Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage. In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change ""drifters"" into ""planners."" In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts ""planners,"" who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with ""drifters,"" who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States. Sawhill draws on insights from the new field of behavioral economics, showing that it is possible, by changing the default, to move from a culture that accepts a high number of unplanned pregnancies to a culture in which adults only have children when they are ready to be a parent.

Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where she holds the Cabot Family Chair and serves as codirector of the Center on Children and Families. She previously served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget. From 2003 to 2006, she was vice president and director of Economic Studies at Brookings. She is the editor of One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America's Children (Brookings, 2003), coeditor with Alice Rivlin of Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005 (Brookings, 2005), and coauthor with Rudolph G. Penner and Timothy Taylor of Updating America's Social Contract (Norton, 2000).