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S6 E4: Brad Wilcox, The Role of Family in Social Progress and Challenges
11 Plays1 year ago
Brad Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes, and culture in the U.S. context, and the important role families must play in any project of civic renewal.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Free Mind Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Faculty Fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Family Structure and Socioeconomic Outcomes
00:00:25
Speaker
My guest today is Brad Wilcox.
00:00:27
Speaker
Dr. Wilcox is professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He's also a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss the two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes, and culture in the U.S. context, and the important role families must play in any project of civic renewal.
00:00:52
Speaker
Rad Wilcox, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Great to be here, Matt. Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you because you study the family. And I think as somewhat of an outsider to this field, my impression is that the family is
00:01:10
Speaker
one of the most important, some would say the most important institutions in our life, not just in the lives of individuals, but also in terms of its indirect effects in society. And yet, would it be fair to say that within the ivory tower and a lot of other corners of intellectual life, it's a fairly understudied topic?
Is the Family Understudied in Intellectual Life?
00:01:31
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think the family studied a great deal, you know, in sociology, economics and psychology, but I think, you know,
00:01:38
Speaker
What is sort of the tragedy there in some ways is that I think a lot of kind of the core insights from a lot of research on family life is not necessarily well known when it comes to family structure. And even when it comes to kind of newer research on the relationship between parenthood, say, and happiness for adults in America today. So I think among specialists, there's a lot of good research being done, you know,
00:02:03
Speaker
that comports with reality.
Family's Role in Societal Challenges
00:02:05
Speaker
But I think that that research is not necessarily well known by not just the general public, but by many elites who are kind of weighing in on family issues, you know, in the pages of the New York Times or in Bloomberg or other kinds of venues like that. Yeah, that's a good summary. And I'm going to ask you about the happiness stuff in a bit because you had an interesting exchange recently with Matt Iglesias on Twitter related to an Atlantic article I think you've written recently that I want to talk about.
00:02:32
Speaker
But first, I want to talk about the large social problems that dominate the public discourse. And I'm not just talking about things like poverty and inequality and crime that sometimes are associated with the family.
00:02:46
Speaker
But I'm also talking about things like civic breakdown and lack of trust and the rise in teen and young adult mental health challenges. How important would you say the family is to those trends? And what are some big risk factors or insights that society would do well to pay attention to in these domains?
Core Importance of Family to Civilization
00:03:10
Speaker
Well, the first thing I would say, Matt, is it's important to understand and appreciate that I think the family is the core institution in any civilization. It plays a key role in socializing kids, obviously. It plays a key role in superintending the relationships between women and men, romantic and sexual. It plays a key role in organizing kinship relationships. It's crucial.
00:03:35
Speaker
And I think the tragedy of our moment in part is that we don't much appreciate that in our public conversation or public policies regarding things like you mentioned crime and
00:03:46
Speaker
you know, poverty and economic mobility. On these kinds of outcomes, we often see that, for instance, family structure is one of the top predictors, if not the most important predictor. So, for instance, you know, the work of Raj Chetty at Harvard looking at mobility for poor kids in communities across the United States finds that the number one factor
00:04:07
Speaker
when you're looking at why a region like St. Salt Lake is more conducive to mobility for poor kids, you know, going from rags to riches mobility compared to a region like Atlanta is that there are many more two-parent families in the Salt Lake region than in the Atlanta region, you know, as a share of families in those two regions. So it's kind of just one example of the way in which kind of what happens in our families matters not just for individual kids and adults, but for entire communities.
00:04:37
Speaker
And when families are strong, we're more likely to see, you know, the economy flourishing, the American dream is healthy, crime is lower, incarceration is lower, kids are more likely to be flourishing in their local schools as
Impact of Screen Culture on Families
00:04:50
Speaker
well. So that's part of the story here. But it's also, I think, important to note that when it comes to sort of this newer set of psychological and emotional challenges you referenced,
00:05:00
Speaker
I think that the impact of the family is certainly one part of the puzzle, although it's also the case that sort of the rise of screen culture is a major contributor to all this. I think we have seen an increase in anxiety and depression among young adults and adolescents because they're spending too much time on screens and they're too captured by social media.
00:05:24
Speaker
And that's sort of in some ways orthogonal to what's happening in the family in general. At the same time, work that I've done with
00:05:31
Speaker
Gene Twenge and others indicates, for instance, that kids in non-intact families are particularly vulnerable to kind of falling prey to spending too much time on their screens and to being more anxious, depressed, and sleep deprived as a consequence of that. So I guess the way I think about sort of the newer kind of psychological and emotional problems we're seeing play out on the American scene is that young adults, adolescents, and even adults who are less connected to a strong family are more likely to sort of
00:06:01
Speaker
I think succumb to spending too much time in virtual worlds that aren't good for their emotional well-being.
Stable vs Non-intact Families
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really nice summary. So a follow-up question that's probably remedial for someone in your field, but I think is important for the uninitiated. When you talk about a stable family, a strong family, a two-parent family being important, what is the mechanistic pathway? So how is it that those things reduce the social problems you were discussing, increase social mobility? Obviously, that's decades of research, but as specifically and concisely as you can.
00:06:38
Speaker
So when I talk about intact married family, I'm talking about two parents who've gotten married, stayed married, and today the vast majority of those parents would be heterosexual. More than 99% of intact married families are headed by heterosexual parents. And so it's really kind of this idea that they've gotten together, they've been together, they have a common history with one another and any kids that they have, and their kids are not exposed to instability of one sort or another.
00:07:05
Speaker
If you have kids or if you've babysat little kids or if you have younger siblings, younger cousins, I think you can appreciate that kids thrive on stable routines with stable caregivers. And so an intact married family is that institution in the US that's most likely to deliver that to kids because collaboration, for instance, the main competitor now is way more unstable than marriage for our kids.
00:07:32
Speaker
If your parents are married at your birth you're much more likely to go through life with a stable family at your back and that's good because you know. Today oftentimes both parents at least at some point over the course of your life for working so they're kind of bring in more income.
