Among today's young adults, the "success sequence" is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in "The Millennial Success Sequence" published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.
The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins of the Urban Institute and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation's largest generation, have found that only 3% who follow this sequence are poor. And you have only a 5% chance of ever living in poverty.
A comparably stunning 55% of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25% of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put "marriage before the baby carriage" have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes and have never been in poverty. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.
One problem today, Wilcox says, is the "soul-mate model of marriage," a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring "ecumenical niceness" to being judgmental.
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