Read the complete 2026-10-14 briefing
Marriage gardens show family formation cannot be ignored
IFS's new maps expose how sharply married-family life differs across communities, making family formation an urgent concern for parents and the officeholders who serve them.
Family formation matters, and IFS's maps show how sharply married-parent life varies across communities. The Institute for Family Studies ranks the share of children in two-parent households among the strongest predictors of upward mobility in a community1. America has marriage deserts, and the Institute for Family Studies has now put them on a map that policymakers cannot ignore.
The Institute for Family Studies posted on Oct. 11, 2026, inviting readers to explore its research on "marriage deserts" and "marriage gardens" across America. The report behind the post, published Oct. 8 by Chris Bullivant and Ken Burchfiel, says its authors "map the geography of family structure in the United States, identifying areas where married and married-parent households are either highly prevalent or notably scarce." IFS says the maps can help newlyweds find places with large shares of married couples and "potentially stronger communities and support networks." A young couple choosing where to raise children is making a family decision, and this map puts the community around that decision in plain view.
“communities where marriages and families are flourishing are likely to be places where both economic and cultural conservatism thrive”
The numbers show how deep the divide runs. IFS measures the share of householders ages 15 to 64 who are married, and the share of households with children headed by married couples. It draws on 2020 Census data organized into Public Use Microdata Areas, which generally contain 100,000 to 200,000 people each1.
In the nation's top marriage deserts, IFS reports, between about 13% and 17% of householders ages 15 to 64 are married. In the top gardens, the married share runs from 74 to 79 percent2. Among households with children, only around 18% to 26% are headed by married couples in the top married-family deserts1. In the top married-family gardens, the share is 86% to 89%.
IFS says this is not a story of small variations around shared national norms but of two distinct family-formation regimes, "so stark it could even be described as family structure polarization." In all ten of the lowest married-family deserts, fewer than 1 in 3 households with children are headed by a married couple. IFS says children there likely face "much greater churn in adult relationship stability, and greater inconsistency in supervision2."
What does it say about a country when a child's odds of growing up with married parents depend this heavily on the neighborhood? Families in the deserts are raising children in a very different America from families in the gardens, and that is the reason family formation belongs at the center of public policy.
The divide has a geography. IFS finds that higher marriage rates "tend to be found in suburban regions, whereas lower marriage rates are often found in the center of major cities." IFS identifies Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the largest grouped marriage desert, with more than 686,000 householders. That puts the marriage divide on a citywide scale, not at the margins. more common in affluent, suburban regions and less common in urban centers and parts of the Southeast1.
The stakes reach past the household. The report says children growing up in stable-married families have "better life outcomes than their counterparts who grow up in less-stable cohabiting or single-parent households."2 Where married-family life has thinned out, children are growing up without the footing the report ties to better outcomes, and the officeholders who answer to those families own that result.
Ohio State sociologist Kristi Williams offers a different view of federal marriage promotion. Ohio State's release on her briefing paper says federal marriage promotion "has missed the mark because marriage doesn’t provide the same benefits to poor, single mothers as it does for others3."
Her own numbers put the stakes in plain figures. Williams cites a 2013 poverty gap in which about 46 percent of children in single-mother households were living in poverty, compared with 11 percent of children living with two married parents3. Her quarrel is with a federal program, and a program that misses its mark is a reason to fix the program, not to write off the married home. IFS cites Harvard economist Raj Chetty's finding that the share of homes with two parents present was the most predictive factor.
The mobility data points to the married two-parent home. Family Brief's answer is to address Williams's concern that marriage does not provide poor single mothers the same benefits it provides others, not to shrug at marriage deserts.
American Principles Project's 2019 report "Family First" found that "communities where marriages and families are flourishing are likely to be places where both economic and cultural conservatism thrive4."
IFS has drawn the map; the work now falls to the officeholders who answer to families.
Raise the child tax credit. Add family deductions. End those penalties. Parents should put those three demands to every candidate and legislator who asks for their vote.
More marriage gardens, fewer marriage deserts.