New analysis from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies has concluded that the key to a successful life is to graduate high school, get a job, get married, and then have kids in that order. Unfortunately, that isn’t the path many millennials are taking.

Reporting on the study, and actually agreeing with it, is The New York Times’s liberal columnist David Leonhardt who wrote in an e-mail blast:

Marriage before children is no longer the norm in the United States.

More than half — 55 percent — of parents between the ages of 28 and 34 were not married when they had their first child, according to a new analysis of federal data. Some of these millennial parents later married, while others remain unmarried.
Either way, it’s a stark change from the past. The question that inspires heated debate is whether this trend is a problem.

I think it is, and the new analysis offers some relevant evidence. 

Most of us have known this forever, but it’s good to see Leonhardt finally coming around to reality.

The “success sequence” concept was developed by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution and was used as the basis for this new study.

“People who follow the success sequence first receive at least a high school degree, then get a job, then get married and then have their first child,” Leonhardt explains. “Doing so, the researchers argue, increases the odds that both the parents and their children will succeed — economically and socially, as well as in terms of health status and life satisfaction.”

The columnist then offers what he found “the most telling” bit from the study:

Among parents between the ages of 28 and 34 who themselves had grown up in low-income households and then followed the success sequence, only 14 percent were living in poverty. For them, remaining in poverty was a relatively rare exception. By comparison, the poverty rate was 46 percent for those parents who had grown up in low-income households and then had a child without ever marrying.

Versions of this pattern also exist among parents who grew up in middle- or high-income families: Those who had a child outside of marriage were more likely to have their families slip into poverty.

Of course, Leonhardt’s liberal tendencies die hard as he wasn’t completely sold on this repeated pattern of self-destruction, but does think it's “likely that family structure is part of the problem.”

“I know this topic is a sensitive one. It’s easy to point to children who thrived without married parents and to those who struggled with married parents,” the column continued. “But it’s worth distinguishing between exceptions and the norm. And the new norm doesn’t seem to be a healthy one.”

Leonhardt could’ve summed up his reaction to this unnecessary study writing only “duh” and saving us all a lot of time.