Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids
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Summary
Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer, crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out what s going on in population, relationship, and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he s discovered in his research, and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually correlated with a higher chance of divorce.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture. Like,
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for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce,
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people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming
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more secular because people leave religion in adulthood. Are these ideas actually borne out by
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the data? Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches
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numbers from all the latest studies to find out what's going on in population, relationship,
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and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he's discovered in
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his research and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually correlated with a
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higher chance of divorce, the effect that marrying later has on fertility, why the drop in the number
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of kids people are having isn't only about cost, but also about the rise in high-intensity parenting
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and how the increase in societal secularization can actually be traced to kids, not adults.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash family myths.
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So you are a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and you focus on demographic
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changes in family life. And a lot of your research has looked at a lot of popular ideas that we have
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about family life. And today I want to talk about some of these ideas and maybe some of the
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counterintuitive findings you found with your research. One idea that's out there is that before
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people get married, you should live with your potential spouse first so that you can, you know,
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know whether you're compatible or not. So let's talk about cohabitation. Like first, what's the state
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It's very common. If you go back to like the 1960s, marriages in the 1960s, only about 5% of them
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were to people who are cohabiting before marriage. Today, it's over 70%, perhaps 75%.
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So there's been a huge increase in cohabitation over the last few decades. Just really this
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extraordinary social transition that I think is kind of taken for granted now, but it's kind of
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snuck up and we're like, oh wait, this happened. Now, like everyone cohabits, it seems like. I mean,
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again, like three out of four marriages will have premarital cohabitation now. So that's a huge
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When demographers look at this rise, do they attribute it to anything like societal changes,
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Yeah, there's tons of different, this is a very debated question. What caused all this?
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There's a couple of things. One is actually, there's a very nice paper that just came like
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the final version of it just came out recently. It's called collateralized marriage. And they argue,
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I think fairly persuasively that the legal benefits of marriage have declined over time. That is,
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it's not as, it doesn't give you the same guarantees it used to in the past. That is,
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you know, it doesn't protect you in the event of divorce. You have to pay, you know, men have to
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pay parents, but usually men have to pay child support, even if they weren't married. The relative
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benefits to marriage have declined for men and women. People often talk about this as declined for
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men, but actually the benefits for women have declined very dramatically as well, as this paper I
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mentioned shows pretty clearly. So as the benefits for formal marriage have declined,
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the thing is that a lot of the benefits of informal cohabitation have not declined, right? Living
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together is still convenient for sexual access and sharing rent and things like that. And furthermore,
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the taboos on premarital cohabitation or non-marital cohabitation have declined a lot.
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So in some sense, it got cheaper to cohabit and the benefits and the legal benefits and social
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benefits and protections of marriage declined. I mean, as a result, people still, they still want
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to have convenient sexual access to one another. So cohabitation rose, but because marriage was no
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longer a contract that really offered a lot of benefits for particularly for lower socioeconomic
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status people, marriage really declined quite a lot. Though, as you mentioned that, you know,
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this trend really is very class biased. Cohabitation rose the earliest and rose the most for lower
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socioeconomic status people. And higher socioeconomic status people are still less likely to cohabit
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and more likely to marry, and they're more likely to marry directly with no prior cohabitation.
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That's interesting. Yeah, I think they also, upper class or, you know, middle class and above,
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whatever, how you want to break it down, less likely to divorce than working class, lower class.
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Yeah. Well, so this idea, okay, well, you should, you know, live with somebody before you get married
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because we can figure out if we're compatible. What does the research say about that? Let's say
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someone cohabitates and they decide to get married. Will that cohabitation period improve
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the marriage? No, or it will increase their likelihood of divorce. The idea is called trial
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marriage. So it's like a test run of a marriage. And the theory has been, yeah, that it's going to
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enable better match quality. So, I mean, look, we can check. We can, we have these large data sets
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that I and others use with hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of women, I think, over the last
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several decades. And we can ask these questions. We can say, okay, if we compare women who did cohabit
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to women who didn't, how do their divorce probabilities vary? And the answer is that if
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you cohabit, you're more likely to divorce. There is a divorce penalty or you can call it a penalty,
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a divorce penalty associated with cohabitation. Essentially this way of saying that like what
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really happens with cohabitation is, is two things. First of all, who cohabits isn't random,
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right? So like if you're cohabiting, it's often because, because you're not quite sure about the
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relationship yet. You want to take a next step or you're just not confident about marriage yet,
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which might speak to, you know, lower match quality to begin with. But secondly, a lot of
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cohabitation just happens kind of people slide into it. It's like they just, they're just spending the
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night a lot. And then somebody goes, ah, maybe I'll start moving more stuff over. And then like,
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if you can still pay rent for like a year or whatever, then you can move in. Yeah. Scott
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Stanley talks about that. And those things in particular, like decisions are very useful for
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people. Making clear decisions is associated with like, even making bad decisions. If you actually
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make it as a decision, you're better off than doing it accidentally. Like you don't want to do
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things on autopilot in your life, just in general, you should exercise agency at every opportunity you can.