00:07:49
Speaker
That's good because you don't have to kind of travel between two households and kids don't typically like to navigate between mom and dad's household when they're in school or kind of navigating summer break. It means that there's going to be typically less drama between your two parents, less fighting, less inconsistency as well. So when kids, parents stay together, they're more likely to kind of put a common front.
00:08:16
Speaker
on things like rules and discipline, and that's sort of good for kids' development as well. So there are just any number of ways in which having that stability is helpful. I'd also add too that one of the problems with family breakdown for kids is that it often introduces a new adult into the household, particularly an unrelated male adult into the household.
00:08:40
Speaker
And it's just a fact of life that men who are unrelated to kids are more likely to physically and emotionally abuse them to be kind of a risk factor. I'm not saying obviously every stepfather is, every boyfriend in the household is a problem, but just sort of saying that on average, we know that unrelated adult males can pose a threat to kids.
00:09:06
Speaker
That's just one more reason why having a stable married family kind of protecting you is the best in average. Having said all that, it's important to note also too that most kids who are raised in a non-intact or a single parent household, like myself, I was raised by a single mom, turn out fine on most outcomes. But we also see in the research that there's an increased risk.
00:09:28
Speaker
for things like depression, drug use, delinquency, school suspensions,
Gender Differences in Family Instability
00:09:34
Speaker
not attending college, ending up in prison or in jail for kids whose parents are not stably married. You talked about the gender dynamic in terms of stepfathers. There's also a gender dynamic with the children themselves in the sense that boys are affected much more severely on average by lack of a stable family. Why is that?
00:09:57
Speaker
I think it's important to actually be careful about that. So what we see when kids are stressed out, boys are more likely to basically engage in things where they're kind of acting out that we call externalizing in the research literature. And that's manifested by things like getting in fights, you know,
00:10:15
Speaker
floundering at school, getting arrested, ending up incarcerated, whereas girls are more likely to do what's called internalize, where they turn inward emotionally. They're more anxious and depressed when things are not going well on the home front. And so I think when you look at how boys are affected, they're more likely
00:10:36
Speaker
to be affected in ways that are visible in school and in the criminal justice system, whereas girls are more likely to be affected in ways that perhaps are more subtle and more emotional. And then also too, I think there's some evidence that when it comes to things like having your own
00:10:55
Speaker
your own family outside of marriage and having a teen pregnancy, for instance, or being a teen parent, that that's more likely to be manifested for girls than boys. So I think you have to just realize that family instability, family chaos affects both boys and girls, but in often different ways.
00:11:10
Speaker
That's a great explanation. Thanks for that clarification.
Trends in Family Stability Since the 1960s
00:11:13
Speaker
Okay. So I think it's the case that however you want to define it, two parent family, stable family, intact family, the fraction of families that have those characteristics, or if you prefer the fraction of children that grow up in families that have those characteristics has been in decline, correct? From the late 1960s to, you know, around
00:11:37
Speaker
2012, we have seen a pretty consistent decline in the share of kids being raised in stable married families. In recent years, we've seen a slight uptick in the share of kids being raised in a stable married family and that's because divorce has come down since 1980 and non-middle childbearing has leveled off since about 2009. And so you kind of put those two things together and what you see is that kids who are being
00:12:03
Speaker
born into married families are actually seeing a slight increase in the stability of their family lives, you know, compared to, say, how it would have been 1975. And then overall, it's just a slight increase in family stability for kids. So what we would estimate is that more than, slightly more than one in two kids today will spend the duration of their childhood with their own married parents.
00:12:26
Speaker
So the big story is that, yeah, the big story is one of decline from the sixties to the present, but it's just important to acknowledge has been a slight uptick in stable families in the last few years. And that's obviously concentrated among kids who are born to married parents. That's really interesting. So as best as we understand it first, the sixties to 2012 period, what are the causes of the decline in stable married families?
00:12:54
Speaker
So this is kind of an overdetermined pattern that we're seeing. So I think what we see in the sixties and seventies is obviously a great deal of cultural changes, the rise of what's sort of called the knee decade in the seventies. People are thinking a lot more about their own desires and less about their family obligations. We're seeing an increasingly secular society where people are recording less authority and the less likely to be a part of religious institutions.
00:13:22
Speaker
We're seeing kind of the rise of feminism where women are expecting more from marriage and family than they did in previous generations. A lot of that's good, but it also can lead to more instability. So there are all these kind of cultural changes that are playing out in the sixties and seventies and they've been with us really since then. We also see legal changes, the rise of no fault divorce that kind of
00:13:43
Speaker
weaken the power of marriage law in people's lives. We're seeing welfare policies that end up penalizing marriage among poor and working class couples. And we're seeing a shift in the economy where men who don't have college degrees are much less likely to be stably employed full time and the women in their lives are more likely to be earning
00:14:03
Speaker
know, better and better incomes. They're less kind of dependent upon the men economically in their lives. So these economic changes, these policy changes, and these cultural changes all kind of come together to weaken family life since the 1960s.
Influence of Social Networks on Families
00:14:18
Speaker
And it's also important to know that we are, you know, social animals and that we are profoundly affected by what we see happening among our
00:14:28
Speaker
peers among our family members and our friends. And so if you were in the 1970s and your best friend got divorced and your older sister got divorced and you're having trouble in your marriage,
00:14:40
Speaker
you're going to think at that point in time divorce is the way to deal with this. Whereas if you're kind of in a more recent cohort and you're college educated and you might hear from your best girlfriend that she's having some difficulty in your marriage, but she and her husband are going for counseling and they managed to work it out. When you hit that difficult chapter in your marriage, you're probably more likely to try to figure it out and stay together than to get divorced.
00:15:06
Speaker
Again, I think part of what's happening both in the 60s and 70s and then recently is that all these factors are also mediated through our social networks in ways that either augment family instability or actually minimize it in some groups today.
Welfare Policies and Marriage Stability
00:15:22
Speaker
Great. So let me follow up on a couple of those.
