The Art of Manliness - Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.440 There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture. Like,

00:00:16.040 for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce,

00:00:20.480 people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming

00:00:24.740 more secular because people leave religion in adulthood. Are these ideas actually borne out by

00:00:30.040 the data? Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches

00:00:35.560 numbers from all the latest studies to find out what's going on in population, relationship,

00:00:40.140 and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he's discovered in

00:00:44.040 his research and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually correlated with a

00:00:48.540 higher chance of divorce, the effect that marrying later has on fertility, why the drop in the number

00:00:53.660 of kids people are having isn't only about cost, but also about the rise in high-intensity parenting

00:00:58.020 and how the increase in societal secularization can actually be traced to kids, not adults.

00:01:03.920 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash family myths.

00:01:18.420 All right, Lyman Stone, welcome to the show.

00:01:21.720 It's good to be with you.

00:01:22.540 So you are a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and you focus on demographic

00:01:28.800 changes in family life. And a lot of your research has looked at a lot of popular ideas that we have

00:01:36.000 about family life. And today I want to talk about some of these ideas and maybe some of the

00:01:41.420 counterintuitive findings you found with your research. One idea that's out there is that before

00:01:48.180 people get married, you should live with your potential spouse first so that you can, you know, 0.96

00:01:53.700 know whether you're compatible or not. So let's talk about cohabitation. Like first, what's the state

00:01:57.960 of cohabitation in the United States today?

00:02:02.680 So lots of people cohabit.

00:02:04.240 It's very common. If you go back to like the 1960s, marriages in the 1960s, only about 5% of them

00:02:12.520 were to people who are cohabiting before marriage. Today, it's over 70%, perhaps 75%.

00:02:20.260 So there's been a huge increase in cohabitation over the last few decades. Just really this

00:02:27.800 extraordinary social transition that I think is kind of taken for granted now, but it's kind of

00:02:33.000 snuck up and we're like, oh wait, this happened. Now, like everyone cohabits, it seems like. I mean,

00:02:39.040 again, like three out of four marriages will have premarital cohabitation now. So that's a huge

00:02:43.980 change in just two generations.

00:02:45.340 When demographers look at this rise, do they attribute it to anything like societal changes,

00:02:50.640 changes in religiosity? What's going on there?

00:02:54.220 Yeah, there's tons of different, this is a very debated question. What caused all this?

00:02:59.920 There's a couple of things. One is actually, there's a very nice paper that just came like

00:03:04.420 the final version of it just came out recently. It's called collateralized marriage. And they argue,

00:03:08.720 I think fairly persuasively that the legal benefits of marriage have declined over time. That is,

00:03:14.740 it's not as, it doesn't give you the same guarantees it used to in the past. That is,

00:03:20.380 you know, it doesn't protect you in the event of divorce. You have to pay, you know, men have to 1.00

00:03:25.980 pay parents, but usually men have to pay child support, even if they weren't married. The relative

00:03:31.360 benefits to marriage have declined for men and women. People often talk about this as declined for

00:03:37.300 men, but actually the benefits for women have declined very dramatically as well, as this paper I

00:03:42.460 mentioned shows pretty clearly. So as the benefits for formal marriage have declined,

00:03:47.620 the thing is that a lot of the benefits of informal cohabitation have not declined, right? Living

00:03:52.380 together is still convenient for sexual access and sharing rent and things like that. And furthermore,

00:03:58.520 the taboos on premarital cohabitation or non-marital cohabitation have declined a lot.

00:04:03.520 So in some sense, it got cheaper to cohabit and the benefits and the legal benefits and social

00:04:09.440 benefits and protections of marriage declined. I mean, as a result, people still, they still want 0.52

00:04:14.240 to have convenient sexual access to one another. So cohabitation rose, but because marriage was no

00:04:20.060 longer a contract that really offered a lot of benefits for particularly for lower socioeconomic

00:04:26.660 status people, marriage really declined quite a lot. Though, as you mentioned that, you know,

00:04:31.460 this trend really is very class biased. Cohabitation rose the earliest and rose the most for lower

00:04:38.100 socioeconomic status people. And higher socioeconomic status people are still less likely to cohabit

00:04:44.380 and more likely to marry, and they're more likely to marry directly with no prior cohabitation.

00:04:50.040 That's interesting. Yeah, I think they also, upper class or, you know, middle class and above,

00:04:54.900 whatever, how you want to break it down, less likely to divorce than working class, lower class.

00:05:00.280 Yeah. Well, so this idea, okay, well, you should, you know, live with somebody before you get married

00:05:04.980 because we can figure out if we're compatible. What does the research say about that? Let's say

00:05:09.700 someone cohabitates and they decide to get married. Will that cohabitation period improve

00:05:14.500 the marriage? No, or it will increase their likelihood of divorce. The idea is called trial

00:05:19.340 marriage. So it's like a test run of a marriage. And the theory has been, yeah, that it's going to

00:05:23.820 enable better match quality. So, I mean, look, we can check. We can, we have these large data sets

00:05:28.920 that I and others use with hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of women, I think, over the last 0.91

00:05:34.620 several decades. And we can ask these questions. We can say, okay, if we compare women who did cohabit

00:05:39.240 to women who didn't, how do their divorce probabilities vary? And the answer is that if

00:05:46.060 you cohabit, you're more likely to divorce. There is a divorce penalty or you can call it a penalty, 0.98

00:05:52.980 a divorce penalty associated with cohabitation. Essentially this way of saying that like what

00:05:57.960 really happens with cohabitation is, is two things. First of all, who cohabits isn't random,

00:06:02.560 right? So like if you're cohabiting, it's often because, because you're not quite sure about the

00:06:07.720 relationship yet. You want to take a next step or you're just not confident about marriage yet,

00:06:11.460 which might speak to, you know, lower match quality to begin with. But secondly, a lot of

00:06:16.160 cohabitation just happens kind of people slide into it. It's like they just, they're just spending the

00:06:20.460 night a lot. And then somebody goes, ah, maybe I'll start moving more stuff over. And then like,

00:06:24.300 if you can still pay rent for like a year or whatever, then you can move in. Yeah. Scott

00:06:27.640 Stanley talks about that. And those things in particular, like decisions are very useful for

00:06:33.460 people. Making clear decisions is associated with like, even making bad decisions. If you actually

00:06:39.140 make it as a decision, you're better off than doing it accidentally. Like you don't want to do

00:06:43.100 things on autopilot in your life, just in general, you should exercise agency at every opportunity you can.