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And so the upshot of this is that there's a lot of selection into cohabitation
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of people who might be lower match quality to begin with.
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And some other research I've read, and these are all just theories that social psychologists have
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put out there about why cohabitating has a divorce penalty is that with cohabitation, you can slide
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into the relationship and then you can slide out of it. And so if you do that before marriage,
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it could kind of prime you like, well, you know, if I don't like the relationship,
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I can just get out of it. Again, it's a theory. I don't know if you can prove it,
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Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it's absolutely a possibility. You know, I, it's, it's hard to
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test what's going on inside people's brains, but yeah, I mean, it could create kind of bad habits.
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But also the expectation of cohabitation might change your search protocol, so to speak. Okay.
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So like, let's say that you expect to marry directly. That is with no cohabitation because
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you don't get to do that test run. You're going to look for other ways to investigate mate quality.
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Okay. Like you're going to try and find other ways to figure out if this is a good mate.
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And one of the big ways you would do that is investigating their family background,
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right? That you try and meet the family, meet them a lot, hang out with them a lot,
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learn about their background because people's family is a good proxy for them. Sorry if you
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don't like your family, but the truth is statistically, you're going to be a lot like
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them in your life. So historically that's how marriage happened, right? Marriage generally
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involved a lot of family to family interaction. You know, that's the origin in the traditional
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marriage ceremony of, you know, if anyone has any reason why these two cannot be joined
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together, let them speak now or forever hold his peace, right? That's asking, you've got
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all the families together and you're supposed to look around and be like, do you, do you
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recognize anybody? Is this an incestuous marriage that they didn't realize? But like, you know,
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look around, make sure nobody knows each other too well. So you used to do a lot of this kind
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of family level investigation. That doesn't happen anymore. A lot of people like their first
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time meeting their partner's family will be like, you know, after they move in together
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or something. So instead of investigating sort of the, the social context and community
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that a partner might be in their family, church, whatever, because we live more atomized
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social lives. We're more detached from these institutions of community support, community
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engagement. Instead, we deepen the level of inspection of the individual themselves by
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Well, related to this idea of deepening your inspection of a partner, people are dating longer
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before getting married. You know, they're playing the field longer. And even when they do
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find someone they commit to, they date them longer before they get married. So as a result,
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has there been a shift in the age of first marriage in the United States?
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Yeah, there's been a huge shift. So today, according to the census, the median age of first
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marriage for women is I think like 28 and a half. And for men, it's 30 and a half. That's way
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up from like the low 20s, like 20, 21, 22 in the 50s and 60s. Now that low value in the 50s and 60s
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was anomalous. If you go back to like the 19th century or the early 20th century, typical marriage
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was in like the mid 20s, you know, 25, 26. So, you know, getting back to a median age of marriage
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of like 21, you know, I don't know that that's necessarily like good or desirable. I mean,
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those marriages did have high divorce rates and dissatisfaction with the state of gender
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relations in America in the 1940s, 50s, 60s gave rise to the world we inhabit today. So just trying
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to recreate the world that gave us the world we have today is, I don't know, it seems like a losing
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bet. But today having, you know, men marrying at 31 instead of in the past at 25 or 26, you know,
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we don't have to get back to 21, but maybe we could get back to 25 or 26. Like that was like 2007.
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That wasn't like a hellscape. Okay. That was not that long ago that we were at that level.
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What are the downsides of delaying marriage? You know, from your research, like what happens
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to a person's life cycle if they put off marriage later and later in life?
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Well, it depends on what you want in life. If you're, let's say you're a man and you want
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career success, marriage is kind of a take it or leave it offer. Marriage doesn't have big
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effects on men's career trajectories, maybe slightly positive. It's not a big effect.
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So if, if what you value in life is career success, getting married later probably doesn't
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hurt you. Maybe what you value in life is a leisure, you know, having lots of leisure time
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there. Marriage is a, an interesting thing to calculate because on the one hand, you know,
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you might have another person that you sometimes have to take care of if she's sick or out of work
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or something, but also in principle, she can take care of you if you're sick or out of work and
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leisure is nice, but also most people like to have leisure with others. Marriage is a, as a good,
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pretty fairly secure way of ensuring that you've got somebody that you really, really like to hang
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around you with all the fun things you want to do in life. So there are, you know, multiplicative
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benefits to the hedonic value of leisure. If you've got somebody you really care about to share it
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with in marriage could be a vehicle to lock that in. So if what you care about is leisure marriage,
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you know, it might be, it might be good. There's some trade-offs, but it might be good.
