The following statistics are from the Pew Research Center's 2008 survey on marriage and parenting:

• Forty-one percent of American adults said children are very important to a good marriage. This represents a sharp decline from the 65 percent who offered the same conviction in a 1990 survey.
  
  
• By a margin of nearly 3 to 1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."
  

"The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults," said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project. "Child-rearing values—sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity—seem stale and musty by comparison."

The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from mid-February through mid-March among a random, nationwide sample of 2,020 adults. Its margin of error is 3 percentage points.