00:06:48.480 And so the upshot of this is that there's a lot of selection into cohabitation

00:06:51.980 of people who might be lower match quality to begin with.

00:06:55.580 And some other research I've read, and these are all just theories that social psychologists have

00:07:00.540 put out there about why cohabitating has a divorce penalty is that with cohabitation, you can slide 0.88

00:07:07.220 into the relationship and then you can slide out of it. And so if you do that before marriage,

00:07:11.580 it could kind of prime you like, well, you know, if I don't like the relationship,

00:07:14.680 I can just get out of it. Again, it's a theory. I don't know if you can prove it,

00:07:20.260 but that's one thing I've read.

00:07:21.940 Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it's absolutely a possibility. You know, I, it's, it's hard to

00:07:25.820 test what's going on inside people's brains, but yeah, I mean, it could create kind of bad habits.

00:07:32.440 But also the expectation of cohabitation might change your search protocol, so to speak. Okay.

00:07:39.680 So like, let's say that you expect to marry directly. That is with no cohabitation because

00:07:45.920 you don't get to do that test run. You're going to look for other ways to investigate mate quality.

00:07:52.440 Okay. Like you're going to try and find other ways to figure out if this is a good mate.

00:07:56.360 And one of the big ways you would do that is investigating their family background,

00:08:00.540 right? That you try and meet the family, meet them a lot, hang out with them a lot,

00:08:04.540 learn about their background because people's family is a good proxy for them. Sorry if you

00:08:08.820 don't like your family, but the truth is statistically, you're going to be a lot like

00:08:12.460 them in your life. So historically that's how marriage happened, right? Marriage generally

00:08:16.720 involved a lot of family to family interaction. You know, that's the origin in the traditional

00:08:20.960 marriage ceremony of, you know, if anyone has any reason why these two cannot be joined

00:08:24.420 together, let them speak now or forever hold his peace, right? That's asking, you've got

00:08:27.840 all the families together and you're supposed to look around and be like, do you, do you

00:08:31.300 recognize anybody? Is this an incestuous marriage that they didn't realize? But like, you know,

00:08:35.540 look around, make sure nobody knows each other too well. So you used to do a lot of this kind

00:08:39.380 of family level investigation. That doesn't happen anymore. A lot of people like their first

00:08:44.600 time meeting their partner's family will be like, you know, after they move in together

00:08:49.260 or something. So instead of investigating sort of the, the social context and community

00:08:54.040 that a partner might be in their family, church, whatever, because we live more atomized

00:08:58.640 social lives. We're more detached from these institutions of community support, community

00:09:03.500 engagement. Instead, we deepen the level of inspection of the individual themselves by

00:09:09.800 getting them in our house and in our bed.

00:09:12.420 Well, related to this idea of deepening your inspection of a partner, people are dating longer

00:09:17.900 before getting married. You know, they're playing the field longer. And even when they do

00:09:21.520 find someone they commit to, they date them longer before they get married. So as a result,

00:09:27.560 has there been a shift in the age of first marriage in the United States?

00:09:31.680 Yeah, there's been a huge shift. So today, according to the census, the median age of first

00:09:37.960 marriage for women is I think like 28 and a half. And for men, it's 30 and a half. That's way 0.57

00:09:44.760 up from like the low 20s, like 20, 21, 22 in the 50s and 60s. Now that low value in the 50s and 60s

00:09:53.760 was anomalous. If you go back to like the 19th century or the early 20th century, typical marriage

00:09:59.180 was in like the mid 20s, you know, 25, 26. So, you know, getting back to a median age of marriage

00:10:04.680 of like 21, you know, I don't know that that's necessarily like good or desirable. I mean,

00:10:11.160 those marriages did have high divorce rates and dissatisfaction with the state of gender

00:10:16.340 relations in America in the 1940s, 50s, 60s gave rise to the world we inhabit today. So just trying

00:10:22.360 to recreate the world that gave us the world we have today is, I don't know, it seems like a losing

00:10:26.900 bet. But today having, you know, men marrying at 31 instead of in the past at 25 or 26, you know,

00:10:35.460 we don't have to get back to 21, but maybe we could get back to 25 or 26. Like that was like 2007.

00:10:40.480 That wasn't like a hellscape. Okay. That was not that long ago that we were at that level.

00:10:45.680 What are the downsides of delaying marriage? You know, from your research, like what happens

00:10:49.940 to a person's life cycle if they put off marriage later and later in life?

00:10:54.340 Well, it depends on what you want in life. If you're, let's say you're a man and you want

00:11:00.060 career success, marriage is kind of a take it or leave it offer. Marriage doesn't have big

00:11:07.920 effects on men's career trajectories, maybe slightly positive. It's not a big effect.

00:11:13.480 So if, if what you value in life is career success, getting married later probably doesn't

00:11:18.520 hurt you. Maybe what you value in life is a leisure, you know, having lots of leisure time

00:11:24.340 there. Marriage is a, an interesting thing to calculate because on the one hand, you know,

00:11:29.720 you might have another person that you sometimes have to take care of if she's sick or out of work

00:11:33.720 or something, but also in principle, she can take care of you if you're sick or out of work and

00:11:37.600 leisure is nice, but also most people like to have leisure with others. Marriage is a, as a good,

00:11:43.560 pretty fairly secure way of ensuring that you've got somebody that you really, really like to hang

00:11:48.180 around you with all the fun things you want to do in life. So there are, you know, multiplicative

00:11:52.480 benefits to the hedonic value of leisure. If you've got somebody you really care about to share it

00:11:56.840 with in marriage could be a vehicle to lock that in. So if what you care about is leisure marriage,

00:12:02.380 you know, it might be, it might be good. There's some trade-offs, but it might be good.