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But if what you care about is making a lasting impact on the world, like leaving something
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behind when you die, marriage is, is you really want to get married young, right? Because the main
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thing you're going to leave behind is your genetic material, your children. And beyond that, your
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cultural material, the, the, the traditions, ideas, values, behaviors, practices that you pass on to
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your children. And delayed marriage dramatically alters your odds of having any given number of
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children. The later you get married, the, I mean, it's almost a perfect correlation. I mean, the,
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the later you marry, the fewer children you end up having. And that's true across many countries,
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across time, late marriage, less kids. So if you want to leave something behind when you die,
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a kind of legacy, something, something that will carry on the, the life projects that you value,
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the traditions of meaning and substance that you contributed to, which personally, that's what I want.
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Then you don't want to dilly dally on getting married because getting married tends to give you
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the kind of high security relationship where you and your, your wife can have a more productive
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negotiation about specialization, right? You can say, look, okay, you know, one of us is going to
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step back from work for a few years to focus on this other thing in our family. Maybe it's kids,
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maybe it's something else care of a relative. I don't know, because, you know, we really value that.
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And, you know, we're going to kind of cross subsidize each other here. So marriage insofar
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as it enables specialization can enable you to really advance your kind of dyadic contribution
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to valued life projects. Well, speaking of kids, there's been a lot of articles I've seen in the
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news about people having fewer kids. What's going on with the reason why people are having fewer
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children these days? Yeah. I mean, fertility has fallen a lot in the U S but it depends on the
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time horizon. Right. So like, if you go back to like the baby boom, fertility was like, I don't
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know, like three kids per woman or something. It was quite high. I don't have it on hand, but it was
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quite high. And then it declined to like 1.7 in like the seventies. People were like, Oh, fertility is
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super low population decline. But then we had immigration reform and we got a lot of immigrants
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and two things happened with those immigrants. One, we got a lot of immigrants and that increases
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population. And two, they were largely from Latin America. And at that time, fertility rates in Latin
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America were quite high. When people migrate, they tend to replicate a lot of the cultural forms of
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their place of origin. Women moved to the U S and they had babies, particularly because the U S's
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birthright citizenship also creates a pretty favorable calculus for having children here if you're a
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non-citizen. So what happened is in the seventies, eighties, nineties, fertility rose there. It wasn't also,
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it wasn't just Hispanic immigrant fertility, native born fertility rose, white, non-Hispanic white
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fertility rose somewhat. So we, we got this kind of little fertility boom in the eighties, nineties
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and into like the mid two thousands. But then in 2007, when, when our fertility rates were like,
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you know, 2.07 or something. So like right at quote unquote replacement rate, replacement rate is
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basically how many kids you need to have for society to replace itself, assuming its current level
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of mortality, which in the U S replacement rates like 2.03, 2.04. Though it also technically depends
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on the sex ratio of children. So that's a whole different thing. But regardless, fertility rates
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started falling since 2007 and they were at 2.07 in 2007, I think, or 2008, one of those, uh, today
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they're like 1.66. So we've lost about 0.4 children per woman, which is to say basically every other woman
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is missing a child versus her 2007 counterfactual fertility in the last, uh, 16 years or something.
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The thing to understand about this is that there's, there's multiple different things going on here.
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Like explaining fertility decline from the baby boom to the 1980s, you're going to have a different set
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of factors than the decline from like 2007 to today. Right. So like from the baby boom to the 1980s,
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you could tell a story of like, you know, women's rights, women's entrance into the workforce,
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you know, no fault divorce. I don't know. There's all these stories you could tell that
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are kind of the stories people are used to hearing about fertility, right? Like, um, contraception
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was big, but like those stories don't really apply to the last 15 years. Like, yes, contraceptive
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use did rise some and particularly of long acting, removable contraceptives, which is the most effective
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form, but abortion rates fell over a lot of that window. And, uh, and furthermore, although unintended
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fertility fell over that period, intended fertility also fell. So what's going on there? Why, why did
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intended fertility fall? That's not a contraceptive story. This decline from 2007, it's not like we
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all got tons more prosperous. Like we didn't just have like some, like this story of like development
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and women's liberation. Like women aren't like what, what 20% more liberated now than they were in 2007.
