To fully appreciate Naomi Cahn and June Carbone's book, you need to understand what the second demographic transition is. The first demographic transition accompanied the rise and consolidation of the industrial economy. As living standards rose, public health improved and urbanization proceeded, mortality and fertility declined, marriage became both more common and earlier in the life cycle, and family life was dominated by a single family model (the “nuclear family”), encouraged by state and religious authorities. In the United States, the culmination of this transition was the society of the 1950s, centered heavily around an idealized nuclear family, with high marriage rates, low divorce rates, and a median age at first marriage of around 20 for women and 23 for men.

The second demographic transition has unfolded with the rise of the information economy and postindustrial society. Increasing affluence and education levels, shifting occupational structures, changing values—especially on the importance of self-expression, tolerance, and equality—and the widespread availability of reliable contraception have broken down the norms underlying the ordered life course of the 1950s. Fertility has declined further, marriage rates have decreased, divorce rates have increased, and the median age at first marriage has shot up to 26 for women and 28 for men. The hold of traditional religion has been loosened, and laws reflecting religious priorities have been eliminated or weakened.

A signal contribution of Cahn and Carbone is showing that this transition has not been neutral across society but, rather, has winners and losers—a class content, if you will. The winners, broadly speaking, are the college-educated who postpone marriage to pursue higher education and job mobility. They establish families when they have a secure basis for doing so, and now are less likely to divorce than the non–college educated. This confers multiple advantages on their offspring: material comfort, stable family life, and parents well able to provide help and guidance for their children. So their children too tend to be successful and replicate their parents' approach to human capital acquisition and delayed family formation.

The non–college educated are adapting less successfully to the second demographic transition. They have more difficulty separating sex from marriage and sex from procreation, seeking in a sense to replicate the ordered life course of the 1950s in a postindustrial society that has rendered such an approach obsolete. They marry earlier, have children earlier, including during their teen years, and are more likely to have children outside of marriage. These responsibilities interfere with their ability to pursue education and career goals, leaving them in an economic cul-de-sac that stresses their marriages, leading to high divorce rates. As a result, their children suffer from deficits of parental investment and family stability, leading them, in all likelihood, to repeat the cycle.

Cahn and Carbone connect these different approaches to the political geography of the country. In blue states and urban areas, the former approach, which they label the “blue family” model, predominates. In red states and rural areas, the latter approach, which they label the “red family” model, is more common. They argue that the conflict between these two models is the real driver behind the cultural polarization (conflicts around sex education, abstinence, abortion, parental notification, gay marriage, custody rights, etc.) that has marked politics in the last 30 years. They further argue that this polarization masks the most pernicious effects of the differing family models: that they produce and accentuate economic inequality. How are the non–college educated to get out of their economic cul-de-sac with these seemingly intractable conflicts around moral issues?

Cahn and Carbone believe there is a way to resolve this quandary. First, they say, change the subject of family-values promotion from sex and sex education to commitment and marriage education. The biggest threat to the red family world is declining marriage and high divorce rates among the non–college educated; contentious programs like abstinence education have proven ineffective in addressing this problem. But efforts to promote stable marriages through communication, commitment, financial planning, and delay until couples have a secure basis for household formation have shown promise and should be acceptable across both red and blue families.

Second, the authors argue for shifting the focus from abortion to contraception. Abortion is intrinsically divisive whereas contraception is not; almost all adult women use it at one time or another. And easy access to, and consistent use of, contraception is the best solution to unwanted pregnancies, particularly for teenage mothers. The authors believe that a true middle ground in the culture wars is moving family formation out of the teenage years.

Finally, they advocate changing the subject from family to work. In their view, the most serious obstacles to both blue and red families lie in the American workplace. On the one hand, American workplaces are notoriously family unfriendly, which promotes low fertility, a problem especially for blue families, and places heavy stress upon families across the board. On the other, it is a huge problem for red families in particular to acquire and improve their human capital so that they do not get stuck in dead-end, low-wage workplaces. Cahn and Carbone argue that discussion and action in this area will be far more fruitful than disputes about what is and is not a proper family.

I find most of this analysis to be persuasive. Cahn and Carbone are fundamentally right to place contemporary debates around family and sexuality in the context of the second demographic transition, as well as a class-divided response to this fundamental change in society. This makes sense out of a wide variety of cultural conflicts that have appeared in the last several decades. To a large extent, people have disagreed on these issues because they are having different experiences during this transition. The successful adapters are happy and defend the changes wrought by this transition; the unsuccessful adapters are not happy and feel threatened by these changes.

The connections drawn by the authors to contemporary politics, with their red and blue families, are also useful and well documented. However, there are limits to this categorization as they themselves acknowledge. Blacks are the bluest of demographic groups politically, yet their family formation practices look more red than blue, as do many of their social attitudes. And many college-educated families who approximate the blue family model nevertheless vote red, particularly in conservative areas of the country. So there is a certain slippage between the politically charged terms they employ and the diverse realities of family formation practices, which do not break down so neatly along partisan lines.

There are also some problems with the recommendations for action, which in essence are to “change the subject” in three different areas of current dispute—families, family values, and abortion. I am all for this, and I do not doubt that if we did so our conversation about these issues would be more productive and lead to better policy. But how to do this is not at all clear. For example, those who feel strongly about abortion may not be amenable in the slightest to changing the subject to contraception.

It is also particularly unclear how we are supposed to change the conversation from, as they say, family to work. The laundry list of reforms that Cahn and Carbone propose here comprise a liberal wish list cutting across the areas of child care, workplace regulation, education, training, and health care. Liberals have been trying to advance this agenda for many years. Is the success (or lack thereof) of this agenda really a matter of “changing the subject” or of the reality that these reforms raise a host of issues about the role of government that are very difficult to resolve politically?

These are minor criticisms, however. Overall, Red Families v. Blue Families makes an important contribution. It is well written, based on a solid theoretical framework, and empirically sound in its use of data. It deserves to be read by all those interested in the politics of family issues and then kept on the shelf as a useful reference on trends in family demographics and family policy.