00:12:05.140 But if what you care about is making a lasting impact on the world, like leaving something

00:12:11.500 behind when you die, marriage is, is you really want to get married young, right? Because the main

00:12:16.780 thing you're going to leave behind is your genetic material, your children. And beyond that, your

00:12:20.840 cultural material, the, the, the traditions, ideas, values, behaviors, practices that you pass on to

00:12:25.880 your children. And delayed marriage dramatically alters your odds of having any given number of

00:12:31.300 children. The later you get married, the, I mean, it's almost a perfect correlation. I mean, the,

00:12:36.620 the later you marry, the fewer children you end up having. And that's true across many countries,

00:12:42.060 across time, late marriage, less kids. So if you want to leave something behind when you die,

00:12:49.440 a kind of legacy, something, something that will carry on the, the life projects that you value,

00:12:54.860 the traditions of meaning and substance that you contributed to, which personally, that's what I want.

00:13:00.160 Then you don't want to dilly dally on getting married because getting married tends to give you

00:13:04.640 the kind of high security relationship where you and your, your wife can have a more productive

00:13:11.020 negotiation about specialization, right? You can say, look, okay, you know, one of us is going to

00:13:16.440 step back from work for a few years to focus on this other thing in our family. Maybe it's kids,

00:13:20.180 maybe it's something else care of a relative. I don't know, because, you know, we really value that.

00:13:25.020 And, you know, we're going to kind of cross subsidize each other here. So marriage insofar

00:13:30.860 as it enables specialization can enable you to really advance your kind of dyadic contribution

00:13:37.620 to valued life projects. Well, speaking of kids, there's been a lot of articles I've seen in the

00:13:43.520 news about people having fewer kids. What's going on with the reason why people are having fewer

00:13:48.940 children these days? Yeah. I mean, fertility has fallen a lot in the U S but it depends on the

00:13:54.220 time horizon. Right. So like, if you go back to like the baby boom, fertility was like, I don't

00:13:59.300 know, like three kids per woman or something. It was quite high. I don't have it on hand, but it was 1.00

00:14:03.060 quite high. And then it declined to like 1.7 in like the seventies. People were like, Oh, fertility is

00:14:09.880 super low population decline. But then we had immigration reform and we got a lot of immigrants

00:14:14.600 and two things happened with those immigrants. One, we got a lot of immigrants and that increases

00:14:19.700 population. And two, they were largely from Latin America. And at that time, fertility rates in Latin

00:14:25.380 America were quite high. When people migrate, they tend to replicate a lot of the cultural forms of 0.98

00:14:29.540 their place of origin. Women moved to the U S and they had babies, particularly because the U S's 0.99

00:14:34.320 birthright citizenship also creates a pretty favorable calculus for having children here if you're a

00:14:38.780 non-citizen. So what happened is in the seventies, eighties, nineties, fertility rose there. It wasn't also,

00:14:44.360 it wasn't just Hispanic immigrant fertility, native born fertility rose, white, non-Hispanic white

00:14:49.320 fertility rose somewhat. So we, we got this kind of little fertility boom in the eighties, nineties

00:14:54.800 and into like the mid two thousands. But then in 2007, when, when our fertility rates were like,

00:15:00.680 you know, 2.07 or something. So like right at quote unquote replacement rate, replacement rate is

00:15:06.260 basically how many kids you need to have for society to replace itself, assuming its current level

00:15:10.820 of mortality, which in the U S replacement rates like 2.03, 2.04. Though it also technically depends

00:15:16.740 on the sex ratio of children. So that's a whole different thing. But regardless, fertility rates

00:15:22.820 started falling since 2007 and they were at 2.07 in 2007, I think, or 2008, one of those, uh, today

00:15:29.620 they're like 1.66. So we've lost about 0.4 children per woman, which is to say basically every other woman 0.99

00:15:37.300 is missing a child versus her 2007 counterfactual fertility in the last, uh, 16 years or something. 1.00

00:15:44.820 The thing to understand about this is that there's, there's multiple different things going on here.

00:15:47.860 Like explaining fertility decline from the baby boom to the 1980s, you're going to have a different set

00:15:54.260 of factors than the decline from like 2007 to today. Right. So like from the baby boom to the 1980s,

00:15:59.860 you could tell a story of like, you know, women's rights, women's entrance into the workforce,

00:16:03.700 you know, no fault divorce. I don't know. There's all these stories you could tell that

00:16:08.900 are kind of the stories people are used to hearing about fertility, right? Like, um, contraception

00:16:14.340 was big, but like those stories don't really apply to the last 15 years. Like, yes, contraceptive

00:16:20.580 use did rise some and particularly of long acting, removable contraceptives, which is the most effective

00:16:25.460 form, but abortion rates fell over a lot of that window. And, uh, and furthermore, although unintended

00:16:32.020 fertility fell over that period, intended fertility also fell. So what's going on there? Why, why did

00:16:37.540 intended fertility fall? That's not a contraceptive story. This decline from 2007, it's not like we

00:16:42.740 all got tons more prosperous. Like we didn't just have like some, like this story of like development

00:16:49.380 and women's liberation. Like women aren't like what, what 20% more liberated now than they were in 2007. 1.00

00:16:55.860 Okay. Like that's just, I mean, I don't know what that would mean to say that, but like

00:16:58.820 the reality is we just have lower fertility without a big change in a lot of these sort of

00:17:04.500 conceptual big drivers of the 20th century decline. So what caused it? I've argued that

00:17:10.740 most of the decline is due to postponed marriage, but if you look at marital fertility rates, so fertility

00:17:17.380 rates of married people, they really have not declined very much. Virtually the whole decline is among

00:17:23.300 is just fewer people being married. So we're really looking at a change in entrance into marriage

00:17:29.620 and as feeling among young people of preparedness for marriage. And so you really need to explore,

00:17:35.300 okay, well, why did that happen? I mean, that's a complicated question with a lot of different

00:17:40.740 elements, but suffice to say the biggest component of the decline in fertility is lack of entrance into

00:17:47.540 marriage. All right. So fewer people are getting married or they're waiting too long to get

00:17:52.100 married. So they can't, they don't have kids. So, I mean, I know you said there's a lot of factors

00:17:56.740 going into like why people are choosing to postpone marriage, but like, what are some of them? Like,

00:18:01.780 what have you found? You don't have to get too in the weeds with this, but I'm curious.

