What the ‘Success Sequence’ Misses

It’s the stuff of any number of teen comedies—the gym teacher, the tittering, the awkward vocabulary and diagrams. “Don’t have sex, because you’ll get pregnant and die.” High school health class may be many things, but the route to virtue it is not.

State-prescribed projector transparencies and worksheets can’t hold a candle to the social scripts that come out of Hollywood and social media. Teen birth rates were driven down less by public school sex ed programming than by broader, structural trends—a growing economy and higher wages, rising education, even reality TV.

This reality should inspire a sense of modesty towards a policy idea long championed by well-meaning conservatives (and some moderates.) Public schools, they argue, should require students to be exposed to the “Success Sequence”—the idea that one’s odds of ending up in poverty are lowest if one finishes high school, gets a full-time job, and marries before having any children (the original book by Brookings‘s Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill included a requirement to wait until 21 to have children).

The idea polls well. At its core, it is a fairly bourgeois application of common sense: Earning a living is the best way to keep out of poverty, education the best way to acquire said job, and having an unstable family life can throw up roadblocks. But the most vocal champions of the “Success Sequence” can sometimes get carried away. Marriage is correlated with many social and economic benefits, but is not an automatic anti-poverty silver bullet (after all, 3.9% of married couples with kids were counted in poverty in 2021). And in defining “success” as meaning “statistically not in poverty,” they offer too thin an understanding of what a life well-lived can, and should, look like.

The research doesn’t disentangle correlation from causation. The prescribed formula of three milestones before parenthood ends up boiling down, largely, to one: increasing income and decreasing dependents. The People’s Policy Project’s Matt Bruenig points out that most of the anti-poverty effect of the “Sequence” comes from its prescription of working full-time. In the 2021 data, just 2.6% of full-time workers were in poverty. And your odds of living in poverty are reduced even further if you work full-time and delay childbearing until much later in life (or opt out of it altogether).

But there’s another way in which those who push the “Success Sequence” miss how the landscape has changed. Rates of single parenthood have plunged since 2007. The “Sequence” —which presumes young adults are rationally choosing single parenthood and a casual relationship with work—is less appealing in a world in which poverty is, broadly speaking, easier than ever before to avoid.

In their powerful 2005 ethnography, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, sociologists Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed low-income women who didn’t see much prospect of “success,” however it was defined. Their job prospects were often marginal, their lives off-track, and the men they formed relationships with quite far from marriage quality. Having a child out of wedlock, in that context, was not necessarily an act of failed contraception or an attempt to game the public welfare system—it was something for their life to be about. It gave them someone to love, and be loved by.

To the single moms of Philadelphia in the early 2000s, advice to “follow the Success Sequence” might have sounded as useful as a tip to buy stock in Yahoo!—it might work for the haves, but for the have-nots, it could come across as utterly divorced from reality.

Plus, the economy and culture more broadly have changed. Tight labor markets mean that anyone in America who wants a job can, to a first degree of approximation, get one. Under healthy macroeconomic conditions, simply being counted as “not in poverty” is much more achievable for the young adults of today: Wages for women at the lowest economic rung rose by nearly 10% (adjusted for inflation) from 1979 to 2019, with further gains post-Covid. In my analysis of the American Community Survey, the share of Americans in their 20s and 30s counted as living at or below the poverty threshold fell from 17.5% in 2010 to 13% in 2019. This was not because of a massive upswing in bourgeois values, but because single parenthood fell and the economy improved (indeed, there’s reason to believe those two variables are linked).

Focusing on the sole outcome of “avoiding poverty” is less salient in an era of high wage growth. And in an era of falling birth rates, conversations around fertility across the life cycle, work-life balance, home economics, happiness, and human flourishing seem more appropriate than one that implicitly encourages students to delay marriage and parenthood until they are fully “ready.” Covering the statistics that stable, married families provide better outcomes for both parents and children is essential. But that is because these conditions lead to a richer life across multiple dimensions, not just richer in purely monetary terms.

Public schools should, in theory, be capable of engaging students in what it means to live a well-formed life. In their ideal form, they have the opportunity and responsibility to form teens into young adults capable of full-fledged citizenship, not just students who can recite back answers on a standardized test. Opening the door to broader conversations about what type of person students want to be, beyond career inventory tests or Myers-Briggs-type claptrap, may well be worth a shot. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve included ideas to re-focus concepts such as “social-emotional learning” and “character education” toward a long-term understanding of human flourishing in some policy reports for state legislatures.

But we should be extremely humble about the potential for any top-down effort to change students’ horizons through curricula—as well as the limitations of an excessively materialistic definition of “success.” The ultimate goals the traditional “Sequence” tries to promote in its narrow way—developing the habits necessary to graduate high school, hold down a job, and be a dependable spouse and parent—are laudatory.

But the success we should encourage students toward should be a life well-lived, of which marriage, for most people, often plays a part. That means talking about how the institution changes us and reorients our priorities, rather than stressing its purported monetary advantages. Put simply, we should have the courage of our convictions, and encourage young adults to get married even if it doesn’t end up reducing point-in-time poverty estimates at all.

More importantly, improving conversations around family and childbearing will require other institutions—civil society, religious groups, the media—engage as well. The National Campaign to End Teen Pregnancy itself took a broad approach that did not simply rely on high school health classes. We need something similar, keyed to the challenges of our present day.

This approach would take the statistics around marriage and parenthood seriously, and engage media and philanthropy to help make those formative institutions more accessible. Trends of declining family formation certainly wouldn’t reverse overnight. But a more holistic and up-to-date conversation around “success” would have more of a shot than the shift some seem to hope will result from a high school gym teacher reading from a script.