What are the trends in marriage, cohabitation, and divorce in the US?

What policies and programs would strengthen American families?

Some of the possible answers to these questions are in the annual “state of  our union” report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values that was released today at FamilyScholar.org.

In addition to documenting the changing nature of marriage and families the report highlights policy and program ideas to strengthen marriages.  There is an excellent summary of the effectiveness of marriage and relationship education with low-income couples by Alan Hawkins and Theodora Ooms based on their recent meta-analytic research.   (Here is a previous summary.)

There are some very interesting ideas in this report.  There will be a more extended discussion of the findings and policies in this report Dec 20-21 hosted by Amy Ziettlow.