00:18:06.340 So when we think about these timing issues, like number of children is something that people

00:18:12.020 plausibly choose. Okay. Like they choose to have more or fewer conditional and some other factors,

00:18:17.220 but when you get married or like when you do something is less a matter of choice,

00:18:24.260 strangely enough, because like in principle, you know, a woman can just kind of go and have children 1.00

00:18:31.060 assuming she's fertile, right? You know, through IVF or sperm donors or just unprotected promiscuous 1.00

00:18:36.540 sex, like this can happen. But the timing is, is, is a bit more complicated for something like marriage

00:18:42.300 because first of all, it takes two to tango. So you need somebody else to agree. But second of all,

00:18:46.940 timing decisions are really, really strongly socially normed. So if you think about the life

00:18:51.440 course, if I were to ask like, when should you graduate high school? Well, you'd probably say

00:18:57.280 around 18, but why would you say around 18? Is it because we have some like research that suggests

00:19:02.820 that 18 is the optimal age to finish high school? No, we'd say, well, you just should,

00:19:07.880 because that's when you usually do. Like if you finish it at 16, because you dropped out,

00:19:12.580 that's bad. You finish it at 16 because you're a super genius. I guess that's maybe good.

00:19:17.440 If you finish it at 20, that's maybe better than not finishing it, but it's not great.

00:19:21.920 But like, ultimately all we're really saying is the norm is to do it at 18. Like, it's not like we

00:19:26.640 have like great reasons to believe that this is like the perfect age to end high school. So it's just,

00:19:31.000 it's just a norm. Likewise, if we say, you know, what age should you finish college? Well,

00:19:34.880 most of us are going to be like, I don't know, like 22. Why? Because 18 plus four. Okay. It's

00:19:39.160 not like we like have some deep methodical consideration of the optimal duration of college

00:19:44.900 education. No, a BA takes about four years. And if somebody was like, well, would you prefer to

00:19:50.400 choose a three-year BA program? It's like, well, there aren't three-year BA, or there aren't many

00:19:54.480 three-year BA programs. Maybe I'd choose if I could, but like, this isn't a choice I really have.

00:19:59.380 And then if you think about like, okay, people don't usually want to get married when they're in school,

00:20:03.200 right? It's just, they, they don't, I mean, there's a big spike in marriage the summer after

00:20:07.380 graduation. And so as people spend more years in school, college, graduate, PhD, whatever,

00:20:12.540 all those are rising, everything is pushed later. And as educated people have their norms pushed

00:20:18.360 later, it also filters down to other people, right? We all inhabit a society and to some extent we share

00:20:24.000 norms. And then there's, there's other things, you know, because you're much later in life when you

00:20:29.080 are done with school and quote unquote, ready for marriage, you also have more adult habits formed,

00:20:33.680 right? Like you're not founding a life with someone else. You're kind of merging lives with

00:20:38.500 somebody else. And so coordinating two fully fleshed out adult lives is a lot harder than

00:20:43.140 coordinating two kind of wet behind the ears, young people who haven't figured out life yet,

00:20:47.380 right? You have the two body problem. If you get married and graduate college together, 0.99

00:20:51.360 figuring out where to move to get jobs is a lot easier than if you're in your mid twenties and one of you

00:20:57.020 or late twenties and one of you gets a job offer somewhere, right? Because you're just more

00:21:01.760 flexible early in life. And so education, social norms, you know, norms about how long you should

00:21:08.980 date and be engaged. I mean, it used to be, you know, six months was a very reasonable length of

00:21:13.180 engagement, but now like people do like two year engagements. It's insane. So, you know, these are

00:21:18.440 just social norms about timing that emerge and why do they emerge? You know, we could get all into

00:21:22.980 stuff about why they emerge and underlying economic factors. But at the end of the day,

00:21:26.240 everything in our society is motivating towards extended adolescence. And if you want to find

00:21:31.520 like a deep underlying factor of this though, it's, it both explains too much and too little.

00:21:36.720 You could point to basically the fact that we're becoming a human capital intensive economy

00:21:40.220 where you get ahead by acquiring a lot of human capital for yourself, which means education,

00:21:46.380 experience, skills. And what that means is peak income comes later in life and income is a way that

00:21:52.340 people signal mate fitness. And then beyond that, because we're a human capital intensive economy,

00:21:56.980 people are more discriminatory in their mating. There's been some shift in assortative mating,

00:22:04.020 though this is somewhat debated, but I believe it, that suggests that people may be more aggressively

00:22:09.200 trying to sort on the, the observable characteristics of their partner. Now the joke is on us because it

00:22:16.300 turns out if you care about anything like genetic, you really shouldn't look at your partner's genetic

00:22:22.380 characteristics. You should look at their parents' genetic character. Well, you should look at your

00:22:25.860 partner, but you should look at their parents' genetic characteristics and their cousins and

00:22:29.060 stuff. Cause that gives you a way better proxy for the latent traits of your partner than what

00:22:34.300 they choose to reveal to you when they want to be in your pants. So again, this is like the second

00:22:38.620 time I've done this pitch, but we should really bring back getting to know people's families.

00:22:41.820 But regardless, all these factors work together to push marriage and everything in life later.

00:22:48.120 Like if you look at like age of first home ownership, that's later. If age of first,

00:22:52.300 anything is later. Like people are getting their driver's license later in life than 20 years ago.

00:22:56.960 Right. And then because they're pushing marriage back so far might mean they don't have the number

00:23:01.520 of kids that they want. And that's the interesting thing. You've done studies on this, that people are

00:23:06.060 having fewer kids, but then when you ask women how many kids they want, it's actually more like, 0.96

00:23:11.820 it's quite a bit more than they're having.

