As America celebrates its 250th birthday on July Fourth, Americans are staring at a dark and very gloomy prospect for the nation's future: namely, that marriage and the family as we know them are on the downswing.

That can spell nothing short of a dystopian society, and sooner rather than later. With marriage on the decline, and with young men who are fatherless twice as likely to end up in jail as those from a two-parent household, we are facing the prospect of a society with not enough taxpayers to care for a population that is rapidly aging.

But there is hope that this can change so long as Americans grasp what really matters.

Those three words are the eponymous title of a recently released and highly readable book by Tim Goeglein, former special assistant to President George W. Bush and now vice president of Focus on the Family, and Craig Osten, a former political reporter and board member of several nonprofit organizations.

"What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family" offers the reader hard facts, statistics, and a few anecdotal stories about the decline of America's nuclear family since the 1960s — a decade in which so much about the family and society in general was questioned and criticized after generations of being accepted.

The grim legacy of that decade, as the authors carefully delineate and document, is that marriage is declining to the point that, in contrast to 2,315,000 marriages in 2000, there were 1,985,072 in 2021.

On the rise are divorce and children in single-parent households, with more than 70% of Black children now being raised by one parent.

Although this unhappy pattern has been developing for nearly 60 years, there is a factor Goeglein and Osten underscore that has accelerated it most recently: the rise of smartphones, the first of which Apple introduced in 2007.

"Smartphones have caused more upheaval than anything I have seen in my career," therapist Andrew Sofin is quoted as saying in an Institute for Family Studies report cited by the authors. "We've normalized them being intrusive and taking precedence when people are lying in bed, playing Wordle, or scrolling through TikTok rather than talking with each other."

So what are the answers to this gloomy portrait of the world as it is and where it could be headed?

Readers may be surprised to find that there are no easy answers, but there are simple ones: more family meals together, a ban on children under 16 using smartphones, and a restoration of the American male's role as head of the household and a role model for male children.

These are some of the solutions that Goeglein and Osten offer to an unhappy situation that could easily get worse. It won't, they assure us, so long as young families today get a grasp on time together and genuine conversation between parents and children — in other words, what makes the family work and what matters most.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.