00:15:24
Speaker
So you mentioned welfare programs as incentivizing single parent families. And that is an argument that I think has been common among conservatives for the last few decades. The other argument that I've heard more from liberals is that we would do well
00:15:43
Speaker
to promote the upper mobility and well-being of her young people and maybe even the stability of her families by having more social welfare more cheaper school public education access to college health care child care maternity leave. Are those conflicting stories or those two stories that focus on different parts of the welfare system in different ways and what's your take on this.
00:16:10
Speaker
So I think there are somewhat distinct arguments being made here. So I think the conservative argument, which I basically buy, is that when you look at kind of the sort of calculus that young adults, couples, people having kids back in the sixties and seventies could make or were making, basically they sort of had this reality unfolding where it often made more sense for a couple having kids not to marry, you know, because a single mom could get more money or more benefits from the federal government.
00:16:40
Speaker
from a state agency than she could were she to be married to the father of the kids. And that dynamic has continued to play out in different ways, you know, since although it hits working class couples now more than it does poor couples. So we've seen data, for instance, that indicates that say working class couple with, I think, two kids in Arkansas would have about a 30% hit to their real income were they to marry rather than just have the mom kind of
00:17:05
Speaker
apply for a number of different benefits like Medicaid and SNAP and the income tax credit. So that's one reality. So the issue there is that the way in which we means test programs
00:17:17
Speaker
leads to a situation where if your income goes above a certain level, you either lose a benefit or you lose a portion of the benefit. That means we've got marriage penalties that are affecting poor working class couples at different points in our recent history. That's played out in different ways at different points in time. Now, it is true that most progressives would discount the effect of welfare on
00:17:39
Speaker
you know, trends in marriage and single parenthood. I'm not saying it's the only factor, but I do think it's one factor, you know, and it's a factor obviously that affected poor and African American couples and families, you know, just because they're disproportionately affected by means tested programs, you know, in the sixties and thereafter. So that's sort of one part of the, of the argument. Now, in terms of the sort of progressive response, they're more likely to kind of make a case today for kind of universal policies.
00:18:08
Speaker
for universal child allowance, for instance, and for say, something like universal access to health care and even a college education as well. And the thought there from their perspective is that if you make these things universal, you're not going to have any marriage penalties built into them. And so you would kind of make people's lives materially easier and you would not be penalizing marriage. And for those two reasons, you would see stronger and more stable marriages and families.
00:18:37
Speaker
And I think that might be explored in certain kinds of ways, in certain kinds of policy contexts. Certainly when it comes to healthcare, for instance, I think that there's a case to be made for that progressive perspective. But what I think they don't appreciate is that if you are giving people a lot of
00:18:56
Speaker
free public goods. Number one, you're going to have to pay for them in ways that are going to often affect middle-class families' tax burden and their capacity to support their own families in a context where they're going to be paying a lot more in taxes. And then secondarily, they're often, I think, minimizing the need for young men, middle-aged men to function effectively as good providers. And so one of my problems with the universal child allowance is that it allows
00:19:26
Speaker
single moms to have kids and raise kids on their own without any support from the father financially. So just kind of reinforces a pretty profoundly negative dynamic in many poor and working class communities where men are not expected to and often don't really do much in the way of providing financially for their mate and for their kids. And that is not good for the men.
00:19:49
Speaker
It's not good for their relationships with the women in their lives. It's not good for their kids, not to see a father in the household providing and showing up for work every morning in the week. So again, I think that my primary problem with the progressive agenda is that there is really no recognition that they're often creating a series of programs and systems that make working class and poor men
00:20:13
Speaker
redundant or unneeded. And that only increases a lot of the more sobering family dynamics that we're already seeing play out in poor working class families across the US. So really interesting, quick follow up question about that. So this reminds me of climate in a weird way, but hear me out.
00:20:36
Speaker
One of the things that comes up a lot in climate is what we call hysteresis or path dependency. For example, there had been times in the geologic record, I'm pretty sure, where we had temperatures and CO2 concentrations similar today and much, much, much less ice. Basically, the reason is if you're melting ice,
00:20:59
Speaker
Growing ice versus melting ice kind of happens at a different temperature. So you have to be a lot colder to grow the ice than to melt it, I think.
Debate on Welfare Benefits and Marriage Rates
00:21:07
Speaker
Okay. So what did that has to do with what we were just talking about is the following, right? So I think a lot of our listeners are going to buy the argument that when you put these incentives in place in what was previously communities that had high rates of marriage and intact families, which I think is regardless of what community you're talking about, whether you're talking about poor urban communities or Appalachian communities is the case. I think it's easy to buy the argument that you're putting forward that these incentives contributed to the decline in marriage.
00:21:37
Speaker
What about going the other way, right? So if we took away, say, welfare programs, whether it's SNAP or child benefit or whatever it is, do you think that the result would be at least immediately more marriage or would it just be more destitute poverty for children? If the latter, what do you do about it?
00:21:55
Speaker
Sure. Well, I think we actually already have, we've conducted this experiment, right? So in 1996, we had welfare reform, you know, Republican Congress, Democratic president, Bill Clinton said we were going to end welfare as we knew what we did. And we made it much tougher for people to get welfare without, you know, without a job, basically. And there were other kinds of, you know, reforms that were passed. And before welfare reform passed, there were many voices, including Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who kind of
00:22:21
Speaker
projected that there would be just absolute chaos. There'd be tons of families and kids that would be left destitute by this welfare reform agenda. And when it passed, none of the great forecasts of destitution came to fruition. There were obviously some people who suffered, but in the main, we saw actually child poverty fall, including poverty fall for single mothers in large part because
00:22:49
Speaker
that the average single mom was more likely to be working in the wake of welfare reform than she was prior welfare reform. Now, there are some negative outcomes that we see with some child measures in the wake of welfare reform, but in the main, it worked to reconnect a lot of single moms to the workplace. It also was the case, the dramatic increase in non-marital child bearing and some apparent that had
00:23:14
Speaker
played out prior to welfare reform kind of slowed down the wake of welfare reform. There are debates among academics about whether welfare reform was a key factor in all this, but you can't kind of deny that kind of the pace of family change and the increase in single motherhood really kind of slowed down once welfare reform had passed and become institutionalized. So, you know, if we were to kind of go forward from here,
00:23:41
Speaker
I think that if we were to reform our welfare policies in ways that were even more marriage friendly, we might see even better outcomes than we saw with all the reform. I'm not convinced, I'm not saying that we should go to zero on any of these programs, but I just think that we could think about re-envisioning them in ways that are more marriage
Pro-marriage Strategies in the Military
00:24:04
Speaker
friendly. So for instance,
00:24:06
Speaker
What we see in the US military is that, this is based upon research, it's about 10 years old, so I would like to see new work on this front, but it's one of the few places where there isn't really a big class divide or a big racial divide in marriage. Some people say that the federal government has never successfully prosecuted a pro-marriage policy, but that's not true.
