HomePostTopic: Success Sequence

Success Sequence

Parents and Children Family Portrait Family Bond Happy Family Love and Togetherness Family Time Family Happiness Family Unity Multi-Generational Family Family Love Smiling Family Family Fun Joyful Family Family Connection Family Memories Family Gathering Family Affection Close-knit Family Family Support Family Values

Key Points

  • Utah’s economic success and high levels of happiness are attributed to the quantity of marriages and cohabiting married parents, leading to strong family structures and economic mobility.
  • The “Family Impact Perspective” proposed by Brad Wilcox offers guidelines to strengthen marriages, encourage desired parenthood, improve family affordability, and enhance family relationships in pursuit of economic success and well-being.
  • Georgia, facing economic challenges and family-related issues, can learn from Utah’s success and consider implementing similar policies and projects to foster a “Georgia Family Miracle” and improve economic mobility rates.

No matter how you spin it, Utah has enjoyed great success in recent years. The Beehive State tops national charts economically—with particular success in economic mobility— as well as scoring highly in happiness, evaluated through emotional health ratings. 

Sociologist Brad Wilcox attributes these achievements to the quantity of marriages in the state. In Utah, adults ages 18-55 are 10% more likely to be married than other Americans (55% versus the national average of 45%) and children are 7% more likely to grow up with cohabiting married parents than their peers in other states (82% versus the national average of 75%).

What’s more, Utah enjoys some of the greatest economic mobility in the country. And according to numerous economists, this is probably due to young people living in married families. Wilcox writes that the poor children in the Salt Lake area whose lot is improving “are much more likely to be raised in a two-parent family and to be surrounded by peers from two-parent families than poor kids in other metro areas.” 

Yet Utah’s economic success has also attracted many newcomers to the state, who have driven the marriage and fertility rates down, as Wilcox explains. Across the state’s counties, from Salt Lake City to rural areas to Utah County, which boasts some of the highest population and birth rate growth, immigration has inflated population counts and decreased fertility. While the state still leads the country in fertility and marriage, there are indeed “clouds on the horizon” as national cultural norms descend upon the state. 

The “Utah Family Miracle” might be seeing its last days. 

 

Where do we go from here?

In a recent report with the Sutherland Institute, Wilcox promotes a “Family Impact Perspective” through which all “states laws, regulations and initiatives” might be considered. He writes that this framework would assist in the pursuit of the following targets: 

  • Strengthen marriage—measured in terms of both the rate and stability of marriage
  • Encourage couples to have the children they wish to have 
  • Make family life affordable for ordinary working families 
  • Enable husbands, wives, children, and especially parents to maximize their time with their families
  • Increase the quality of family relationships by increasing positive and reducing negative (e.g., domestic violence) interactions in families.

 This perspective is flexible to the needs of the state and offers guidelines and signs of success for legislators and the families that they serve.

Georgia, facing economic challenges and family-related issues, can learn from Utah’s success and consider implementing similar policies and projects to foster a “Georgia Family Miracle” and improve economic mobility rates.

Georgia, facing economic challenges and family-related issues, can learn from Utah’s success and consider implementing similar policies and projects to foster a “Georgia Family Miracle” and improve economic mobility rates.

Sutherland and Wilcox’s report culminates in five policy recommendations that solidify the Family Impact Perspective. Utah already enjoys ranking as the best state in the country for families, but even there these productive steps are under consideration.

  1. State reports should consider family structure when they track other socioeconomic factors.  
  2. The “Success Sequence” proposed by the Institute for Family Studies should be worked into public school curricula and premarital education.
  3. States should provide families with young children a monthly allowance to “empower parents in their capacity to make choices about how to best care for their children.”
  4. Address families’ cost of living, considering housing, schooling, and food as issues integral to family decisions.
  5. Create a state commission on men and boys, as men everywhere increasingly fall by the wayside. 

These ideas address the biggest issues facing families in a holistic, productive manner. Georgia would do well to consider implementing similar policies and undertaking such projects. 

 

What’s in it for Georgia? 

A Georgia Family Miracle. 

The state has much to gain by considering what it would take to improve economic mobility rates until they rival Utah’s. Currently, Georgia lags in 12th economically and 24th for fiscal stability, and the economic mobility rate has drawn critical attention for a decade. While many factors feed into economic mobility, leading Georgians ought to encourage study into the impact of family structure and costs of living on the prospects of the youngest citizens. 

Georgia’s immigration rates are much lower than Utah’s (-2.5%, whereas 8.4% of Utah’s population are immigrants). This means Georgia might enjoy greater cultural stability, which should not be taken for granted. Rather, Georgia’s leaders ought to double down in their service to the constituency’s families and help them build happier homes where they have better relationships.

