by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Feb 9, 2018
It’s National Marriage Week, so it’s a great time to take an inventory of your marriage. Here are some tools to help you more fully engage with your spouse and help strengthen your marriage.
- Do you know your love language? If not, or it’s been awhile, take the online quiz to discover your love language. Click Here.
- While this tool does have a cost, the Couples Checkup, is an online assessment to help you and your spouse identify the strongest portions of your relationship and the areas where you might need a little more TLC.
- According to AJC.com, these are the best 8 places in the Atlanta area for free or under $20 date night.
For more information on how you can better engage/strengthen your marriage, visit BuildMyBestRelationship.com.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Jul 10, 2017
By: Randy Hicks and W. Bradford Wilcox
Although young men and women are taking what seems like a dizzying array of paths into adulthood these days, one path stands out as maximizing their shot at the American Dream: what scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have called the “success sequence.” The sequence is a three-pronged formula for success in America: graduate from high school, get a full-time job (or have a partner who does), and then marry before having children. Now, a joint report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) shows this “success sequence” works for Millennials as well.
Released last month, the report tracked how an astounding 97 percent of the oldest Millennials (ages 28-34) who follow this threefold success sequence avoid poverty. In contrast, 53 percent of young adults who didn’t follow the sequence at all are in poverty. Moreover, those who delayed childbearing until after marriage are more likely to not only survive financially, but thrive—finding themselves in the middle or upper third of income earners.
These data hold true regardless of family background, socioeconomic status, or race. Seventy-six percent of African Americans and 81 percent of Hispanic young adults who marry first are in the middle to upper third of income distribution, alongside 87 percent of whites. And 71 percent of Millennials who grew up in households in the bottom third of income distribution but put marriage before the baby carriage had the same economic fortune.
Here’s the message for Millennials—success in America is partly grounded on the three pillars of work, education, and family. But what about young people who struggled with one or more of these steps? Over half of Millennials have already become parents prior to marriage, many remain underemployed, and 53 percent of young adults who have not followed the sequence at all are in poverty.
Closer to home, Atlanta scored horrifically low for social mobility among low-income individuals, according to a joint Harvard and Berkeley study, even though middle-class job growth in Atlanta is strong. In our metro area, poverty rates remain unacceptably high, particularly for minority populations. Even though young adults in the metro Atlanta area are about equally likely to miss steps in the success sequence as their counterparts nationwide, young adults in the state of Georgia are more likely to miss at least one step in the success sequence, compared to young adults in the nation as a whole (46 percent versus 44 percent).
However, for both young and old, this new research isn’t justification for giving up on those who have missed one or more steps on the sequence. Instead, we need to understand that each part of the success sequence can work to help individuals; it’s never too late to get life back on track.
For children caught in multi-generational cycles of poverty, a good education can be a stick in the spokes of the poverty cycle that slows it down; for an adult, it’s a job; and for couples, it may be relationship enrichment programs and other supports. When all three parts of the success sequence work together, however, we begin to see significant results in boosting opportunity for the rising generation.
Many of these solutions must come locally. Mr. Hicks’ organization, the Georgia Center for Opportunity, has been spearheading numerous efforts to bring together local employers, community leaders, schools, churches, and nonprofits to advance vocational training and apprenticeships for workforce development, expand education options for the most vulnerable children, and promote marriage enrichment initiatives to help families flourish.
Here’s the bottom line: While no statistical model can predict an individual’s future success perfectly, we can know what’s more likely to happen. The AEI-IFS report points to what both common sense and experience have already told us: particular paths into adulthood are more likely to give individuals a shot at flourishing than others.
At the same time, it’s crucial to acknowledge that everyone who doesn’t follow the success sequence isn’t destined for failure or disaster. Neither does it suggest that every child born into better conditions is guaranteed success. All the success sequence tells us is what paths are most advantageous for human flourishing.
And it forces us to ask some serious questions: If we care about people, are we not duty-bound to communicate the message of the success sequence, and to do what we can to remove barriers to a quality education, fulfilling work, and a stable family life?
W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a coauthor of The Millennial Success Sequence.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Apr 24, 2017
In a recent project spearheaded by the Center of the American Experiment, Georgia Center for Opportunity’s President and CEO, Randy Hicks, tackled the one topic even politicians and religious leaders are shying away from – family fragmentation.
The written symposium “Was Trump and Clinton’s Campaign Silence Regarding Family Fragmentation Golden?” is a collaboration of thirty writers answering two questions.
1. “Was Trump and Clinton’s campaign silence regarding family fragmentation golden?