00:24:29
Speaker
If you look at the military, it's a place where you can't get benefits for your partner unless you're married to him or her. So talk about housing benefits, healthcare benefits, especially. And those are meaningful benefits in the military. And so what we see is that marriage rates are much higher in the military and that there isn't really a big, for instance, racial divide in the share of whites and blacks are married, unless the folks are married at higher rates and they're equivalent civilian peers.
00:24:56
Speaker
So if we think about that as one example, we could kind of imagine other ways that our mean system programs could be reconfigured to be more marriage-friendly. So one example would be, for instance, on Medicaid, just to kind of raise the threshold for married couples with kids in terms of who gets access to Medicaid. And so doing, eliminate that marriage penalty that many working-class couples now face when it comes to thinking about, you know, marriage versus Medicare, certain Medicaid for their, you know, family health care.
00:25:26
Speaker
So would it be fair to say that the debate about should welfare programs be more or less marriage friendly can almost be separated from the question of should they be bigger or smaller? The other area where I think somebody might just steal down what you were just saying, somebody might say, well, if you look at Scandinavia, they have a lot more social welfare programs. I'm not sure what their marriage statistics are like, but they certainly have much less of
00:25:53
Speaker
some of the social problems that in America we associate with family breakdown. Yes, I think we should distinguish between kind of public spending and or the size of programs and their marriage friendliness. So when I talk about kind of making our mean system programs more marriage friendly would be in the short term that we would probably spend more because we would have higher thresholds for married families, working class families with kids. We might want to having done that kind of then rethink how we, you know,
00:26:21
Speaker
how we organize them, how we could consolidate them, et cetera. But what I'm saying is just sort of one issue, sort of how much we spend and what we do in sort of the social welfare space versus are we spending in ways that do or do not reinforce marriage or at least not cumulize marriage as a way of life.
00:26:39
Speaker
In terms of the Sweden point, I think Sweden's a very different society than the United States. Marriage is weaker in Sweden, but there's also much more of a collectivist ethos in Sweden that I think helps to foster solidarity in that country.
Cultural and Social Welfare Differences: US vs Sweden
00:26:56
Speaker
America is a much more individualistic society than Sweden is. And so we necessarily depend, I think, more on our nuclear families to give core social and material support to our adults and kids than is the case in Sweden. So it's people who talk about the Swedish model have to recognize that it's really a very different country and
00:27:22
Speaker
were we to kind of move to that model for it to work require not just more spending and more generous programs, a much more collectivist ethos in terms of the norms that govern social life are much more stringent in Sweden. You know, you have to kind of do things a certain way. If you're not, you're sanctioned, you know, by stigma. So it's just, I think we'd be careful about thinking that we could just easily switch to the Swedish model here in the US.
00:27:47
Speaker
So it's a really interesting point and a perfect segue to the second thing I wanted to follow up on. And that is you mentioned
00:27:54
Speaker
what I think Jean Twenge refers to as the narcissism epidemic. Basically the rise in me culture you talked about in the, I think in Gen X, but of course people are also talking about it in terms of millennials and Gen Z. And maybe a way to put it in regard to what you were just saying is, is there a way to have a strong society without a sense of duty in some domain of life?
00:28:19
Speaker
One way I think to rephrase what you were talking about earlier is that in America, because we're an individualistic culture, the family is a place where we have historically had a sense of duty.
00:28:32
Speaker
and that was binding especially for maybe for husbands to avoid the problem of aimless young men that is well known to be challenging for society's societal stability. It sounds like you're saying Sweden has this sense of duty in another way through its collectivist culture. Am I getting to the rub of it or is there something more to it than that?
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, this is just a basic, you know, sociology 101, right? I mean, I think a lot of Americans are a little bit naive about the way the society works. I think it's about rights and freedoms and, you know, and that's about it. But, you know, if people are going to respect your rights, you know, if you're going to be able to kind of navigate our society freely about worrying about, you know, people stealing things from you or in other ways harming you, then they have to also kind of
00:29:20
Speaker
be aware of their responsibilities and their duties towards others. And then also, if you fall into some kind of difficulty, whether it's an illness or the loss of a job, for instance.
00:29:35
Speaker
then talk about rights and freedoms becomes a lot less compelling, right? And much more likely looking for people to be caring for you and helping you either financially or with healthcare of one sort or another. So yeah, I think any successful society needs to have basically ways to sort of reinforce solidarity where people are caring for the vulnerable, whether that's the young, the older, or adults who are in some way impaired or injured or sick.
00:30:01
Speaker
And the family is one vehicle for doing that and the state can be another vehicle for that. Obviously civil society too, whether it's churches or other community institutions can be sort of vehicles for solidarity, what Burke called the little platoons. So I think historically three of the really important ways that solidarity has been promoted in America are through the family, through patriotism,
00:30:29
Speaker
or what people call civic religion, and then through actual religion, all three of which have largely been in decline, except maybe for this slight uptick recently in family structure that you talked about earlier. How do we get it back?
