Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 656 ｜ The ‘Family Diversity’ Myth

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I am so

00:00:05.700 excited for you to hear this conversation that I'm going to have with Professor Brad

00:00:10.160 Wilcox from the University of Virginia. He is an expert on the importance of the family and

00:00:16.520 family formation and how the formation and structure of the family contributes to child

00:00:22.060 development. And he has just released an amazing study that shows, based on data, the importance

00:00:28.900 of fathers in not just children's lives and in families, but in society as a whole. You are

00:00:36.300 going to learn so much from him. I know you're going to enjoy this conversation. So we are going

00:00:41.220 to get straight into it. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to

00:00:46.460 goodranchers.com slash Allie. That's goodranchers.com slash Allie.

00:00:58.900 Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for joining us. First, can you tell everyone who you are and what

00:01:03.780 you do? I'm a professor of sociology, University of Virginia, and a senior fellow at the Institute

00:01:10.900 for Family Studies. Awesome. And I want to talk to you about this new study that recently came out

00:01:16.940 about fathers, about sons. You've talked about this subject for a long time. I've used your research

00:01:22.160 actually in some of my writing for World Magazine. But before we get into it, can you tell us kind of

00:01:27.280 how you got to the position that you're in now? I didn't know until a couple years ago

00:01:32.900 that there was this institution, this program at the University of Virginia. Some people are going

00:01:37.800 to be surprised by that, that in liberal academia, that people are even studying this subject. So

00:01:42.720 tell us how you got here, why this interests you, and maybe a little bit of the history of this

00:01:48.240 program at UVA. Yeah, so I got interested in these issues actually as an undergraduate here at the

00:01:54.300 University of Virginia. I kind of came to the realization as someone who was raised in a single

00:01:59.640 mother household, that dads were important, and that marriage was an institution that kind of

00:02:04.960 connects dads on average to their kids. And then set about to study family at Princeton University in

00:02:12.460 sociology, got a PhD at Princeton, and then came back here to teach at the University of Virginia.

00:02:17.740 And then in 2009, brought the National Marriage Project from Rutgers University, where it was led by

00:02:23.600 David Popano and Barbara DeFell Whitehead, to UVA. And since then, the National Marriage Project has

00:02:29.240 sponsored a number of reports and conferences and lectures here at UVA to kind of spotlight the

00:02:35.700 important role that marriage and stable families play in the lives of kids, communities, and our country

00:02:41.100 at large. It's kind of the quick story behind my work on marriage and family life.

00:02:46.580 Well, I'm so glad that this program exists. This is something, of course, that conservatives have

00:02:52.260 been talking about for a long time, the deficit of fathers in the country and how that leads to all

00:02:57.160 kinds of social ills. It seems to be something, at least from our perspective, that many in liberal

00:03:04.640 academia really don't want to touch her in liberal media, liberal institutions. They don't want to talk about

00:03:10.500 the problem of fatherlessness, how that leads to idle young men, sometimes delinquent young men and young

00:03:17.780 people. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that you are kind of a rarity or this program is kind

00:03:25.100 of a rarity in academia?

00:03:28.500 That's a great question, Allie. I mean, I think what's, you know, striking when you look at the data

00:03:32.980 is how often family and marriage emerges as the number one predictor of things that occupy our

00:03:40.260 public conversation, and yet family is kind of cast to the side. So, for instance, when you look at the

00:03:45.700 work of Raj Chetty at Harvard, what he finds is the number one predictor of mobility for poor kids and

00:03:51.860 communities across the U.S., you know, rags, which is mobility, where they're going from poverty as

00:03:56.100 as kids to being successful as adults. It's not race, it's not school spending, it's not inequality,

00:04:03.300 it's two-parent families in a community. It's kind of one example. In our recent brief that you just,

00:04:09.380 I think, mentioned, we find that a family structure is a better predictor of incarceration, of being in

00:04:14.420 prison or in jail for young men than is race or family income growing up. So, family is a huge factor

00:04:23.220 in, you know, in our lives, our kids' lives, our country's lives, and it's often the elephant in

00:04:28.820 the room. It's the sort of family elephant in the room. I think people are reluctant to talk about

00:04:32.820 family for a couple of reasons. I think one of those reasons is that, you know, all of us make

00:04:38.900 mistakes. All of us have, you know, family members who've made mistakes when it comes to marriage and

00:04:43.380 family life. So, it's kind of like a reluctance, I think, to sort of broach the issue in part for fear

00:04:48.340 of offending people who've made mistakes on the family front. I think a second reason that it is