By multiple measurements, marriage in Georgia is far from the worst in the country, but there is still much work to be done if Georgians are to have the families and futures that they want. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, in 2021, Georgia’s marriage rate was only 60% of Utah’s (at rates of 5.5% and 9.1%, respectively). Demographers have reported for years that Georgia’s divorce rate is among the highest in the U.S., and a 2020 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Georgia Family Connection Partnership found that 33.5% of Georgia’s kids live in single-parent households—not accounting for cohabiting, unmarried parents.  

The easiest ways to increase familial connection include reducing tech use in the home, making family life more affordable with an allowance, and strengthening existing marriages through close review of couple’s needs, especially men struggling to be dependable citizens and fathers.

Talk To An Expert

About The Author

David Bass

Press Manager

David Bass is a journalist and communications professional with nearly two decades of experience in the world of PR, marketing, and publications.

Key Points

  • Mr. Rowe has emerged as a dynamic voice on education, upward economic mobility, family formation, the Success Sequence, and adoption.
  • The family Breakthrough event will focus on the importance of people of all ages knowing their ABCs — Attitude, Behavior, and Choices.
  • The event is on Thursday, August 25, from 10:30am to 12:30pm at Sonesta Gwinnett Place Atlanta in Duluth, Georgia. Lunch is included.

There is a close link between the quality of your relationships and the quality of your work life. To further explore and explain this link, the Georgia Center for Opportunity team is honored to welcome Ian Rowe — senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute — to our upcoming family Breakthrough event focused on family and relational health.

The event is on Thursday, August 25, from 10:30am to 12:30pm at Sonesta Gwinnett Place Atlanta in Duluth, Georgia. Lunch is included.

 

The family Breakthrough event will focus on the importance of people of all ages knowing their ABCs — Attitude, Behavior, and Choices. Martin Seligman, the father of human flourishing, says that to flourish is to find fulfillment in our lives, to accomplish meaningful and worthwhile tasks, and to connect with others at a deeper level. In essence, to live “the good life.” But “the good life” is impossible if your relationships are broken and you’re living in poverty.

Ian Rowe will address the link for us. Mr. Rowe has emerged as a dynamic voice on education, upward economic mobility, family formation, the Success Sequence, and adoption. The Success Sequence is the basic idea that those who follow a three-step process — graduate from high school, wait until marriage for children, and get a full-time job — are virtually guaranteed to not be in poverty. They also have a strong likelihood of entering the middle class.

Mr. Rowe is also co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools opening in the Bronx in 2022; the chairman of the board of Spence-Chapin, a nonprofit adoption services organization; and the co-founder of the National Summer School Initiative.

“When it comes to fighting poverty and creating opportunity, Ian Rowe is one of the most effective and eloquent leaders in the United States,” shares Randy Hicks, GCO’s president and CEO. “His leadership isn’t just based in theory and his expansive knowledge, but in his hands-on experience in leading and serving schools that are transforming lives.”

Randy will guide the discussion with Mr. Rowe at the family Breakthrough event. Topics will include:

  • What is the correlation between broken relationships and poverty?

  • Can you have one without the other?

  • If there were no broken relationships, would poverty exist?

 

mother and baby

Key Takeaways:

  • Welfare cliffs and marriage penalties are discouraging people from work and forming families.
  • The cliffs and penalties may mean that our clients are locked into poverty for much longer than they would be otherwise and despite our best efforts.
  • GCO has created a platform that allows anyone to see when a particular family can expect to experience benefit cliffs as they earn more money through work. 

Important Link: BenefitsCliff.org

 

If you work in a nonprofit serving the poor, you need to know that the government benefits your clients receive are likely discouraging them from working or forming a family, two things that research shows could lift them out of poverty the fastest. 

This is an especially tough problem for nonprofits, like GCO, that work to get their clients into good-paying jobs and strengthen their family relationships.

What’s going on?

These disincentives to work are often called “welfare cliffs” and the disincentives to family formation are called “marriage penalties.” Essentially, “cliffs” are generated any time a person receiving government benefits gets a raise at work that causes them to lose more in benefits than they will earn in additional income from the raise. These same individuals can face a similar financial penalty IF they decide to marry. In many cases, they will lose more in benefits than their spouse is able to provide in new income to the household.

While you would think (hope?) cliffs and penalties are rare, they are not. Instead, they are baked into the structure of nearly all welfare programs and many of the cliffs are severe. It’s also important to know that welfare recipients don’t face a single cliff or a single penalty, but they face cliffs and penalties at a number of different points as they have additional income from working or through marriage.

Why does it matter?

For nonprofit leaders, the cliffs and penalties may mean that our clients are locked into poverty for much longer than they would be otherwise and despite our best efforts. For workforce development nonprofits, cliffs could be the underlying reason why your clients don’t pick up additional work hours when they are offered or seem less than excited when they are offered a good promotion. In extreme cases, clients may quit jobs that seemed like a perfect fit simply because they panic when they learn they may lose a major benefit – like housing or childcare.