Decline in Social Norms and its Impact
00:30:41
Speaker
I would say that I think this story is pretty negative, at least in terms of the polling that the Wall Street Journal has been doing and that NORC, the University of Chicago has been doing, that we're seeing pretty marked declines in the public's regard for patriotism, faith, and family. Even though actual kids who are being born and raised today are more likely to be raised in technically families at the margins,
00:31:04
Speaker
there are many fewer kids being born today than was the case, you know, say 15 years ago. And so what that means is sort of the average adult was a shift from the kids to the adult perspective. The average adult is living a much more anomic life today than was the case even 10 years ago in terms of being less likely to be married, less likely to be attending religious services, less likely to have a strong sense of patriotism. And so there's just fewer norms,
00:31:31
Speaker
fewer social events, more loneliness kind of playing out. And that does not spell
00:31:38
Speaker
anything good for not just the emotional wellbeing of adults in the US, but just kind of the capacity for this Republic to flourish. Because I think, you know, we've seen certainly from the 20th century that when people feel rootless and disconnected from others, they're more likely to succumb to, you know, the siren songs of demagogues of one stripe or another.
00:32:03
Speaker
So how do we fix it? And obviously it's not something that's easy or else we've done it already, but is there anything that, and it doesn't just have to be policy at, you know, one of my pet peeves in left dominated academia is that anytime there's a problem, the first thing we talk about is policy, but maybe there are, maybe there's policies. Some people have talked about this idea of mandatory civic years.
00:32:24
Speaker
Right. You can imagine civil society, simple things like let's not socially reward people who espouse nihilistic views towards important institutions. What else can we do? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously from my perspective, I mean, there are lots of things one could do in different sectors and spheres, but I think, you know, I think renewing marriage and family is crucial. And so part of the case is just sort of, you know, there is just sort of helping people understand that
00:32:53
Speaker
like work and money and education, while important, don't compare to marriage when it comes to your odds of flourishing in terms of meaning and happiness and a sense of sociability. Married Americans are much more likely to be happy with their lives. They're much more likely to report meaningful lives than their peers who are not married and don't have kids. And because we're social animals, having opportunities to care for others and to be
00:33:22
Speaker
part of families is extraordinarily important for our well-being. So I think trying to kind of get young adults to appreciate how much marriage matters, giving them opportunities to date more successfully, kind of giving them some strategies for dating would be, I think, helpful. Also kind of trying to strengthen and stabilize existing marriages and families too to kind of give those families a greater shot at success and also to kind of
00:33:48
Speaker
make sort of the cause of marriage and family more attractive to people who are not themselves yet married would be good.
Proposals for Supporting Stable Marriages
00:33:56
Speaker
So that means concretely two terms of policies, doing things like eliminating the marriage penalty, that means intermeans testing programs and policies. It means eventually I think reforming divorce law to make it more kind of
00:34:10
Speaker
conducive to lifelong marriages. It means doing more to educate kids in both public and private schools about both the benefits of marriage and some of the steps they can take as young adults to increase their odds of forging a good marriage as adults. And it also means, I think, recognizing that for those young adults who have either any kind of religious formation or an openness to
00:34:41
Speaker
a religious tradition of one sort or another, that they're much more likely to succeed in getting and staying married and being happily married by connecting themselves to some kind of local religious congregation. So those are a couple of ideas that I think would strengthen marriage and family, and that would be a major help to reviving the fortunes of the American experiment.
00:35:06
Speaker
So the religion thing is really interesting and I want to come back to it at the end. But first, one thing that you alluded to, which you've written about is the happiness benefit of marriage. And am I correct in remembering that that's especially large advantage for moms? I think you had an article in the Atlantic recently that you called the married mom. In the Atlantic, because we're just sort of saying that we're not sort of comparing moms to dads. We're just sort of saying that, you know, I've just been struck by
00:35:36
Speaker
the number of negative articles published in the New York Times and the Atlantic and Bloomberg, other, other kind of venues as well, just sort of basically saying that, you know, marriage and motherhood are difficult, hard, misery inducing, depending upon the article. But there's just been so many of them published since COVID hit. And obviously COVID was tough times for many families and couples. But what these articles overwhelmingly neglect to mention is that as tough as it was for
00:36:06
Speaker
many married people to navigate COVID and fathers and mothers COVID. It's still the case that on average they did better than their childless and single peers. So that was true for both moms and for fathers. And that's what I pointed out for moms in the Atlantic, which my colleague Wendy Wong.
Women's Happiness and Family Roles
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I saw that article, it reminded me of this quite famous pattern that I think Betsy Stevenson and Justin Bulvers were among the first to describe called the paradox of declining female happiness. And so I think the pattern is that, you know, 50 years ago, there was a happiness gap on average favoring women, and that gap has closed.
00:36:48
Speaker
largely due to female happiness declining, and the reason it's a paradox is that it coincides temporally with the large increase in women's rights and women's access to the workplace and other male-dominated spaces. Is that pattern related to the decline in intact stable married families that we were just talking about earlier? How should I understand that pattern in general?
00:37:16
Speaker
I don't want to make any strong claims about women's experience in particular since the 70s, because that's a whole other literature. But what I would say is that I have looked at trends in unhappiness since 2004, adults ages 18 to 55 in the US. And I can say that there's no question that increases in reports of unhappiness are higher among adults in their prime
00:37:45
Speaker
who are not married and that the gap between the unmarrieds and the marrieds on this outcome, this negative outcome of happiness has been growing since 2000. So I think it's quite plausible to say that part of the challenge facing adults today, both men and women, is they're less likely to be married and less likely to enjoy the fruits of a good marriage. It's important to note also here that when I look at kind of what predicts global life satisfaction,
00:38:12
Speaker
A lot of Americans today think it's more about money or work or maybe even education, but there's just no question that the number one predictor of global happiness or global life satisfaction in the data that I see is a good marriage. What we see is that couples who are happily married are just way more happy with their lives in general compared to both couples who are not happily married and people who are not married.
00:38:35
Speaker
When you kind of report that finding, people would say, well, maybe it's just that happy folks end up being happily married and having a life in general. And that's a legitimate, I think, pushback. But what that doesn't appreciate is that no other factor in the data that I've looked at predicts global life satisfaction like a happy marriage. So for instance, having a satisfying job is definitely a predictor of being happy with your life in general.