00:23:14.840 Men and women alike both say they want to have about 2.5 kids-ish. Depends on how you word the

00:23:19.700 question. If you word the question, instead you ask how many kids do you intend to have, you'll get

00:23:24.380 answers around 2, 2.1. But intentions aren't really desires, right? Intentions are kind of a

00:23:29.240 compromise between desires and reality. If you ask any kind of desire question, what people want,

00:23:34.160 what they think would make them happiest, what their ideal is, yada, yada. They give you between

00:23:38.420 2.2 and 2.7 as their answer on average. That's true for men and women. There's not much difference

00:23:44.080 between the two on this particular question. And so, yeah, I mean, people want to have more kids

00:23:49.180 and that's been true for a while. Now, fertility desires did fall in the 1950s and 60s. People used 0.98

00:23:55.200 to say they wanted about 3.5 kids. Now they want about 2.5. And that fall happened around the same

00:24:01.740 time that fertility fell after baby boom. And so, yeah, people want about 2.5-ish, but they are 0.95

00:24:07.820 going to have in the U.S. currently about 1.6, 1.7, which means the average woman will have 0.8 fewer 1.00

00:24:14.600 children than she wants, which means if you take 10 women, the eight of them will be missing a child 1.00

00:24:19.820 that they wanted to have. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:24:24.140 And now back to the show. So we talked about the reason why it's happening or one of the reasons

00:24:32.840 why that's happening is, well, people are pushing marriage back. So you might not have the time you

00:24:37.580 need to have the kids you want or desire. But then also people talk about, well, I don't, maybe I want

00:24:42.440 three kids, but kids are so expensive. So I'm only going to have two. Is that a reason, like, is the cost

00:24:49.760 of raising a kid a reason that's holding people back from having the kids they want? Yeah. I mean,

00:24:55.320 both in kind of empirical studies and in surveys, I mean, lots in surveys, tons of people report

00:25:00.740 child cost factors as reasons they're not having more kids. And we have dozens of empirical studies

00:25:06.680 showing that if you reduce the cost of having children, people have more children, which that

00:25:11.140 suggests that, yes, the cost of child rearing is a factor that's reducing fertility. If we can find

00:25:17.460 ways to reduce the cost of child rearing, we will have more babies. But that is not as simple as it

00:25:22.200 sounds. Okay. So think of it this way. Like, let's say that we decide we want to reduce the cost of

00:25:27.500 child rearing. And the way we do it is by making free childcare. Okay. Now childcare is free.

00:25:34.340 Everybody can have it. Well, now because it's free, everybody can have it, which means lots of people

00:25:38.720 will have it, which means everybody will take it for granted that they should have it. The norm of what you

00:25:44.380 need to have for people to feel like they have enough to have kids will rise. Right. And that

00:25:50.540 extra money that you have on hand, well, actually, there won't be that much because it'll be tax

00:25:53.320 finance. Your tax will go up, but whatever. Some people have extra money on the end. Where will it

00:25:56.480 go? Are they just like, before they were spending it on childcare for their kid, are they now not going

00:26:00.920 to spit it on, spend it on their kid? No. Children are a bottomless pit of money. You can always find 0.99

00:26:07.600 something else to spend money on for your kids. Like, like, this is ridiculous. The idea that giving people 0.98

00:26:13.140 childcare means they're going to like, now just like squire it away. No, they're going to spend it

00:26:18.000 on their kids. They're just going to spend it on something else. Now something else might be,

00:26:21.440 you know, might be good, but, but the point is they're going to spend on something else.

00:26:24.520 The consumption norm will rise. Okay. The point is, you know, you can just have children and like

00:26:30.660 raise them like the Amish and it's really cheap. Okay. But like, you don't want to do that. And the

00:26:35.400 reason we don't want to do that is because people assess their wellbeing by comparison to others.

00:26:40.280 And, you know, of course we do it this way. It's totally reasonable that we would assess our

00:26:45.420 wellbeing by comparing to others because we don't have, it's not like in our brains, we have some

00:26:50.340 intrinsic measure that just like knows that we are well off. So in practice, yes, we define our

00:26:56.740 happiness by comparison to others. That's okay. To an extent, you know, there's an extreme version of

00:27:03.000 that that's not, but like, it's reasonable to look around at others and be like, okay, like, you know,

00:27:06.640 how am I doing? And at the end of the day, if the norm for spending on children is so high that you

00:27:12.760 have to forego a lot of goodies that your comparison group is not foregoing, you're not

00:27:19.880 going to have kids. So this is, there's a fascinating line of research that looks at fertility

00:27:24.360 contagion. And they find that like, if you're the great study, this looked at workplaces, like large

00:27:30.340 offices, lots of workers. And they found that when a coworker who sits close to you has a baby,

00:27:35.380 you become more likely to have a baby than when a coworker who sits like on a different floor or

00:27:40.980 farther away from you. There's, there's a bunch of studies looking at contagion showing that

00:27:45.140 people's fertility behavior is sensitive to the fertility behavior of others in their life.

00:27:51.540 Okay. As they see other people having kids, they go, okay, maybe I will too. And the reason is as

00:27:56.520 other people start to give up some of those goodies to have kids and put money into kids,

00:28:01.820 you don't face the same relative losses because now you can give it up because you're ahead now.

00:28:07.120 So you can afford to give it up. Okay. So it sounds like the absolute cost of raising a kid

00:28:12.000 is holding people back from having more, but there's also just, it's a matter of how people

00:28:17.640 think they're faring compared to other people who maybe don't have kids. So if society, if society,

00:28:25.100 society wants to encourage people to have more kids, maybe, you know, maybe their fertility rate has

00:28:29.580 fallen below the replacement level and they want to encourage people to have more kids,

00:28:33.200 they need to work on both of those things. Yeah. So like cost factors matter, but the important

00:28:38.940 thing to understand is that there's a relative component to them and it's a component that's

00:28:42.600 intensely normative. And so that means to reduce the cost of child rearing and have more kids.

