The Sequence to Success

“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.” This children’s rhyme is embedded among my earliest memories. It wasn’t taught to me at church, although I was a regular attender, and went to Sunday School to boot. It wasn’t taught to me by my parents, although my parents modeled this sequence themselves.

Rather, I distinctly remember learning this on the playground. It wasn’t particularly religious. It wasn’t meant to be preachy, or moralizing. It was just the way things were, and the way things ought to be. Call it “the world of Ozzie and Harriet,” if you want. You could even mock it, and say that ship has sailed.

In terms of cultural trends, you would be right. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom. Memories are sketchy from my early childhood, but the best I can figure, I learned this rhyme in the summer of 1968. Free love was already in the air and Woodstock was just around the corner.

A different wind was blowing. Soon, it would become a gale-force. In those years fewer than 9% of children were born out of wedlock. By the time the boomers came of age, 20% of them had children out of wedlock. Among the millennials the number rose to 33%. Today it is over 40%.

I haven’t heard this rhyme in years. Apparently, our children are not hearing it either. So what? Does it make any difference that the order of love, marriage, and baby has been upended in so many homes? Recent studies are suggesting that it does.

In 2009, a study from the Brookings Institute coined the term “success sequence.” Their study suggested that people who entered into family life by way of the specific sequence: education, job, marriage, then children, had a 98% chance of living in the middle to upper income levels.

Recently, the Institute for Family Studies released an analysis of the latest data gathered by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth which was begun in 1997. This survey has been tracking a representative sample of around 9000 millennials born between 1980 and 1984. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has been periodically surveying these people, since they were in their middle teens. The latest sampling checked on them when they were 28-32 years old.

What they found largely confirmed the predictions of the Brookings Institute. Across the board, 97% of these young adults who have completed the sequence of education, job, marriage, then children, have avoided falling into poverty. Of these, 51% are in the upper income bracket. By contrast, 53% of those who did not follow this sequence live below the poverty level, and only 7% are in the upper bracket.

With numbers so striking as these, you might think that they cooked the numbers, or neglected to take into account other significant variables. What about race and socio-economic background? What about sex and education, and test scores?

If you’re interested in the details, you will want to read the full report, “The Millennial Success Sequence: Marriage, Kids, and the ‘Success Sequence’ among Young Adults.” But the bottom line is this: after all these variables are taken into account, still the sequence of education, work, marriage, then children always comes out on top as the best indicator of success.

It remains true that childhood family income influences your prospects. So also do race, sex, and educational opportunities. These are areas which we should all be concerned about addressing. But they are factors over which the people born in them have no direct control.

The good news is that three factors that any person can control, matter a great deal in overcoming the disadvantages of circumstances beyond your control. We can control whether or not we stay in school. We have agency over how diligently we seek a job and how faithfully we work in it. We, alone, determine whether we get married before having children, or have children before getting married.

According to the latest research, each of these decisions has a strong economic impact on our future. Even among those who did not follow the sequence completely, finishing high school places you at an advantage over those who don’t. Of all millennials who finished high school, only 31% are now below the poverty line.

Adding a full-time job (or continuing school, or marrying and raising the kids at home) cuts that number by half. Then, by the time you add marriage before children, your chances of avoiding poverty are 97% certain. This sequence of success holds out hope for all young people, no matter how disadvantaged they are to start with.

Even those who were raised in the lowest income bracket have an 80% chance of rising out of poverty by following the sequence. Both blacks and Hispanics also have an 84% chance of living in an upper- or middle-income bracket when they follow the “success sequence.”

Of course, economic opportunity is only one measure of success. It would be wrong to put so much emphasis on money that we neglected physical health, emotional well-being, and spiritual care. Education, work and marriage also have benefits in these areas, but we cannot explore them here.

Still, just the economic numbers alone lead to some clear conclusions.

First, there is hope. We are surrounded by doomsday prophets who preach that your future is determined by the circumstances of your birth. They are quite wrong. The way you live has a whole lot more to do with your future success than other factors that you cannot control. Your future is not determined, it is in your hands.

Second, marriage matters. If I had a dime for every time I heard someone ask, “what can a marriage license give me that I don’t already have,” I’d be lifted to the high-income bracket. Social scientists and theologians might be able to explain why marriage makes a difference, but the numbers alone prove that it does make a difference.

Don’t forget, that the poverty numbers among the millennials are not just because single mothers are disadvantaged economically. Having children out of wedlock also hurts the economic prospects of the men who father them, even if they take no responsibility for the children. How could this be if it were only about single-motherhood?

Our grandparents said that marriage tames men. Women don’t tame men, marriage does. It increases incentive for responsibility, hard work and education. It brings out the best in both men and women.

That sounds like a pretty “Ozzie and Harriet” thing to say, and it is. American culture has spent the last 50 years trying to prove them wrong. But what if they were right?