00:39:00
Speaker
but not nearly as powerful predictor as having a happy marriage. So I'm just trying to get people to understand and appreciate that our current cultures focus often on money and job and on education and they sort of markers of status to some extent, often I think puts people on the wrong path when they should be focusing more on family and friendship.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, so the reason I asked you about if there was a gender difference there is that as far as I understand it, there's a liberal and a conservative you might say take on the pattern that I just described in Stevenson and Wolfer's data. And the liberal take is a combination of
00:39:39
Speaker
Well, it used to be that there were social norms against women complaining, and so maybe some of the change is survey bias in the older data. The other aspect of what you might call liberal explanation is that
00:39:55
Speaker
You know as women have taken on more and more roles in the workplace it's not necessarily the clear that they've taken on less roles in the home and so are they maybe just being squeezed in terms of their their time and obligation and then the more conservative. I would say take on it is that as much as the way that those social roles were enforced was certainly in some ways restrictive and oppressive to women there's also an element again on average across large group people of the.
00:40:23
Speaker
the social role of the, you know, mother figure that was really important to women's wellbeing in a way that wasn't appreciated. And then as kind of a maybe necessary evil of the movement towards women's liberation was culturally downplayed, the importance of that role in the happiness of some women. What do you think of those two stories? And is there any story there that I've missing?
00:40:48
Speaker
I think that there's no question that newer opportunities in education and work have been the source of real added happiness for many women in the United States in recent decades. At the same time, though, I think what we are suffering from is a lack of appreciation for how much being a spouse and parent
00:41:18
Speaker
can mean for people and also we don't accord as enough status towards being a good spouse and a good parent as we can and should. And so people often feel like if they're investing a lot in their husband or their wife or their kids, especially as say a stay-at-home mother, for instance, those investments are not given a lot of status in their peer groups, particularly if they're in more elite
00:41:46
Speaker
social networks. And so that I think means that people often invest less in their families than they might otherwise if there was kind of a different status mix for family investments. And I think that that in turn is
00:42:01
Speaker
One reason why we have seen kind of a decline in marriage and parenthood, you know, playing out in recent years and that in turn is I think one reason why we're seeing more, you know, adults reporting that they're not too happy with their lives or that they're not completely satisfied with their lives. The other thing that I would say is that it's also the case too that conservative women are happier today than liberal women. Conservative men are as well compared to liberal men.
00:42:28
Speaker
But it looks like the gap is bigger for women than for men, and that the gap is more about family status and satisfaction for women than it is for men. So what that means concretely is that conservative women are happy with their lives and liberal women, and that's in part because they're more likely to be married, they're more likely to be satisfied with their family lives compared to liberal women. So certainly today, at least, the sort of family divide
00:42:53
Speaker
that separates conservative and liberal women is noteworthy and one of the big factors explaining why one group is happier and the other group is less happy with their lives. So this gets at a tension within feminism that I think Christina Hoff Sommers describes as between freedom feminism and equity feminism.
Gender Roles and Public Life
00:43:14
Speaker
And it actually came up in a recent episode I recorded with Alice Evans, who's a scholar from University College London. And basically the crux of it is, okay, so in the context that you were just describing, suppose that we achieved a society where
00:43:29
Speaker
People valued family more people value there was more status given to caregiving social roles as a spouse and parent we made it you know punishable for corporations to punish people for working part time i think it's.
00:43:44
Speaker
probably reasonable to predict that all of those things would at least be very likely to contribute to a retreat of women in some aspects of economic and public life. So just to give some specific examples, I believe the Netherlands passed such a law where you couldn't
00:44:04
Speaker
punish people for working part-time and something like 60% of women now work part-time in the Netherlands. There was a study that I just saw today that showed that people who chose majors following the idea of following their passions had larger segregation by gender than people who didn't. And the authors of the study sort of framed this negatively as sort of this is teaching people to follow their passions is going to reduce gender, increase gender inequality in the sciences.
00:44:32
Speaker
And when I was talking to Alice Evans, one of the things that she said was that in the context of a culture of patriarchy, as she put it, freedom can be an illusion, right? And so she gave an example of, it was pretty stark in India, I think, where there's, you know, extremely restrictive religious patriarchal norms. But I think she had a little bit of a harder time explaining it in the context of, you know, I gave an example of a Western woman who had grown up that somebody I know who had grown up in a
00:45:02
Speaker
very hard-working two-parent family of recent immigrants and didn't feel like she had a good relationship with her parents and so for that reason chose intentionally to stay at home with her children when they were little and doesn't see that as a choice that was in post or in any way and if there was any kind of pushback it's been kind of from feminists or if you're a bad feminist.
00:45:20
Speaker
But on the other hand to steel man maybe what's the perspective that al sevens was discussing an earlier episode it is probably true that if this happened right that if we had more gender segregation in high paying occupations and disciplines if we had more gender segregation in.
00:45:37
Speaker
you know, status and power seeking roles in government, that I think it would be reasonable to worry about a decline in women's influence in major societal decisions and major economic decisions. And so it does seem like there's a real tension there. What do you think about that? Do you see that too? And if so, you know, how do you think we should think about resolving it?
Occupation Preferences by Gender
00:45:59
Speaker
I think we have obviously moved to a society where women are playing in, you know,
00:46:03
Speaker
a large role in much of our public life and much of our commercial life.
00:46:10
Speaker
obviously in many sectors are now kind of outperforming men, whether it's medicine or psychology, for instance. So I think we have to sort of recognize that we're kind of at a different place than we were in the 1970s when all of these concerns were first articulated. There are certain sectors of the economy that are dominated more by men, but often I think when you look at those sectors, you see that some of this interest is related to sort of the difference between
00:46:39
Speaker
Men and women's interest sort of in persons versus things as a sort of classic psychological distinction where men tend to gravitate towards, you know, things and going towards, towards person related professions. One thing that's striking too is that the sort of the gender paradox we've seen play out in Scandinavia is that sort of the more,
00:46:57
Speaker
Relatively affluent societies that give women a lot of options are ones where women actually tend to gravitate towards more person-centered professions. By contrast, in Scandinavia, men tend to still focus more on
00:47:09
Speaker
you know, things like engineering and the marketplace and women tend to focus more on jobs with the government, you know, that are more person centered. So I think that's where Alison's perspective may not really be is you don't need to talk about India, you can talk about Sweden, you know, and how this dynamic is playing out in Sweden. So I think you have to sort of basically grant this idea that there are some differences by sex and what women and men want to do, both when it comes to work and when it comes to family.
