criminal justice systems, housing unaffordability and underfunded schools—reasons that are reflected in lower marriage rates among Black men and women.

Research makes clear that when Black people live in areas with greater opportunities to own homes, start businesses and earn livable wages, marriage rates tend to be higher. This is just one of the many findings discussed in my new book, Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It. Consequently, good family policy must address the preconditions of marriage, including improving conditions that increase wealth, in order to encourage it.

In a 2011 study, Harvard researcher Daniel Schneider looked at how wealth influences marriage. He found that men and women who had assets like cars, homes or bank accounts were more likely to get married than those without such assets. Schneider included race in his analysis to see if differences in wealth could explain the racial gap in marriage rates. He found that by age 27, about half of men who owned assets had married, compared to only a quarter of those who had never owned assets. By age 46, the likelihood of being married increased to around 80% for asset owners, versus 40% for those without assets. When looking specifically at Black men and women, wealth reduced the racial marriage gap by about 30% for men and 36% for women, showing that wealth plays an important role in marriage disparities. Subsequently, past discrimination related to wealth disparities came out in the wash of marriage rates.

Wealth not only increases the chances of getting married but also helps keep relationships together. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of the Social Sciences, Cornell University researchers Alicia Eads and Laura Tach looked at how wealth influences the stability of cohabiting couples. The authors defined family structure as adults living in the same household and considered household changes—like separation, divorce or one partner moving out—as signs of relationship dissolution.

Initially, the researchers found that Black couples were 53% more likely to end their relationships than white couples. When they accounted for factors like income, employment and education, this gap decreased to 41%. Adding in assets and debts further reduced the likelihood of breakup, bringing the gap down to 29%. This shows that having assets and managing debt significantly stabilizes relationships, reducing the racial gap in relationship stability by about 45%.

Those who’ve tied the knot also know that marriage can sometimes worsen one’s circumstances. University of Chapel Hill researcher Fenaba Addo found in 2014 that married people often find themselves in greater debt than their single counterparts. She finds that cohabitating men have more loan debt and women more student loan debt. Women with education loan debt are more likely than women without such debt to delay marriage and transition into cohabitation. As Addo states, “Single life may be difficult to afford, but marital life is unaffordable as well.”

Relationships will improve with higher wages, home and business ownership rates as well as when educational and criminal justice systems improve. Policy should create opportunities of higher paying jobs, homeownership and better schools that foster stronger families.

Incentivizing marriage rather than empowering communities lays bare the race ladened hypocrisy with Trump’s marriage policy push. Instead of strengthening Black wealth, numerous economists and family planning advocates have discouraged childbirth among Black women, particularly those who are unmarried.

Since 1965, when the U.S. government released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” economists and various family planning organizations have discouraged Black women from having children out of wedlock. The report, commonly referred to as "The Moynihan Report," after its lead author, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, offered a robust analysis of racism.

However, the Moynihan report perpetuated the notion that Black men and women must conform to societal norms while overlooking the myriad forces that either facilitated or hindered marriage: the housing policies that failed to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods; redlining; the exclusion of some Black people from the GI Bill, with its education and housing opportunities; segregation, which restricted access to quality education, employment and housing; and tax policy.

Researchers regularly try to calculate the extent to which these discriminatory practices robbed Black families of the wealth to enter and stabilize marriage. But the negative effects go beyond the numbers. Another enduring consequence of the Moynihan report's framing of the Black family as pathological is that it invited legislators to enact punitive policies, which were completely at odds with promoting human development, let alone marriage.

What is not hypocritical is that the proposed marriage and childbirth initiatives rely on the same failed strategy that has long plagued Black Americans: attempting to improve marriage and birth outcomes without addressing underlying economic inequalities.

The United States does need policies that strengthen all families, including those who are “non-white.” But we must see marriage and childbirth as an outcome of strong communities, not as their cause.

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Andre M. Perry is a senior fellow and director for the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution and is the author of “Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It.”