For nonprofits trying to help strengthen family relationships, marriage penalties may be driving behavior that is otherwise inexplicable, like seemingly happy couples refusing to marry or live in the same home. These dynamics can lead to stress for the couples affected and to a sense that a parent (usually the father) has abandoned the family when, if the system would allow it, he would be in the home. In these cases, children pay the biggest price.

What can you do about it?

Fortunately, we have created a platform that allows anyone to see when a particular family can expect to experience benefit cliffs as they earn more money through work. For nonprofits working with these families, you now have a tool (available for 10 states, with two more on the way) that will allow you to help your clients plan for the future. In some cases, knowing when cliffs are likely to happen will allow your clients to seek a larger raise that will help them bypass or leapfrog a cliff. In other cases, maybe the answer is seeking additional training or certifications that will get your client into a different payscale entirely – one that avoids the cliffs.

In the coming weeks, we will be adding a tool that will allow users to see the impact of penalties on couples who decide to marry. We will also be incorporating a solutions tool that will allow anyone to see how reforming our government benefit programs can actually eliminate cliffs and penalties entirely, giving recipients every reason to pursue work and form stable households.

For GCO, it is this last point – reforming the system – that remains the ultimate goal. In the meantime, we are looking for ways to mitigate the harm caused by the welfare system, so that as many people as possible can escape the system and break cycles of poverty now.



The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities. GCO uses this as a framework for much of our work.

A belief in working together is key

 

BETTER WORK Columbus is connected with groups and organizations across the Chattahoochee Valley. These groups include both the Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition (CVPRC) and the Mayor’s Commission on Reentry. A belief in working together in the local community as the key to eliminating poverty in our city is the common thread binding these groups together.  More specifically, the CVPRC holds a shared vision to reduce the poverty rate in the Chattahoochee Valley by 50% over the next 10 years.

BETTER WORK Program Manager, Kristin Barker, plays a leadership role in both of these groups. As forthcoming chair of the Reentry Commission, she works to identify key people in our community and bring them together to address the needs and concerns that impact individuals who are justice-involved. This is necessary to further the mission of preventing recidivism by strengthening cooperation and collaboration between law enforcement agencies, corrections and supervision entities, resource agencies, social service and non-profit organizations, faith-based non-profit organizations, community members, and other private and public stakeholders. Embedded in the group’s purpose is a focus on finding key people in the community and bringing them together to address the needs and concerns that impact individuals who are justice-involved.

 

The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities. GCO uses this as a framework for much of our work.

Local Connections and National Partnerships

It is these local connections and national partnerships like Jobs for Life that will allow Columbus to discover the high-impact strategies needed to support families in poverty and connect them with resources that will move them toward self-sufficiency.

Find more information about the Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition and the Mayor’s Commission on Reentry online.

turkey

The Farm Bureau Released A Report That The Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner Was Going Up Significantly.




 What is happening

  • Many people are gathering for the first time in nearly 2 years for Thanksgiving.
  • A recent Farm Bureau report shows the impact of Inflation and other factors that are leading to a 14% increase in the cost of Thanksgiving dinner.
  • GCO’s work in our community is shedding a light on the impact higher prices is having on many communities and social support efforts.

Why it matters

  • The hardest hit will be those already facing food insecurity.
  • Inflation impacts those already living in the margins far more than it hurts many of the decision-makers
  • Family is a vital component to a flourishing life and can be undermined by creating a financial burden for family gatherings.

My family and I are headed home to the mid-west this Thanksgiving to see my extended family and 95-year-old mother. The pandemic kept us away from each other, and my children are really looking forward to catching up with mom and their cousins. We have a lot to be thankful for and I am extremely grateful for my parents and siblings and the love we have for each other.  Family matters so much and the Eckstein’s are blessed in abundance. 

I note a Farm Bureau report this week that estimates the cost of that Thanksgiving dinner to again be on the rise—up 14% from last year. Of course, last year we were in the heart of the pandemic and we hadn’t yet felt the supply chain crush brought on by lockdowns and the employment market. As a result, demand and prices were low. 

The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities. GCO uses this as a framework for much of our work.

Given our families blessings, we don’t feel the impact of these swings as much as some of the people we work with at GCO. We work in coalitions with partners focusing on food security, housing, and mental health. We bring our expertise in employment, education, and family relationships to make those within the partnership more effective, allowing them to have greater impact. We see a lot of families that would be impacted by even a small increase in price. It can seem hard sometimes for those blessed like us to believe that the Farm Bureau’s estimate of just under $6 for a group of 10 to eat that Thanksgiving dinner is unaffordable to some. But we can assure you that is the case. Inflation impacts the poor disproportionately and we are witnessing its devastating impacts on families daily.

Our prayer for those families—and for you and your family— is that this holiday will be a time of peace, an opportunity to be grateful for all families big and small and the communities they live in.

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