00:47:36
Speaker
would be willing to live with those differences rather than to deny them. And again, they're playing out in places like Sweden. But in terms of just the family front, I do think it is the case that we see in the United States, for instance, that the most popular option for married moms today is to work part-time, and yet we don't have
00:47:55
Speaker
sort of a culture in our businesses and our employers, not to mention kind of in terms of law and benefits that really reinforces that option for married moms. And so I think we should kind of move more in the direction of the Netherlands to make this kind of option more accessible to married moms. I think that would be good for their own welfare, their own emotional wellbeing.
00:48:19
Speaker
their capacity to spend more time with their kids and for the happiness and satisfaction of families across the US. It would mean a certain shift in their engagement with the workplace at that point in their lives, but I think that is fine so long as this is what the women in those contexts are wanting to do for themselves and their families.
00:48:44
Speaker
Relatedly, what about one of the things that I've heard from some of the women in my life is that there also needs to be more options for coming back after a long absence. So there's some women who want to, and some men who when they have young kids want to stay at home or they want to work part time, but what about the ones who want to stay home for maybe 10 years while their children get through elementary school and then want to come back?
00:49:11
Speaker
Are there any models that you know of analogous to the Netherlands with part-time for facilitating that?
00:49:17
Speaker
So I think, again, I think trying to get companies and nonprofits and government agencies to be more open to bringing back stay-at-home parents is good, although I think in this kind of labor market, there are plenty of nonprofits and businesses and government agencies that are willing to do that as long as the person has the requisite skills. But we can always do more, I think, to help on-ramps be strengthened for people coming back into labor force from spending time at home.
00:49:45
Speaker
But then also thinking about policy changes, and I know that I think American Compass, for instance, has produced a report detailing some shifts in policy related to things like social security that would make it easier for people to step out of the workforce and then step back in without paying a big penalty when it comes to their benefits once they're retired. So there are some policy, I think, levers that can be pulled
00:50:10
Speaker
that would make it more financially attractive to take time off a full-time track to be at home with your kids at a work part-time so you can be with your kids more and yet not necessarily pay as big a financial penalty in some of our public programs for doing so.
00:50:28
Speaker
Okay, so we're almost out
Religion's Role in Civic Cohesion and Happiness
00:50:29
Speaker
of time. I want to make sure I ask you this and this will be our last topic and that is religion. So religion has come up in a couple of different contexts related to this family issue.
00:50:41
Speaker
The first is civic cohesion. Religion undoubtedly is, it's clear in the data as far as I understand it, has historically been a driver of civic cohesion, at least within the group. And certainly in the US, it's the case that people who are regularly attending religious services, I believe, report higher civic trust and other kinds of measures of civic engagement.
00:51:04
Speaker
And then birth rates, there's a similar pattern, right? So people who are part of religious communities have higher birth rates. One of the challenges that's facing 21st century rich societies is, you know, what to do about low birth rates and potentially declining populations and the economic problems that causes. And I believe the only country that's considered rich that has a birth rate above replacement is Saudi Arabia.
00:51:28
Speaker
where religion is obviously a factor there. Okay, the reason why I wanted to, the thing I wanted to ask you is basically that I see a tension between religion as a solution to birth rates and to civic cohesion and the ethic of the secular society.
00:51:45
Speaker
It seems to me that in America we're quite comfortable with the idea of religious freedom for the most part. So if individuals want to be part of a religious group, they should. They should have the freedom to do that. They should have the freedom to live by the norms of that group. But we're not very comfortable with blurring lines between church and state. So if we decided that religion has to be part of the solution
00:52:09
Speaker
to declining civic engagement and declining birth rates, I think a large segment of the country, frankly, myself included, would be quite uncomfortable with that. So I guess my question is, if religion can't be a lever for, like, if religion continues to decline as sort of a fraction of the population, despite the higher birth rates, it seems like either that would have to change organically, or there have to be some kind of a coercive
00:52:36
Speaker
aspect to changing it, as we've seen dramatic examples of in places like Iran and Afghanistan. Or we'd have to fill the roles in society that religion has filled in terms of providing civic support for the family and civic life with other things.
00:52:53
Speaker
Is there a fourth option I'm missing? And if so, you know, what are the best and most realistic options there? Because it seems like the option of, you know, continuing to decline is somewhat dystopian. And I think to many people, the option of, you know, state imposed religion is also quite dystopian.
00:53:08
Speaker
Yes, I think it's just one thing it's important to just realize is that just as a factual matter, I think people often have the sense of, you know, like religion is kind of a pathological reality in today's world. So I think part of the challenge, you know, for young adults especially is to realize that
00:53:24
Speaker
Yes, there are the Duggars, there are, you know, Southern Baptist pastors, there are Catholic priests, and I'm Catholic, you know, who have done horrible things, you know, and have really kind of lived in ways that are profoundly evil and wrong, but that on average, people who are kind of engaged in their own religious communities are more likely to be flourishing. So for instance, Gallup, you know, surveyed people on a variety of, you know, fronts across the pandemic, and the only group that really kind of managed to sort of maintain their
00:53:52
Speaker
a plumb across the pandemic were Americans who were regularly attending religious services in person across the pandemic. And happiness, there's no question when those people are happier, more likely to get married, have kids, stably married, they're less stressed out than other Americans. So on a whole bunch of outcomes, the average religious person is doing better.
00:54:13
Speaker
And so I think it's important for people to recognize and appreciate that kind of the generic religious congregation is a place where you can flourish. And so again, if you have a religious bone in your body or you're open to that, you know, I think it's worth knowing that, you know, being a part of a community for yourself and your kids ends up being a pretty great thing. So I think if we could kind of in a sense do a better job of just conveying the truth about religion, that would be helpful in sort of reshaping people's norms and practices.