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Okay. Like that's just, I mean, I don't know what that would mean to say that, but like
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the reality is we just have lower fertility without a big change in a lot of these sort of
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conceptual big drivers of the 20th century decline. So what caused it? I've argued that
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most of the decline is due to postponed marriage, but if you look at marital fertility rates, so fertility
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rates of married people, they really have not declined very much. Virtually the whole decline is among
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is just fewer people being married. So we're really looking at a change in entrance into marriage
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and as feeling among young people of preparedness for marriage. And so you really need to explore,
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okay, well, why did that happen? I mean, that's a complicated question with a lot of different
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elements, but suffice to say the biggest component of the decline in fertility is lack of entrance into
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marriage. All right. So fewer people are getting married or they're waiting too long to get
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married. So they can't, they don't have kids. So, I mean, I know you said there's a lot of factors
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going into like why people are choosing to postpone marriage, but like, what are some of them? Like,
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what have you found? You don't have to get too in the weeds with this, but I'm curious.
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So when we think about these timing issues, like number of children is something that people
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plausibly choose. Okay. Like they choose to have more or fewer conditional and some other factors,
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but when you get married or like when you do something is less a matter of choice,
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strangely enough, because like in principle, you know, a woman can just kind of go and have children
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assuming she's fertile, right? You know, through IVF or sperm donors or just unprotected promiscuous
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sex, like this can happen. But the timing is, is, is a bit more complicated for something like marriage
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because first of all, it takes two to tango. So you need somebody else to agree. But second of all,
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timing decisions are really, really strongly socially normed. So if you think about the life
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course, if I were to ask like, when should you graduate high school? Well, you'd probably say
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around 18, but why would you say around 18? Is it because we have some like research that suggests
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that 18 is the optimal age to finish high school? No, we'd say, well, you just should,
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because that's when you usually do. Like if you finish it at 16, because you dropped out,
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that's bad. You finish it at 16 because you're a super genius. I guess that's maybe good.
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If you finish it at 20, that's maybe better than not finishing it, but it's not great.
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But like, ultimately all we're really saying is the norm is to do it at 18. Like, it's not like we
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have like great reasons to believe that this is like the perfect age to end high school. So it's just,
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it's just a norm. Likewise, if we say, you know, what age should you finish college? Well,
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most of us are going to be like, I don't know, like 22. Why? Because 18 plus four. Okay. It's
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not like we like have some deep methodical consideration of the optimal duration of college
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education. No, a BA takes about four years. And if somebody was like, well, would you prefer to
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choose a three-year BA program? It's like, well, there aren't three-year BA, or there aren't many
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three-year BA programs. Maybe I'd choose if I could, but like, this isn't a choice I really have.
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And then if you think about like, okay, people don't usually want to get married when they're in school,
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right? It's just, they, they don't, I mean, there's a big spike in marriage the summer after
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graduation. And so as people spend more years in school, college, graduate, PhD, whatever,
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all those are rising, everything is pushed later. And as educated people have their norms pushed
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later, it also filters down to other people, right? We all inhabit a society and to some extent we share
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norms. And then there's, there's other things, you know, because you're much later in life when you
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are done with school and quote unquote, ready for marriage, you also have more adult habits formed,
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right? Like you're not founding a life with someone else. You're kind of merging lives with
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somebody else. And so coordinating two fully fleshed out adult lives is a lot harder than
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coordinating two kind of wet behind the ears, young people who haven't figured out life yet,
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right? You have the two body problem. If you get married and graduate college together,
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figuring out where to move to get jobs is a lot easier than if you're in your mid twenties and one of you
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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
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engagement, but now like people do like two year engagements. It's insane. So, you know, these are
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just social norms about timing that emerge and why do they emerge? You know, we could get all into
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stuff about why they emerge and underlying economic factors. But at the end of the day,
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everything in our society is motivating towards extended adolescence. And if you want to find
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like a deep underlying factor of this though, it's, it both explains too much and too little.
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You could point to basically the fact that we're becoming a human capital intensive economy
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where you get ahead by acquiring a lot of human capital for yourself, which means education,
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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,
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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,
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
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
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
00:24:14.600
children than she wants, which means if you take 10 women, the eight of them will be missing a child
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
00:26:07.600
something else to spend money on for your kids. Like, like, this is ridiculous. The idea that giving people
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
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
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,
00:42:46.300
Gen X, millennial parents, they aren't religious themselves, and then they're not passing on
00:42:51.620
religion to their kids. Well, yeah, but no, I mean, I'm saying even among religious parents
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.
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?
00:46:21.220
You're all over the place. All right. Well, Lyman Stone, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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
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the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM podcast