2. Or was it leaden, especially when it comes to reducing poverty, improving education, and reversing crime?”
Click here to see the full essay.
by Eric Cochling | Mar 23, 2017
We know that to avoid poverty, it is essential to get a high school diploma, maintain a steady job, and marry before having children (see research from the Brookings Institution and Harvard University on these points). Not only are they key to avoiding poverty, upward mobility and financial stability are closely tied to this family-education-work sequence, as well.
That is why our recent reports are so disturbing. They show that most of our welfare programs are systematically undermining two of the three keys to avoiding poverty and are doing so for some of the most vulnerable groups in our society.
In the first paper, Disincentives for Work and Marriage in Georgia’s Welfare System, we show that many of our welfare programs – alone or when combined –actually penalize earning more and create dramatic “welfare cliffs”.
For many parents on public assistance, receiving a raise or working longer hours can result in dramatic reductions in welfare benefits, often completely erasing what they gain by working more or receiving a raise. Even worse, there are times when earning more money through additional work or a pay raise can result in less income to the family because government benefits are reduced so much all at one time.
When families find themselves in this position, they are effectively locked into dependency, unable to work themselves into self-sufficiency without having to endure sometimes long, crippling periods of financial hardship.
To make matters worse, a similar set of perverse incentives exist when a parent on welfare decides to marry.
For many moms on public assistance for example, deciding to marry a boyfriend or the father of their children can mean that family income is dramatically reduced due to an immediate and steep loss of benefits. In many cases, the disincentives to marriage only go away if the potential husband is earning much more money than would be expected or likely under the circumstances. The result is that these moms must choose between forming a family (and the financial and relational stability it can bring in the long-term) or the short-term financial health of their families.
For a parent in this position, it is easy to see why many would simply choose to stay single and cohabit rather than marry. Unfortunately, research also shows that cohabiting couples struggle with relational instability in ways that married couples do not, so the welfare system ends up encouraging people to enter into relationships that are less likely to last and less likely to provide the stability that would allow them to escape poverty.
While the welfare system was not intentionally designed to work this way, it is unjust nonetheless. If it worked as it should, the system would encourage work and family formation at every turn – as the surest antidotes to poverty.
That is why in our next report, we will be setting out a suggested set of reforms that the state and federal governments can adopt to reform the system in a way that creates a sustainable safety-net that encourages the behaviors that we know are needed for individuals and families to escape and stay out of poverty. We will also be providing a plan for a how a state can implement these reforms on the ground if it chooses to take on reforming the system.
If you want to see how the welfare cliff works for different family types and in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, visit www.welfarecliff.org.
by Eric Cochling | Feb 1, 2017
National Marriage Week will be celebrated next week, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The celebration is now in its eighth year and seeks to foster collaboration around the country to “strengthen individual marriages, reduce the divorce rate, and build a culture that fosters strong marriages.”
The Marriage Week campaign website cites to tons of research on the many benefits of marriage and they have provided a list of events taking place in Georgia next week to celebrate marriage.
At GCO, we believe marriage is indispensable to the creation of healthy families and a stable society. That’s why we encourage you to love your family, teach your children to value marriage and the commitment it requires, and to take part in next week’s celebration.
If you want to strengthen your own marriage, check our Healthy Families Initiative and the resources we offer there.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Dec 11, 2015
Earlier this month, GCO hosted a lunch and learn with Dr. Brad Wilcox, one of the nation’s leading sociologists. Dr. Wilcox has devoted his work to understanding family formation and the effect it has on our social structure and economy. His new report, “Strong families, prosperous states: Do healthy families affect the wealth of states?” takes a deep dive into the shifts in marriage and family structures – highlighting the factors which influence the national and states’ economic performance.
Georgia is in the bottom ten states for children living with married parents and at the bottom for college educated individuals. These statistics have a defining negative effect on the state’s economy and correlate with a higher number of Georgians on welfare programs and in the state’s penitentiary system.
At GCO, we understand that strong and healthy marriages have been proven to be better for all family members and lead to increased economic stability. That is why we are working to strengthen families and marriages, through relationship training so that individuals have skills they need to have healthy relationships and a public campaign to increase the value our culture places on marriage.
As Randy Hicks, President of GCO, states “When we’re successful, fewer Georgians will be living in a condition of dependence, a higher percentage will be enjoying earned success and the fruits of their labor, more children will be ready for college and a career, and more families will have the economic and relational resources to thrive.”
For more information about our Family and Community Initiative, visit: https://foropportunity.org/initiatives/family-community/