School Choice and Religious Education
00:54:42
Speaker
I'm not suggesting that a kind of state establishment of a particular tradition or of religion in general would be very helpful. And I think we have to understand and appreciate that in Iran, for instance, they've had obviously state-sanctioned faith since the Shah fell. And
00:55:03
Speaker
And what's happened in Iran is that marriage and fertility are also actually going down pretty dramatically in recent years. And people are not likely to identify with or embrace a faith that is kind of forced upon them. So I don't think that's the solution. But I think there are ways in which we could kind of increase this sort of sphere of operation
00:55:26
Speaker
or the latitude that religious institutions have in our country in ways that would be, in my view, consistent with American traditions of religious freedom, but would kind of give religious groups more functional kind of authority in American life. And so one obvious example is kind of to really increase, as we are now, school choice measures across the US to give more religious schools, Catholic, evangelical, Muslim, Jewish, whatever
00:55:52
Speaker
opportunities to get vouchers that they could use to educate the young in ways that are consistent with their own faith tradition and would also, I think, have the benefit of often stressing the value of marriage and family much more than we see currently in our public schools. That's a concrete example. Now, you might not like the example, but it's one that's not having the state put the thumb on one faith, but it does give those institutions more latitude to exercise a key role in the cultural formation of the next generation.
00:56:22
Speaker
So I try not to show my cards too much in some of these interviews, but school choice is actually an issue where I have changed my mind. So I'm a Canadian. I moved here being kind of like pretty convinced by the, you know, public schools, public schools only kind of model. And I have to say for a number of reasons that don't have time to get into in this episode, I've come around to the school choice.
00:56:44
Speaker
I'm really glad that you made the distinction, which I think is really important, between state-imposed religion, which many people see as pathological, and just religion, which I totally agree is not pathological, right? And certainly is associated with those good outcomes you say. Maybe as a last question, so the solutions that you offered, in some sense, I see as stop the bleeding kind of solutions, right? So school choice might keep
00:57:09
Speaker
members of religious communities within the religious communities, but they're not going to probably bring too many new kids into the religious communities. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. But it seems like the intent is primarily to allow communities to practice their faith as opposed to to grow their faith. I see
00:57:24
Speaker
So you talked earlier about how you know there's all these statistics that show that people who are in stable marriages and stable families are flourishing. And if we knew that that would help convince people to make those choices more that seems like a logically straightforward argument i think with religion the challenge is.
00:57:43
Speaker
is there's this middle step, right? So you can show people the statistics that say that people who are members of religious communities are flourishing more, but then the middle step is that you have to adopt a specific set of beliefs which aren't directly necessarily the cause of that flourishing, right? Maybe indirectly they are. I imagine it being easier to go to somebody and say,
00:58:07
Speaker
You know, married people do better, right? Kids and married families do better. You should get married. Okay. Versus, you know, people who go to religious services do better. They have more stable lives. Therefore, you should believe, you know, a specific origin story about the planet, right? Because that's a little bit of a cartoon, a caricature of it. But that's kind of what I'm getting at. What's your response to that? I think on the religion piece, I think that there are
00:58:28
Speaker
Number one, I think it's important to note that religious people have more kids than secular people. There's a pretty decent-sized gap. And so I think if religious schools were more plentiful, it'd be easier for them to raise their kids up in their own traditions than it currently is. So I think retention would be higher is what I'm saying if there were more religious schools potentially. The other thing I think to note about just the appeal of
00:58:52
Speaker
flaking into religious school or religious congregation is that I think there are plenty of folks who are on the fence. In my own church, my own local Catholic church, there are plenty of folks who are not hardcore Catholics, but who show up on many a Sunday. They like the ritual, they like being together as a family. It's something to do on Sunday morning. I think that there are plenty of folks who, if they were given some moderate degree of encouragement,
00:59:19
Speaker
be more likely to show up at a, you know, at a church or a synagogue or whatever else it might be.
Religious Institutions' Cultural Influence
00:59:24
Speaker
And the same thing is true for religious schools. You know, particularly since COVID, we've had a lot of non-Catholic families come to our kids Catholic school. The parents have been overwhelmed by how much more
00:59:35
Speaker
orderly it is, how much warmer it is, how much more effective it is in educating the kids than the public schools in our county. And I'm sure at the margins, the parents are more friendly towards the Catholic Church than they would have been before COVID. And the kids are a lot more friendly towards Catholicism too. So I'm just saying, I think if you give churches and religious schools some greater latitude to operate, you'll have some number of people in the middle, right? You know, sort of the cultural middle who will be
01:00:02
Speaker
you know, at some margin more likely to plug into a religious congregation or religious school and push their culture in a somewhat more religious direction. I've seen that as a good friend of mine who's not Catholic, sent his kids recently to Catholic school because he objected morally to what was going on in the public schools and thought that it would be easier to have a conversation with his kids about, you know, a religion that admits it's a religion than about a religion that doesn't admit it's a religion.
01:00:30
Speaker
So kind of related that you talked with people. This is my last question. I promise you talked about people with religious bones in their body. One story that I've heard among sociologists about, you know, what's going on with what people call wokeness or on the other side, but people call QAnon is basically people who do have a religious bone in their body, who've abandoned religion for whatever reason, finding new versions of it. Is there any way do you think to kind of bring some of those people back into the folds of traditional religions?
01:00:56
Speaker
Well, again, I mean, I think the QAnon point is actually more relevant here because I think those people are more likely to be conservative in one way or another and might be persuaded to kind of join. I'm in an evangelical church. I'm not an evangelical, but I think the challenge there is just to kind of give them opportunities to be engaged in one way or another, to be invited by friends, family members, acquaintances.
01:01:20
Speaker
And that might get them off the conspiratorial track that they would otherwise be heading down. But yeah, I don't have a magic wand here that would allow me to kind of take care of the QAnon or the excessively well people who I think are religiously kind of committed to a hyper progressive view of the world or to a conspiratorial view of the world. Well, we could talk about this for hours, but it's probably a good place to end. So thank you so much, Brad Wilcox, for being on the Free Mind podcast, and we'll see you around. Thanks, Matt.
01:01:51
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
01:01:59
Speaker
You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at The Benson Center and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.