Jenet Erickson can remember where she was sitting during the Sept. 23, 1995, General Relief Society Meeting of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when President Gordon B. Hinckley stood to read “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” for the first time.
“I remember thinking, as we always did when President Hinckley spoke, there was power in his message — something powerful and significant about this — but I had no idea then how important every sentence in that proclamation would be to me in my own study and understanding of the family,” Erickson said.
In the 30 years since then, she has had ample opportunity to study, teach and uphold the truths laid out in the proclamation as a teacher, a researcher and a social scientist. As an associate professor of Religious Education at Brigham Young University, Erickson teaches a class called “The Eternal Family” that delves into the principles taught in “The Family Proclamation” line by line. She is also a fellow of both the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, which focuses on research and policy surrounding marriage and family.
Erickson recently spoke on the Church News podcast about her new research and how it connects to the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints described in “The Family Proclamation.”
Disruptions to the family
At the time it was given, many did not understand the prophetic nature of the proclamation, Erickson said. “I think all of us had that same feeling, like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing really unique or standout. Why the need to make a statement like that? Doesn’t everyone sort of already know this?’ But who could have foreseen that just in a few years, even, significant questions about the very core structure of family — marriage itself, the need for children, wanting children, why family needed to be structured the way that it is — all of those questions would be up for debate. And certainly in our time, we’ve seen some of the fallout, the implications, of that natural unit being disrupted.”
Two years ago, the Church’s second-most senior leader spoke to Latter-day Saint young adults across the globe.
Among other topics, the first counselor in the First Presidency, President Dallin H. Oaks, expressed his and other Church leaders’ concern about the nature and extent of marriage in the United States and in the Church.
President Oaks showed a chart illustrating the reduction in the percentage of adults in the United States who marry. Not only are fewer Americans marrying, but they are marrying older and, therefore, having fewer children, including within the Church.
These declines represent lost opportunities and postponed blessings, President Oaks said. “It means decreased opportunities to work together to build the kingdom of God. And most important, it means fewer children born to grow up with the blessings of the gospel.”
According to numbers released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than 1.6 children are being born per woman in the United States, which is below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman. This is reflective of many countries globally.
In a question-and-answer with young single adults in 2021, President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, explained one of the reasons the Church focuses on marriage is because the doctrinal significance of marriage and family throughout the world has been demeaned over the last few decades. “The Lord expects us to revere marriage and family and the bearing of children,” the Apostle said.
While the causes for the decline in marriage and family size are multifaceted, one contributing factor seems to be a devaluing of family and children.
A study conducted by Pew Research Center last year found that among young adults without children, less than half of women — about 45% — said they want to be parents some day.
At the same time, research by the Institute for Family Studies shows that more U.S. women are skipping motherhood. In 2020, 1-in-6 women reaching the end of their childbearing years had never given birth.
In President Oaks’ address, he cited a national poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and University of Chicago, which shows that the importance to adults of having children has dropped in the last 25 years from 66 percent to 33 percent.
Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, noted recently in a column for “The Atlantic” that many news reports and online and social media forums frame commitment and motherhood as making women unhappy.
Twenge cited an op-ed written in the New York Times which states, “Married heterosexual motherhood in America, especially in the past two years, is a game no one wins.” At the same time, Bloomberg, a finance and business news outlet, ran an article with the headline, “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.”
“We live at a time when women, even women who have grown up with an orientation to family, see marriage and motherhood as a transition of loss — loss of identity, loss of autonomy, of fear that they won’t be an equal,” said Erickson. “Yet all the research consistently shows that the happiest women are married mothers.”
Erickson and Twenge in addition to Wendy Wang, director of research at the Institute for Family Studies, and Bradford Wilcox, a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, co-authored a study released last month looking at the impact of marriage and motherhood on a woman’s wellbeing.
They surveyed 3,000 U.S. women, ages 25 to 55, in March 2025. Controlling for age, family income and education, the survey found that married mothers are the happiest group of women, outpacing single women, married women without children, and unmarried mothers in nearly every measure of well-being. Nearly twice as many married mothers said they are “very happy.” The married mothers were also more likely to say that life feels enjoyable most or all of the time.
Importance of relationships
The Women’s Wellbeing Survey offered several insights into why married mothers are happier. For example, data showed that married women are less likely to feel lonely.
“While getting married and having children may mean less time hanging out with friends, marriage and children are also associated with other kinds of social engagement, including volunteer work, church attendance, and community connections,” Erickson noted in a Wheatley Institute press release regarding the study.
The study also revealed the importance of physical touch to a woman’s wellbeing. Research links physical touch to lower stress, increased emotional resilience and higher overall happiness. Women who reported higher levels of physical touch were three times more likely to describe themselves as “very happy.”
“We are in a dearth of touch because of technology,” Erickson told the Church News. “And what we can see is that human beings embodied need touch. And who are those that are most likely to be experiencing touch? It’s married mothers.”
Most importantly, the study found that motherhood provides women with a deepened sense of meaning and purpose in life. Married mothers were more likely to state their lives felt meaningful most or all the time and that what they do in life is valuable and fulfilling.
“Motherhood is an unbelievably nourishing, flourishing experience for women, in spite of the narrative,” Erickson said.
However, she continued, that does not mean that it is easy. Their survey also found that married mothers were more likely to report feeling exhausted, overwhelmed or that they wished for more time to themselves. “There’s no question that [motherhood] is a work of faith.”
Something more
Erickson explained that the truths laid out in “The Family Proclamation” — whether it’s that marriage matters, the importance of the law of chastity and fidelity within marriage, the importance of children, that mothers and fathers offer something different to their child’s development — “all of this we can see societally, and it’s upheld in thousands of research studies in human well-being.”
However, the proclamation also offers something greater, something beyond what can be seen in mortality — the family “is an eternal design” and essential to Heavenly Father’s plan of salvation.
“It’s the reason we are, because we have a father and a mother, and their work is to enable us to grow so that we can live in the quality of relationships that they have as father and mother. So it’s like the whole plan is grounded in this reality of the family. If there weren’t the family, there would be no plan,” said Erickson.
Over the past five years, Erickson said, the world has experienced an “epidemic of loneliness” where individuals are choosing isolation. Though culture would say that the ideal life is autonomous, pleasure seeking, free of obligations to others, “in fact, it’s left us starving and hungry for what we in our core need … we need strong core relationships.”
Erickson emphasized, “We are part of an eternal family. We are designed for deep relationships eternally. That’s what Christ’s whole atoning work is, to bring at-one-ment in our relationships, and that’s where we will find eternal joy.”
Each individual is a child of God, designed to find wholeness in deep, strong relationships. “Anything that tells us otherwise is a distortion about who we really are and where happiness lies,” Erickson said.