00:28:47.760 Yes, we should do things to financially support families. Yes, absolutely. We should want to be

00:28:52.960 clear that that's good. The research suggests that giving families more money does get you more babies

00:28:57.640 and the price tag on it is not that high compared to other things the government does.

00:29:03.420 You can get, if all you care about, if like you're like super utilitarian man and you want to do like

00:29:08.000 quality adjusted life years, the public cost per quality adjusted life year added from pronatal policy,

00:29:14.820 that is birth subsidies, it's way cheaper than trying to increase quality adjusted life years than

00:29:19.800 like expanding Medicare or Medicaid or something like that. Pronatal policy is cheap on utilitarian

00:29:25.860 grounds though, whether you should trust utilitarian grounds debate. But although we should throw money

00:29:32.320 at this, that's not all we need to do. We also need to discipline consumption norms. Now, one way you

00:29:38.080 could do this would just be to, you know, set off a large electromagnetic weapon near all of the

00:29:45.360 Instagram servers, because what's going on is, is it's not a coincidence that fertility started falling

00:29:50.940 after 2007 and kind of never came back. It wasn't just the recession. It was the advent of social media,

00:29:55.080 I think that created a supercharged kind of comparison. And that's why this decline has

00:30:00.520 happened all over the world. It's not just in the U S so all basically everywhere that has a cell

00:30:04.680 phone fertility starts declining around this time. And so what we want to do is we want to find ways

00:30:10.600 to nudge algorithms, to show people more babies, less solo vacations to Tahiti. And we need to be

00:30:19.720 promoting parenting norms of like, well, I just heard a great example recently. Somebody was like,

00:30:25.420 you know, when I was growing up, I always ate canned peaches. They're like, that was the fruit

00:30:29.640 that my parents gave me canned peaches. Well, recently I was in the grocery store and I was like

00:30:34.060 in this like section where it's like all fruit for kids. And like, there weren't canned peaches.

00:30:39.060 They were not there. Instead, what fruit are parents giving their kids at the parks where I live?

00:30:45.640 Berries. Okay. Like blackberries, blueberries, strawberries. If you're a middle-class family

00:30:50.780 at the park, you don't get, you know, a preserved peach cup out. You get a thing of fresh raspberries

00:30:57.240 and it's like four times as expensive. And so the norm changed. So we really need culturally,

00:31:04.420 it's hard to know what role government would have in this. Maybe there's some, I'm open to that,

00:31:07.720 but really as a cultural thing, we need to push back on this. We need to like, like defend lazy

00:31:13.600 parents, not negligent. Okay. I don't want to go too far, but like, like I'm, I'm very in favor of

00:31:22.120 like, okay. Parents, like I'll admit, like I am an okay parent. I am not parent of the year. My wife,

00:31:29.320 my wife is, but like in general, I'm very think we should be much more favorable to like

00:31:35.620 middling parents and like super high intense parents. We should like socially stigmatize this.

00:31:43.720 It's just partly because also we know it doesn't actually do much to help children. Like there's a

00:31:48.220 real benefit when you shift from like negligent to like middle third or, you know, 75th percentile of

00:31:55.460 like parental intensity, but like the shift from like 75th percentile to like 99th is not helping kids

00:32:00.220 very much. So we should really stigmatize this, like send your kids outside and close the door,

00:32:04.720 give them, give them cheap fruit cups. We need to have clear norms that if you spend a lot of time 0.99

00:32:12.320 and money on your kids, like it's taboo. So, okay. I love this. This is really interesting. So

00:32:18.820 people's increased, we call it desired consumption level has gone up as standard living has gone up and

00:32:25.040 you, and it's a social contagion. You see everyone else is doing this. I need to have that.

00:32:28.740 Well, kids might put a hamper on that vacation, so I'm not going to have kids so I can go on the

00:32:33.380 vacation. But then also there is this idea of intensive parenting. You think, well, man,

00:32:38.420 if I want to be a good parent, I got to give the berries. I got to take them to the baseball coach

00:32:43.280 and get them the two, the Kumon tutor. And we're going to have all these fantastic parties inspired

00:32:49.440 by Pinterest. And because people see that they're like, yeah, it's a lot of work. I'm just going to

00:32:53.520 have two kids instead of four kids because I can't do that for four kids.

00:32:57.560 Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, that this hyper-intensive parenting is, is a huge factor.

00:33:03.320 And I should say like, you know, I've done, I run these surveys and, um, you know, agreement with

00:33:09.180 statements related to high intensity parenting is associated with way, way lower fertility.

00:33:15.000 Yeah. Yeah. The high intensity parenting is, is really interesting because you think those parenting

00:33:20.920 norms won't affect you, but they do affect you. I mean, I think all parenting norms affect you and

00:33:26.120 that can be used for good or for ill. I mean, here's an example that I'm seeing in my own life

00:33:31.980 with my kids. So I got a son who's in middle school and a lot of his friends are starting to

00:33:37.600 get cell phones. And so there's this social pressure, you know, like my kid wants a cell

00:33:43.160 phone. And if I don't get him a cell phone, then he'll be out of the loop with his friends.

00:33:47.160 And so you kind of have to band together with other parents and be like, Hey, how about we all

00:33:53.880 not let our kids get cell phones until high school? It has to be like this collective thing.