00:04:54.660 sort of swept to the side is that a lot of progressives would prefer to focus on what they

00:05:00.020 call structural issues. You know, things like poverty, things like inequality, things like racism

00:05:06.900 that are kind of, from their perspective, easily addressed with public policy solutions that don't

00:05:14.180 require people making changes in their own personal lives. I think that's the second reason why, you

00:05:18.740 know, this is a challenge for us. And the third thing that I would say is there's been a kind of

00:05:23.540 progressive commitment undergirding academia, you know, for many, many years now. And this progressive

00:05:30.100 commitment tends to kind of embrace family change as kind of an intrinsic good, that every single change

00:05:36.020 that sort of washed over American family life since the 60s is good for us and our country,

00:05:43.220 and that we should not in any way kind of reconsider a lot of steps we've taken on the family front.

00:05:49.380 I think that sort of progressive assumption is also a big reason that undergirds why we have

00:05:54.740 difficulty in talking about the importance of stable marriage and of even fathers in our kids' lives.

00:06:01.300 Well, I've heard you say before that progressives kind of have the idea that the only thing that kids

00:06:05.940 need is love and money. And as long as they have that, it doesn't matter if they're raised by a single

00:06:11.140 mom, it doesn't matter if they're raised by two moms or cousins or whatever it is, they kind of

00:06:16.420 have this idea that, you know, this coalition of people can raise a child and that child will be

00:06:21.780 fine as long as their basic needs are met. But does the data show that? Is that true, that kids who

00:06:28.420 grow up with just some kind of love and some kind of money end up just as well or just as stable as

00:06:38.660 the kids who are raised with both a mom and a dad?

00:06:41.140 Yeah, that's right. I think what I've been talking about kind of is family diversity theory.

00:06:45.540 It's this idea, again, as you just put it, that, you know, all that kids require is love and money

00:06:51.220 and the family form, family structure doesn't really matter for kids. And yet, when you actually

00:06:55.300 look at the data, what you see is that kids are much more likely to be flourishing when they're

00:07:00.660 raised in an intact biological married family with their own, you know, mother and father.

00:07:05.300 And we see this when it comes to incarceration, when it comes to college graduation, when it comes to

00:07:11.860 depression. And there's just no question that, you know, on average, kids benefit from a stable,

00:07:19.060 married household. So that's what sort of the research tells us. And what I would kind of go

00:07:24.740 on to add is that I don't think progressive scholars really appreciate journalists as well,

00:07:29.780 that even when it comes to love and money, kids are more likely to have more money

00:07:35.220 in a stable, married household, you know, that's accessible to them.

00:07:38.500 And they're more likely to get the love of both of their parents, you know, more attention,

00:07:42.660 more affection, more consistent discipline when they're being raised by their own

00:07:46.580 stably married parents compared to the alternatives. So you can kind of on its own terms,

00:07:51.460 kind of the family diversity theory breaks down because again, it doesn't appreciate how much

00:07:56.580 having, you know, that strong, stable family, that stable family on the home front actually delivers

00:08:02.500 more money to kids and more love to kids as well.

00:08:16.580 I don't know if you're able to assess this, but why do you think, why do you think kids are typically

00:08:23.700 better off and have better outcomes when they are raised by their biological mom and dad?

00:08:31.380 No matter their socioeconomic background, no matter if mom and dad are rich or not,

00:08:36.100 as you're saying, they are typically better in that kind of structure in that kind of home

00:08:42.660 versus a single mom who maybe makes more money than the mom and the dad over here.

00:08:47.060 Why do you think that is?

00:08:48.180 Well, you know, I think it's about a couple of things. It's partly about the fact that,

00:08:53.860 you know, on average, you have two parents and today, you know, either you have, you know,

00:08:59.780 both parents bringing in income and they're going to be much more likely to kind of allocate that

00:09:04.020 money towards their kids if both of those kids are their biological children. And when you've got one

00:09:09.540 stay-at-home parent, you have the other parent who's not typically working that much harder to kind of

00:09:14.180 bring in money for, you know, his, his spouse and his kids, it's usually the father who's doing that.

00:09:19.460 So, so that's part of the financial picture. It's also important to financially that

00:09:24.420 they're not kind of paying the costs of family instability. And that's things like obviously

00:09:29.060 child support, things like keeping two households, you know, going with, you know, kids going back and

00:09:34.900 forth, you know, selling a family home if there's a divorce. So family stability is, is linked to

00:09:41.220 having a better financial foundation underneath kids would be part of the story. When it comes to

00:09:46.980 just sort of the sort of social and emotional side, you know, kids are getting, you know, more

00:09:52.580 attention from their two parents. Biological parents tend to be more invested in their kids and step

00:09:58.420 parents and boyfriends and girlfriends. So they also benefit from having, you know, that parental

00:10:03.860 presence in the household. Two parents who are biologically weighted to the kids are less likely to

00:10:09.860 sort of lose their temper with their own biological kids compared again to step parents, boyfriends,

00:10:16.020 and girlfriends. So it's a safer household for kids on average than one where there's cohabiting

00:10:22.180 parents or, you know, step parents of one sort or another. And then in terms of just thinking about

00:10:29.380 the, the sort of mobility issue, what we see is that kids who are raised in non-attack families tend

00:10:35.860 to be more likely to be having to travel between apartments and homes. Whereas kids who are raised

00:10:41.060 by our own stably married parents are much more likely to stay in one home and in one neighborhood.

00:10:46.980 And if you have kids, if you babysat kids, if you've taught kids, you know, they thrive on stable

00:10:53.860 routines with stable caregivers. And the intact married family is much more likely to deliver

00:10:58.820 stability, not just in the household, but even kind of in that neighborhood context compared to the

00:11:03.860 alternatives. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you can see how those who are more driven kind

00:11:09.620 of by ideology within what the data shows really are uncomfortable with that fact. Because if you,

00:11:17.780 if your number one value is tolerance, you talked about that family diversity theory or acceptance of

00:11:25.860 any new form of family or any new form of lifestyle or behavior, then really everything else is secondary.

00:11:32.660 Everything else kind of has to submit to that number one value, even the well-being of kids.

00:11:38.020 There is this book that recently came out by a woman named Sophie Lewis, and you know,

00:11:42.660 she's a professing communist and she's written a lot of stuff that I consider crazy. But her latest book

00:11:47.860 is called Abolish the Family. Of course, she believes that the family, the mom, dad, child structure is a

00:11:54.420 tool of the oppressive patriarchy and that children should really be liberated from the oppression of their

00:12:01.060 family. And that's kind of an idea, this anti-hierarchy at all costs idea that comes from the left. You can

00:12:08.820 kind of see how that would apply if that's your idea to the family. But liberation is not something

00:12:16.580 that is achieved for children, whatever that even means, when there are no parents involved. I mean,

00:12:22.580 you talked about the importance of that biological connection. I mean, what would that,

00:12:26.820 what would that look like? I know that that's not really on the horizon, the true abolition of the

00:12:31.380 family. But what are some of the consequences for kids if they are raised in a society that really

00:12:37.140 doesn't value that family structure and really does just say anything goes?

00:12:42.660 Yeah, I think what we're seeing in part is there's a move on the left to kind of replace the family

00:12:48.580 as a core institution with the state, right? And to have the state take a bigger role when it comes to

00:12:53.940 things like, you know, daycare, providing, you know, publicly provided daycare, for instance,

00:12:58.820 would be kind of an example here. Or even to now, unfortunately, kind of sort of seeing public schools

00:13:04.500 kind of given their own power to sort of shape the moral ethos, you know, an orientation of our kids as

00:13:11.140 well, kind of just displace what the parents would like to see happening, you know, in their own

00:13:15.620 public schools, in their own counties, cities, and towns across America. So this kind of status

00:13:20.580 orientation is an expression of the kind of viewpoint you were just articulating. Well,

00:13:27.060 the one you just articulated was pretty extreme. But I think another point to make here is what's

00:13:31.300 striking about, you know, our elites often is how much they talk left when it comes to family,

00:13:37.380 but walk right, or how they're kind of supporting a more progressive agenda, you know, in the

00:13:43.860 companies that they lead or in the public initiatives that they champion in state houses

00:13:48.020 across America, or in the halls of Congress as well. And yet again, on the home front, they're often

00:13:52.980 kind of living a fairly traditional lifestyle. And my colleagues and I looked at this in California,

00:14:00.420 for instance, in a report we call State of Contradiction. And we found in California was the

00:14:05.060 college educated elites in California, were much more likely to embrace publicly family diversity

00:14:10.900 theory. And yet in private had plans to marry before having kids. And again, on the home front,

00:14:17.140 we're much more likely to be stably married than their fellow Californians. So this is kind of one

00:14:21.460 example of how elites in California end up talking left and right. And we found even in the heart of

00:14:27.540 Hollywood, that there were a few neighborhoods running right through the heart of Hollywood that had

00:14:33.700 exceptionally high rates of two parent families. And you can imagine sort of the showrunners,

00:14:38.180 the producers, the executives living in those neighborhoods, kind of sitting in the hills of

00:14:43.700 Hollywood, probably are, you know, producing shows and behind, you know, videos, music videos that send

00:14:51.540 a very different, you know, message to the American public. Right. The content that they are producing

00:14:57.860 is telling America that all forms of family life are equal, no matter the family setup or who's taking

00:15:04.660 care of the child. And yet they're not actually living that way, which would maybe speak to the

00:15:10.500 fact that they don't actually believe that. I mean, I'm sure that they would say that they believe that

00:15:15.940 the diversity of families is a good thing for society. But if they really believed it, would they be

00:15:21.620 leading this pretty conservative lifestyle? It doesn't seem that way. So what are the ramifications

00:15:27.540 of that? You're preaching a particular message to average America who is watching Netflix, whatever,

00:15:33.620 they're taking it in and they're thinking, well, I'm going to be just as well. If I decide to have kids

00:15:38.500 before I get married, cohabitation is just as good as getting married. Marriage is just a piece of paper.

00:15:45.400 I mean, that's what we've been hearing for a long time. Not to mention the redefinition of marriage

00:15:49.780 and family is to him and to men, whatever it is. And so like, what are the ramifications of that?

00:15:55.820 And I guess, why do you think that is like, why is there that state of contradiction between I know

00:16:00.680 these are two different questions between the people who live a certain way and are communicating

00:16:04.520 another message to everyone else? Why? Why would that be the case? Why wouldn't they just be consistent?

00:16:10.700 Right. This is what I call inverted hypocrisy in the part of our elites. Again, they're talking left

00:16:16.100 about family walking right in practice oftentimes. And I think, how do we explain this and why it's important?

00:16:20.760 Well, I think you explain it by, you know, sort of underlying the fact that they sort of have some kind of

00:16:26.700 prudential, some kind of tacit understanding that both they, their spouse, and especially their kids

00:16:32.920 are more likely to flourish. I mean, they kind of probably at some level know that if they kind of live

00:16:37.720 the lifestyle that they're preaching to the broader public, you know, it would often be ruinous for their kids.

00:16:44.260 And my own research indicates, you know, released in the last week and a half that young adults,

00:16:48.540 young men actually, who are raised in non-intact families are more likely to, you know, not go to

00:16:53.260 college, not graduate from college, more likely to end up in prison or in jail, more likely to be idle

00:16:57.960 as 20-something young men. And so at some level, you know, these smart people realize that,

00:17:02.540 you know, stable marriage is good for them and their kids, and they act in the private sphere

00:17:07.360 accordingly. Now, the problem, of course, is they know they're supposed to be signaling.

00:17:11.200 They're supposed to be signaling in public their allegiance to a very progressive, you know,

00:17:17.040 commitment about family issues and to embrace kind of diversity theory in public. That's what's

00:17:21.880 going to get them status at work. That's what's going to kind of, you know, get them plaudits among

00:17:25.560 their peers and all this kind of stuff. So they have a kind of progressive public-facing ideology

00:17:32.480 often because that's, you know, what's demanded of them in their roles as CEOs or as journalists or

00:17:37.740 professors or school superintendents. That's the kind of challenge there. And this is problematic,

00:17:42.660 right, because in the institutions that they control, whether it's, you know, Hollywood companies

00:17:47.040 producing movies and TV shows or the school superintendents kind of, you know, pushing

00:17:51.020 forward a certain kind of viewpoint in the classroom, they're sending a message to ordinary young adults,

00:17:56.420 to our kids, to our teenagers. That is, you know, one that doesn't underline the importance of

00:18:03.020 marriage and that often underlines the idea that, as you said, you know, anything goes when it comes

00:18:07.660 to family. And so it's problematic insofar as they're advancing a cultural ethos and message

00:18:14.140 that undercuts the values and virtues that are, that are required to forge a good and stable marriage

00:18:21.120 student in America. Let's talk a little bit about the specifics of the study. Life without father,

00:18:38.160 less college, less work, and more prison for young men growing up without their biological father.

00:18:43.600 The decline of marriage and the rise of fatherlessness in America remain at the center of some of the

00:18:48.140 biggest problems facing the nation. Crime and violence, school failure, deaths of despair,

00:18:53.560 and children in poverty. The percentage of boys living apart from their biological father has

00:18:57.600 almost doubled since 1960. 17% then to 32% today. There are about 12 million boys who are growing up

00:19:06.520 in families without their biological father. They are twice as likely to graduate college by their

00:19:12.200 late 20s versus those without a biological dad. So young men with a biological dad,

00:19:18.040 twice as likely to graduate college than those raised without young men who are idle. So not

00:19:24.400 working or going to school is almost double when there is no biological father. And I've said this

00:19:29.800 before. I'm not saying this is what you say in, in your study in particular, but I've said there is

00:19:35.060 nothing more dangerous than a man with no purpose, with nothing to live for, to, with no one to live

00:19:41.960 for. There is really nothing more dangerous than an idle man, really an idle anyone, but especially

00:19:48.580 a man. That's another topic that it seems like progressivism doesn't really want to cover, that

00:19:53.240 there is this inherent difference. There is a difference in the innate drives of men and women.

00:19:59.820 Yes, we all need purpose. We all need to know why we're here, what we're doing, and to be productive.

00:20:04.480 But a man without a good fight to fight and a good thing to fight for is very dangerous. And so this

00:20:12.080 number in particular scares me and makes a lot of sense to me that young men without dads are more

00:20:18.040 idle. Well, they're going to be doing something with their time, which to me would be the reason why

00:20:24.320 they typically end up delinquent. They typically end up, you know, in situations of violence. Was there

00:20:30.740 anything about this study, whether it's some of the stats that I just listed or any other parts of

00:20:36.420 this study that you found that actually surprised you after being kind of in this industry and

00:20:42.020 studying this for so long? Not exactly, Ali. I don't think I was particularly surprised. I mean,

00:20:48.200 it is striking, though, how large, for instance, I mean, as you mentioned, we do find there's a marked

00:20:53.100 increase in risk of idleness and incarceration for young men who are being raised without their fathers

00:20:58.780 in the household. But it was striking to me looking at the college trends. I mean, we just saw a big

00:21:04.640 Wall Street Journal article, I'm sure you talked about earlier in the last year that kind of

00:21:08.520 chronicled this growing gap in our colleges between men and women. We're headed now to a world where

00:21:13.840 about 60 percent of college students are female, about 40 percent are male. So a big gender divide in

00:21:19.780 colleges in America. And what we see here in this research is that 14 percent of young men who

00:21:26.640 grow up without their fathers are graduating from college compared to 35 percent of young

00:21:32.440 men who are graduating in college when their dad's present in the household. This is a large gap.

00:21:37.080 And that was actually surprising how large it was. And it does suggest to me that part of the story

00:21:41.300 in terms of understanding this growing gender gap in American colleges is that young men are coming

00:21:47.200 from homes without their dad to be a model for hard work, to kind of help them with homework,

00:21:52.020 to kind of give them some guidance about how to navigate school and college. These young men are

00:21:58.020 the ones who are particularly likely to be absent from our nation's campuses. And this is problematic

00:22:03.200 in part, of course, because men who don't graduate from college today are more likely to be floundering

00:22:08.920 in our labor markets and then also to be much less attractive as husbands, you know, later on as well.

00:22:15.360 So the sort of education story here was was kind of striking to me.

00:22:20.860 Yeah. So it's not like these young men are not going to college, but they're starting these

00:22:24.140 successful businesses. They're becoming entrepreneurs. They're being productive in other

00:22:27.420 ways. They're often falling into the idleness that can then kind of have a domino effect on the rest of

00:22:33.380 their life and inhibit success in other ways. Right. Although, of course, I think probably as you would

00:22:38.360 appreciate, you know, one idea that I've been thinking about a lot lately is this idea that we need to be

00:22:42.480 doing a lot more to strengthen vocational education, sort of recognize and appreciate that a lot of guys

00:22:47.420 need not go to college to flourish. The problem is we don't have programs in most, you know, towns and

00:22:53.040 cities that would do that. Right. Right. Yeah. I certainly don't think that going to college is going to be

00:22:59.380 the answer for male flourishing in the United States. I think it's the problem of the absence of

00:23:07.440 alternatives, that when they're not going to college, they're also not they don't have a leg

00:23:13.580 up on life. This kind of is what you're talking about here.

00:23:27.800 Some other statistics, the percentage of young men who have been arrested by the ages of 15 to 19 is

00:23:33.140 higher among kids without a biological dad in the home than with a biological dad in the home.

00:23:37.940 And the percentage of young men who have spent time in jail by around age 30 is double among boys

00:23:43.900 who grew up without biological dads than with biological dads. America's young man problem is

00:23:51.040 disproportionately concentrated among the millions of males who grew up without the benefit of a present

00:23:56.220 biological father. The bottom line, both these men and the nation are paying a heavy price for the

00:24:02.320 breakdown of the family. So what would you say needs to be done? Because we all see I mean,

00:24:08.340 we all see that one commonality in these mass shooters horrific is that they're typically young

00:24:14.180 men. A lot of times they come from broken homes or different kinds of broken backgrounds. That was

00:24:18.840 certainly true in Uvalde. He didn't have a present dad in his life. We see the epidemic of violence that

00:24:25.240 happens among predominantly young men, particularly, unfortunately, black young men. Everyone sees that.

00:24:32.120 And very few people seem to be pointing to this problem and trying to come up with policy solutions

00:24:38.720 or any kind of cultural solutions, whatever, to fix this problem. So in your ideal world, like if you

00:24:44.960 were put in charge for a day, a year, whatever it is, and said, okay, this is what we need to do to fix

00:24:51.060 this problem, what would you propose? Yeah, great question. I think one thing that we need to do is to

00:24:56.260 look at this as a cultural challenge, as you can appreciate. And that means thinking about ways in which,

00:25:01.140 you know, schools across America can introduce curricula, for instance, that sort of spotlight

00:25:07.740 the value of marriage for young adults and for their kids. One idea is called the success sequence,

00:25:14.500 where you talk about the importance of getting at least a high school degree, then working full time

00:25:19.140 in your early 20s, and then marrying before having kids. And kind of just telling adults, if you do

00:25:24.620 these three simple steps related to education, work and marriage, your odds of being poor are just

00:25:30.140 3% and your odds of getting into the middle class or higher are 86%. So it's kind of a pathway to

00:25:36.100 helping adults sort of avoid poverty and establish strong and stable families for themselves and any

00:25:42.000 kids that they have. So it's sort of one idea is talking about the success sequence in public

00:25:45.680 schools and also running public campaigns in, you know, states across America that are supportive

00:25:51.620 of marriage and family. A second policy idea is to address the marriage penalties in our welfare

00:25:56.860 programs, things like Medicaid, for instance, and the earned income tax credit. These programs often

00:26:02.340 penalize marriage in substantial ways, particularly for working class couples with kids. And Congress

00:26:07.620 has actually addressed marriage penalties and income taxes, which fall higher, you know, on higher

00:26:11.860 earning Americans. But Congress has not addressed these marriage penalties in our welfare programs

00:26:17.940 and can and should go forward in addressing, you know, these penalties. Those are kind of two ideas

00:26:23.920 that we could think about on both the cultural front and the policy front to make marriage both kind

00:26:31.140 of, I think, more attractive and less, in this case, financially problematic for precisely the group of

00:26:39.020 folks who are most likely to be struggling with marriage today, and that is working class and poor Americans.

00:26:44.260 Well, it's certainly an uphill climb. We don't seem to be going that direction, especially with how young

00:26:51.040 people seem to think about marriage, seem to think about that kind of commitment, seem to think about

00:26:55.500 having kids. And that diversity of family theory seems to be really popular, especially among young

00:27:02.840 people. And certainly the progressive ideology that we've kind of described, especially as it pertains to

00:27:08.380 the family, seems to dominate most institutions, at least in what they are conveying to the public

00:27:14.240 as you said, they're kind of conveying the message to the left and walking right themselves. And yet

00:27:19.080 that message is so impactful. The ramifications of that, I think, I mean, we've seen what they are

00:27:24.480 over the past 60 years. And so I'm thankful for what you're doing. Data matters. Statistics make a

00:27:32.260 difference. They can change people's mind. I like to say that the truth is like a beach ball. You can keep

00:27:37.160 on with ideology or your desires or your personal preferences, try to push it underwater. Eventually,

00:27:42.220 it's going to pop back up. Right now, the reality of the need for fathers is popping up

00:27:46.620 and the prevalence of violence and idleness among young males. And so I'm thankful to you for

00:27:53.040 highlighting that. I'm thankful to UVA for having you there and allowing you to study this and publish

00:27:59.140 these studies. So thank you so much, Dr. Wilcox. I really appreciate what you do and the time that

00:28:03.580 you've spent talking with us today. Thanks, Alan. It's good to be with you today.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - August 08, 2022

Ep 656 ｜ The ‘Family Diversity’ Myth ｜ Guest： Dr. Brad Wilcox

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