00:33:59.520 Exactly. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing is that parenting is a collective project. And this is,

00:34:03.920 this is what we often don't get in our kind of atomized modern societies that like,

00:34:09.080 like parents can't do it themselves. They engage in combinations with other parents to do collective

00:34:14.600 projects because a lot of parenting is very collective. Like kids develop these norms

00:34:19.640 among them based on what they allow. And you do want to find parents who do things similarly because

00:34:24.040 again, kids judge their own wellbeing by comparison, just like we do. So we want to give them comparisons

00:34:29.900 that don't put us in a rough spot. Um, uh, you, you want your kid to be at a similar level of,

00:34:36.420 of subjective consumption assessment as their peers. And so that means like, you really want to,

00:34:42.880 yeah, create these collaborations. So, uh, I think the takeaway of their kids don't have to be high

00:34:49.380 intense. They don't have to take a lot of time. Like you said, you can just be like, all right,

00:34:53.080 here's the fruit cocktail kid. You get your one cherry. I haven't had one of those. I don't think

00:34:57.280 my kids have ever had a fruit cocktail. I'm going to have to go get them a can of fruit cocktail and

00:35:01.300 then have the birthday party at McDonald's. You don't need to go to the jump zone. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

00:35:05.440 My kids love McDonald's so much. I think, I think actually two of them may be at McDonald's

00:35:09.900 right now with my wife. You know, I don't, I don't want to make this sound like, you know,

00:35:13.800 we're two dudes talking about this. Um, so, you know, it's easy for this like opposition to

00:35:19.440 intensive parenting to sound like, sound like saying like, Oh, those crazy moms. This is not

00:35:24.780 what I'm saying. You know, parenting is, it does take time. It does take effort. There is a certain

00:35:30.200 level of money that it does take. And the work that parents do, particularly parents who are primary

00:35:36.580 caretakers do is incredibly valuable and important. But what I wish we understood better as a society

00:35:43.120 is that most of the value and importance of what parents do is explained by the shift from like

00:35:49.440 bottom percentile parental investment to like 60th percentile parental investment. Okay.

00:35:56.580 So not like 85th to 99th percentile investment. Okay. What I wish we'd do a better job is really

00:36:04.320 speaking value and appreciation into like the average parent who's done most of the work that

00:36:11.780 needs to be doing. And we would do less valorizing of like the super parent who, you know, does,

00:36:19.500 you know, 36 hours of homemade craft decorations for their two year olds birthday party. And I'm like,

00:36:26.000 like, no, no, we like, no, we made like a cardboard cutout of like, I think we bought a pinata and like,

00:36:34.060 that was it. Yeah. Like just, so I want to try and thread the needle of like excessively intensive

00:36:41.340 parenting, you know, not good makes all of us worse off. I work from home. And so like, I'm really

00:36:48.360 involved in my kids' lives. I'm taking them to school, picking them up from school. I've taken the

00:36:53.040 practices, taking activities. And because of that, you know, I'm always looking for ways. It's just

00:36:58.220 like, okay, what can we do to like make this easier for everybody? And that means like saying no a lot,

00:37:03.200 you know, we're not going to do traveling teams. We're not going to go to this activity. And I always

00:37:07.540 tell, you know, I imagine like, I always do this thing when I'm like trying to figure out what to do

00:37:11.320 with my kids. I'm like, imagine it's 1985. What would my mom tell me? And I'd be like, well, okay,

00:37:17.160 you can go do that. Go outside, go shoot the basketball. Just you're fine. You don't have to be

00:37:22.160 holding their hand the entire time. Let's shift over to another topic because you've done some

00:37:26.860 research on declining religiosity in the United States. And the common narrative on this subject

00:37:33.080 is that people leave religion as adults because of the increasing secularization of society or

00:37:40.460 because they became disillusioned with faith because of, you know, scandals in churches.

00:37:46.100 But your research shows that the decline of religiosity starts when you're a child and still

00:37:51.720 living with your parents. Walk us through those findings.

00:37:54.680 Yeah. So I, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a religious guy. My wife and I are, are church workers as well.

00:38:03.240 And so you hear this story a lot like, oh yeah, we had all of our, you know, good Christian kids

00:38:08.500 and they went to college and those liberal professors contaminated them and they left the faith.

00:38:12.400 But as a sociologist, I was always a little skeptical of this because like

00:38:15.860 my impression had always been that the research suggested that like religious ideas were socialized

00:38:22.300 fairly young. And so recently I, there was this book that came out, the great de-churching that 0.93

00:38:27.720 was, it was really interesting. It's an interesting read. I enjoyed it, but it made this really strong

00:38:33.620 argument that, uh, there was a de-churching that happened basically to 20 somethings and to some

00:38:39.700 extent 30 somethings that like they were religious kids and then they grew up and they stopped going to

00:38:44.620 church because of all these different things that happened. Science or change in life circumstances

00:38:50.720 or whatever. And I just reading, I was just very skeptical of this. So I put together all the data

00:38:56.640 I could find on child religion. So usually when we do surveys, we survey adults because it's easy to

00:39:03.400 survey. Well, comparatively easy to survey adults. Kids, we don't survey very much. They, you know,

00:39:08.820 their contact info cannot be distributed as freely as adults legally. They're just

00:39:14.620 part of the survey. Very young kids can't take surveys, right? Like they don't have their own

00:39:18.460 phones. They don't have their own email address. Like what do you, how do you, how do you get kids?

00:39:21.800 Although increasingly they do have phones and email addresses, but so, but there are some surveys,

00:39:26.300 some of them are in school. Some of them are really high quality kind of scientific research

00:39:30.660 surveys that were able to get a bunch of kids. And what I show is across three or four different

00:39:37.200 surveys. All the evidence suggests by age 13, children are already way more secular than their

00:39:45.000 parents are. They continue to secularize until maybe age 21. And there is virtually, there's very

00:39:53.600 little net loss of faith after age 21. Yes, there are people who leave the church after age 21,

00:39:59.380 but there are also people who convert after age 21. And on net, it approximately balances out.

00:40:03.940 Whereas under age 21, and really particularly under age 18, you just have this really dramatic

00:40:11.440 rise in secularization. I show this in cross-sectional data and in longitudinal data in

00:40:16.120 multiple different sources, taken at different times, using different methods. And what I'm able to show

00:40:21.240 is that child secularization has moved younger and has gotten more intense. So in 1993, about 12%

00:40:33.300 of 8th graders said religion was not at all important to them. About 13% of 10th graders said religion was

00:40:40.520 not at all important to them. And about 15% of 12th graders. So 12, 13, 15 from 8th, 10th to 12th grade.

00:40:47.320 Okay. In 2000 and 2005 or so, it was still about 13% for 8th and 10th graders, but it was about 17%

00:41:00.880 for 12th graders. So 12th graders started secularized, but 8th and 10th graders did not. They stayed the

00:41:06.440 way they were. In 2013, about 15% of 8th graders were not at all religious. So it arisen a bit, but not

00:41:14.660 a lot. 20% of 10th graders were not at all religious. And about 23% of 12th graders, which means 12th

00:41:23.880 graders secularized a lot more. 10th graders secularized a lot more. And crucially, the gap

00:41:29.140 between 10th and 8th graders grew a lot, which means secularization was happening in 9th and 10th

00:41:34.040 grade. And then if you look at today, or the most recent data, which is I think 2021, about 29% of

00:41:41.040 12th graders are not at all religious, about 27% of 10th graders, and about 23 or 24% of 8th graders,

00:41:48.820 which means now tons of the secularization is happening before 8th grade. That's really

00:41:54.580 striking. To me, that says that secularization of children is moving earlier and earlier and earlier.

00:42:00.280 Why is that happening? Well, I mean, I think social media is a big part of that story, right? That

00:42:05.460 kids now inhabit these totally adult, unsupervised online spaces where they interact with much older

00:42:11.320 people and where their life is more contaminated by these kind of adult things. So I think that that's

00:42:18.120 one of the factors. But in general, I think this is just a case of American parents not trying very

00:42:25.200 hard to pass on religion. Okay. So we oftentimes think that society is becoming less religious because

00:42:32.000 adults undergo a faith deconstruction, faith crisis, and then leave religion. But the data

00:42:39.000 actually shows that faith loss largely happens in childhood. And that's because the baby boomer, 0.97

00:42:46.300 Gen X, millennial parents, they aren't religious themselves, and then they're not passing on 0.60

00:42:51.620 religion to their kids. Well, yeah, but no, I mean, I'm saying even among religious parents 0.53

00:42:55.680 are pretty lazy. There's a nice book called Handing Down the Faith. I reviewed it a couple years back

00:43:01.240 for Christianity Today, where they do this really comprehensive qualitative and quantitative study

00:43:06.140 of religious parents in the US. And they show that most religious parents in the US believe what I

00:43:11.280 would call the backlash myth. And the backlash myth is this. If you do too much overt, explicit

00:43:20.920 religious instruction in your house, your children will react against your religion and they'll end up

00:43:28.200 less religious than if you've done nothing at all. Okay. This is the backlash myth. There's no

00:43:33.400 empirical support for this idea. This is totally wrong. Every shred of empirical evidence we have,

00:43:37.620 including some that's, I think, plausibly causal, suggests that the more effort that society,

00:43:44.580 parents, schools, whatever, the more effort you put into passing on the faith to your children,

00:43:49.380 the likelier they are to share your faith. Like it's very straightforward. Try hard, get better

00:43:55.660 results. But parents don't believe this. American parents deeply believe in the backlash myth.

00:44:00.540 It's hard to persuade them against it. They think that if they do something that their kids don't like,

00:44:05.800 that their kids will hate everything they stand for. And this is, this is just not, this is just

00:44:11.180 totally untrue. There's no serious high quality research to support this model. And yet it's widely

00:44:17.380 believed. And the result of this is that American parents really forego a lot of their influence.

00:44:22.120 They don't do a lot of explicit teaching to their children about the faith at home. They don't lead a lot

00:44:27.500 of religious activities at home. They don't lean on their kids to be involved in religious communities.

00:44:32.020 People just assume that their kids are going to absorb their religion. It doesn't matter what

00:44:36.620 environment they surround their kid with. So yeah, religiosity is declining, not because adults

00:44:41.780 are converting for the most part, but because children are never absorbing their parents' faith

00:44:46.660 at considerable rates. And that's largely because parents are not making great efforts to pass it on.

00:44:54.280 And I should say, I'll say something in defense of American parents. Okay. So like,

00:44:57.660 you know, not just American parents, this ever, you know, 80 years ago, parents didn't need to do

00:45:03.500 that much because our society was so suffused with religion that parents could just do a bit to kind

00:45:11.820 of give some extra firepower and a relatively religious society would do most of the work

00:45:16.440 socializing the child into the faith. That is no longer the case, but parents haven't caught up.

00:45:21.480 They haven't realized that they now have to substitute for all that stuff society used to be doing.

00:45:26.840 And this is a place where I just said all this stuff like against intensive parenting.

00:45:30.340 And this is one place where I think we should be way more intense.

00:45:34.180 Like do less intensive parenting at like making sure your kid has 57 different talents

00:45:39.240 and goes to all these activities and you don't need to monitor every moment of their play and stuff,

00:45:44.120 but like intentionally, concretely lead everyday religious activities in your household every single day.

00:45:51.980 The day should not pass where your child does not see you leading the family in practices of faith.

00:45:58.480 If you want your religion to be passed on to your child. 1.00

00:46:02.260 Well, Lyman, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

00:46:06.680 You can follow me on Twitter at Lyman Stone KY, or you can always just, uh, find me at various places

00:46:14.540 online Institute for Family Studies and in some other places.

00:46:17.340 Yeah. You've got, I think you've got some articles in the Atlantic, correct?

00:46:20.060 Yeah. I'm all over the place.

00:46:21.220 You're all over the place. All right. Well, Lyman Stone, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:46:24.340 Good talking to you.

00:46:26.480 My guest today was Lyman Stone. He is a sociologist, a demographer.

00:46:29.820 You find more information about his work on his Twitter or X site, whatever you want to call it

00:46:33.360 at Lyman Stone KY. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash family myths.

00:46:38.660 We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:46:41.140 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:46:52.260 at artofmanlish.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:46:56.360 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you haven't

00:46:59.480 done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you take one minute to give us a view of a podcast or Spotify,

00:47:02.860 it helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the

00:47:06.600 show with a friend or family member who would think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for

00:47:10.620 the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM podcast

00:47:14.440 and put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - November 27, 2023

Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript