How Family Breakdown Destroys Society - Rob Henderson
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
205.43214
Summary
In this episode, we're joined by the author of his new book, "Luxury Beliefs: How to Break the Cycle of Abuse in America's Foster Care System: The Story of a Family in Need of a New Beginning. We talk about the process of writing the book, how he got into foster care, and what it was like to grow up in foster care.
Transcript
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Your first memory is watching your birth mother handcuffed and taken away.
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You go from foster home to foster home to foster home.
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I got a front row seat into sort of witnessing what's been happening to families in working
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At what point are we just going to be just really honest and go, we're failing our children?
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Last time you were on, we talked about this concept that you actually pioneered, which
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You've since written a book conspicuously right in the center of the table, which is absolutely
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And in some ways, I have to say, it probably wasn't that hard to write in that you've had
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the most remarkable life story of almost anyone that sat in that chair.
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It was a struggle, actually, to get the ideas down on the page, the sort of resurfacing all
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And there was a period, especially the first half of the book, where I was surprised at
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how sort of fresh the feelings were from that period.
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You know, especially as a guy, you just feel like, oh, I can just get over it.
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It can be adaptive as you're sort of striving and advancing in the world.
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It was the lockdown and everyone was just kind of inside.
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You know, I managed to use that period to channel my energy toward writing this book.
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And yeah, I mean, just the way it came together, even in hindsight, you know, I've read it multiple
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times now going through edits and all that stuff before it came out and, you know, if
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I had known how difficult it was going to be to write it, I don't know that I actually
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So in a way, I'm actually glad I didn't know what it was going to be like.
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It's almost like, you know, I don't know, running a marathon or something like that,
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where you don't actually anticipate just how grueling it's going to be.
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But then afterwards, you're like, glad you're proud that you did it.
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You've got to give yourself a break, though, because for people who haven't yet read the book,
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and of course, we recommend that they do, like your first memory is watching your birth
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You go from foster home to foster home to foster home, then you get adopted, you know, that
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family splits and someone else comes in, someone gets shot, like, then you get your, you drink
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too much, like, I mean, every terrible experience is pretty much that human beings can have.
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Yeah, I mean, it's, it was a very kind of interesting, you know, these terrible experiences, to me,
00:03:01.160
they, I've had some difficulty with this, because I've read a lot of great memoirs and biographies
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of, you know, many guests that you guys have had on your show.
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And I'm like, you know, I wasn't like, I wasn't a refugee in a totalitarian regime.
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I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, you know, a poor black person in the Jim Crow era, like I've
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read very, you know, some of these, some of these stories are just horrific.
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And, but my book, I think is unique in that I think most people don't anticipate just
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how difficult the foster care system is in the modern era.
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I don't think a lot of people are familiar with just how, how much deterioration and disrepair
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exists in kind of lower class, working class areas in the US.
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So, you know, when you hear about, you know, someone in a totalitarian regime, you kind of
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I'm going to read about it, but I know it's going to be bad.
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Whereas a book like this, you're like, okay, foster care system.
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You know, I have some thoughts about it, but let me read it.
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And then I think a lot of people are just shocked at just how unstable, chaotic, neglectful,
00:04:03.280
emotionally difficult it is for kids in those environments.
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And so, you know, I, I opened my book, the preface of the book going through the kind
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And I use that as a device to kind of introduce the reader into kind of what happens to kids
00:04:19.920
who go in the foster care system, you know, these not uncommon experiences.
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And then, like you mentioned, after the foster care system, I was adopted into this, uh, working
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class family was settled into this kind of dusty blue collar town in Northern California.
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And of course, at the time I wasn't aware of this, but, you know, cause I was a little
00:04:41.960
kid, but in hindsight, now I understand after reading kind of interesting sociological studies,
00:04:46.880
ethnographic research that I got a front row seat into sort of witnessing, uh, what's been
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happening to families in working class communities sort of all across the country.
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I mean, all across the Western world, really, that this is not a unique just to the U S or
00:05:00.720
And yeah, just communicating those experiences firsthand.
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You know, I didn't want this book to just be this kind of, you know, oh, this bootstrap
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story, you know, he had a difficult life, but then he, you know, worked really hard and rose
00:05:17.460
And I guess that is one way to look at it, but I wanted people to understand the kind
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of modal or most common experience of a young male in this kind of environment.
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And so I had several close friends growing up, uh, in Red Bluff, California, and I described
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their lives and their experiences and kind of where they ended up.
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And I wanted the reader to understand that you can't expect, you know, every single kid
00:05:46.460
who grows up this way to have the outcome that I had.
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These are the outcomes that are statistically the most likely.
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So, you know, I had most of my friends, they weren't in foster care, raised by single moms.
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I had a friend raised by a single dad, friend raised by his grandmother because his mom
00:06:02.340
And that's kind of a common picture of these communities.
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I have, you know, the rest of my friends kind of in these, you know, menial jobs that are
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And, you know, friends who have, uh, two children with two different women who they don't speak
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Like, this is not, you know, this is, uh, you know, this is surprisingly and, and, and
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And Rob, you're talking about your friends who went down a different path.
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You went to an Ivy league college, you went to Cambridge.
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Do you think that the difference between you and them is intellectual slash academic
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So, yeah, I get into discussions and friendly debates with people more so on the right, I
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think, who, I think they, they overvalue the importance of academic ability where they,
00:07:06.520
you know, they read some studies about IQ and intelligence.
00:07:10.140
And then I think like, oh, that, that explains the world now.
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And I think it's a, it's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole story.
00:07:17.000
Um, so, you know, the, the, the short version is, I think that in intelligence or academic ability
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And I tell these stories in the book about how my curiosity and my aptitude and my interest
00:07:33.340
in school, it would kind of wax and wane depending on my environment.
00:07:36.520
And so I tell a story in the seventh foster home I lived in, um, you know, I was changing
00:07:49.180
And so by the time I was in this seventh foster home, the teacher and the social worker and
00:07:55.320
my foster mom, they were so concerned with my lack of academic performance that they, um,
00:08:01.400
had a psychologist come and administer, uh, an IQ test because they thought it might've
00:08:05.080
had a learning disability and I took the test and it was like a very, you know, I, I scored
00:08:12.380
Um, and on the verbal portion, I scored something like an 80, which is more than a standard deviation
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And that was because no one read to me, um, changing schools all the time.
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There was no, um, external pressure or guidance or encouragement to pick up a book.
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Um, you know, I was taking this test and I gave it like a kind of half-hearted effort.
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You know, one of the things that people don't understand about IQ tests is if you score really
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high on an IQ test, it probably means you're pretty smart.
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If you score low on IQ tests, that could be for a variety of reasons.
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It could be because you're not very academically inclined, but it could be because you're tired,
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you're hungry, you're neglected, your, um, abilities haven't been, yeah, you can't concentrate.
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Or if you are, it's the kind of school that I had where it's like, oh, you're changing school
00:09:09.340
Like I had this, um, I describe in the book, this kind of simmering anger and resentment.
00:09:19.060
Um, you know, I, I talk about how, you know, after you're let down by so many adults in
00:09:25.180
your early life, eventually you learn to let yourself down.
00:09:28.080
And so this was kind of an outlet for my aggression where the, you know, the psychologist
00:09:33.280
is like, you know, he, he showed me a picture, you know, one of the questions, he showed me
00:09:36.560
this picture of this bald guy and he, he has a comb pressed to his head and he has no hair.
00:09:42.200
And so the psychologist asks me, uh, what's happening in this photo.
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And I say, um, uh, it's a guy combing his hair or his head.
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And the psychologist says, well, is there anything unusual about this picture?
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And I thought the test was, I was just like this whole, like this whole thing is stupid.
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You know, I've never seen this person in my life.
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The system has assigned to help me, even though I never felt like I was being helped.
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And it wasn't because I was dumb or because I didn't understand.
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It was just like, I know what you want me to say.
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Um, and then there were some other parts of the test too, where it was like, you know,
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here's a picture of a fire truck and they gave me this ruler.
00:10:29.760
Um, but look, all of this is to say that, look, I, I scored very low on this test.
00:10:34.780
And so, but then later on when I was adopted, there were periods of stability in my early
00:10:42.840
Um, I tell this story about how, after I had to teach myself to read, I eventually got
00:10:46.940
third place at the school spelling bee, um, you know, within a very short period of time
00:10:53.240
And then, you know, there was, there were divorces and separations and more disorder and chaos.
00:10:59.480
And my grades would kind of reflect that in school.
00:11:02.240
Uh, and so I think there are probably a lot of kids who are from these kind of deteriorating
00:11:08.480
neighborhoods who are smart and who would be academically inclined, but they're just weighed
00:11:16.740
You know, I do talk about a bit about the material poverty, but more so by the disorder
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and the chaos and the uncertainty and instability.
00:11:22.980
I think that's a much stronger, uh, uh, that has a much stronger effect on a child's sort
00:11:30.100
And I, I set research and studies in the book that are reflective of that.
00:11:34.700
I remember when I used to teach you, I used to teach kids who were so bright, so smart.
00:11:39.060
And the, the heartbreaking thing was, is that you would see them come in and many of them,
00:11:45.120
the vast majority wouldn't be able to leave their background at the door because they're
00:11:49.840
There was, you know, the odd one who succeeded in spite of everything, but that was an anomaly.
00:11:57.900
And I mean, like I, there are glimmers of this.
00:12:00.480
You know, I tell the stories where I'm interacting with my friends and I'm the only one who reads
00:12:05.440
I'm the only one who regularly visits the school library, but my grades were the same
00:12:12.760
Um, and you know, like I, I did the bare minimum.
00:12:17.060
I was kind of a C minus slacker stoner kid in high school.
00:12:20.400
And I just didn't feel like I needed to put in an, uh, an effort once I kind of decided
00:12:25.980
that college wasn't in the cards for me, you know, I knew we couldn't afford it.
00:12:30.360
And I, you know, it wasn't a common ambition of the people around me.
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I talk about, there's one kid who I was kind of friendly with.
00:12:37.540
We weren't close, but he went off to, uh, kind of a local state school and he was the
00:12:42.920
He was the smartest kid that we thought of in our client.
00:12:46.540
And he went off to a state school, but I wasn't, you know, I didn't see myself in that way.
00:12:52.780
And so once I realized, oh, I'm not going to go to college, I just, you know, kind of
00:12:55.980
mailed it in and didn't even think about my future, um, until kind of the last minute.
00:13:01.000
But yeah, I mean, it's, it's just one of the points I, I, I also make in the book is
00:13:06.200
that, you know, even if, even if every single kid who grew up the way that I did goes off
00:13:15.300
to some, you know, fancy Ivy league school and attains the kind of conventional badges
00:13:22.480
of success that we're also focused on when we talk about social mobility, educational
00:13:26.960
attainment, occupational prestige, future earnings, you know, even if they do attain
00:13:32.620
all of those things, it's not going to suddenly, uh, heal the wounds or the scars of their early
00:13:40.120
Um, you know, I came to this realization at some point that, you know, it's nice.
00:13:44.420
It's better than not having those things, but you know, it's not worth the trade-off.
00:13:50.300
I'm so glad I went through everything I went through because it made me who I am today.
00:13:52.920
And I kind of have this, the opposite view where I think most of the time people who
00:13:57.960
live through very difficult early life circumstances and, and then later achieve some level of success
00:14:03.620
and flourishing, I think they succeed despite those experiences, not because of them.
00:14:08.240
Um, cause you know, very few people would wish those experiences on their loved ones or their
00:14:16.340
Um, so, you know, I, I think that we focus too much on what happens after the age of 18
00:14:25.000
You know, kids from poor or poor homes, foster homes, and so on.
00:14:28.920
Where do they go next after they graduate high school or if they graduate high school and
00:14:33.200
Whereas I'm focused more on, you know, this is kind of a coming of age memoir.
00:14:36.780
And I talk about zero to 17 or 18 and how, you know, my friends, I'm not entirely certain
00:14:44.340
that even in the best of environments that they would have gone on to some, you know,
00:14:51.240
I, they weren't, they weren't interested in school.
00:14:53.460
And I'm not entirely convinced that even if they were raised by two parents, stable home,
00:14:57.740
upper middle-class area, if they, their interests would have changed that much.
00:15:01.680
But I do think that even if they don't go off to college, um, you know, they, they still
00:15:07.520
would have deserved to have a stable, safe, secure childhood where they're not surrounded
00:15:12.440
by poverty and addiction and substance abuse and people making self-defeating decisions
00:15:21.500
Um, it's still important to try to minimize those experiences regardless of how the future
00:15:28.140
And so, and the other thing is like, you know, even if social mobility were our goal, social
00:15:34.600
mobility in the sense of conventional badges of success, education and earnings and so
00:15:39.120
on, one of the number, actually the number one predictor of whether or not someone graduates
00:15:45.200
from college is if they were raised by, by two parents.
00:15:48.620
And so even if we wanted them to go to college and that was our goal, which I'm not convinced
00:15:52.220
that should be our goal, but even if it were, um, yeah, sort of promoting and cultivating
00:15:57.340
stable family, stable community, stable environments.
00:15:59.480
I mean, I tell you guys a story that I eventually, uh, left on the cutting room floor.
00:16:05.640
Um, so it's not in the book, but it was in an early draft of the manuscript where, you
00:16:11.380
know, I, uh, there, there are a couple of stories.
00:16:13.560
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00:16:17.380
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00:16:47.680
So my, my younger sister, my adoptive sister, uh, Hannah, who I write about in the book,
00:16:54.720
And, you know, there, there was a period where, um, my, our adoptive mom was single for a while.
00:17:00.680
And so my adoptive mom raised us for a little while and my mom was working full time.
00:17:06.180
And, you know, so she'd work long hours, try to pay the bills.
00:17:10.440
Her attention and resources were spread very thin.
00:17:13.400
And so then, you know, she'd come home, she'd make dinner for us.
00:17:16.400
And my sister would, you know, she'd make some chicken and some rice and some,
00:17:20.520
you know, broccoli or something, or a salad, something healthy, nutritious.
00:17:24.020
And my sister would say, you know, I want chicken nuggets.
00:17:28.040
I want corn dogs, you know, kind of the, you know, junk food that American kids like to eat.
00:17:32.460
And, you know, sometimes my mom would give in because she was tired because she, you know,
00:17:39.060
But then later, when my mom fell in love with a woman named Shelly, who I read about in the book,
00:17:45.600
they would give in less frequently because it's different when you have two parents present.
00:17:49.780
And suddenly, you can kind of negotiate, you can tag team, like, I'm frazzled, I'm tired,
00:17:55.220
And then the other parent can kind of, you can sort of switch off that way.
00:17:58.060
And so when people talk about things like childhood obesity and how it's particularly
00:18:02.560
prevalent in low-income communities, I don't think people are thinking about that.
00:18:06.260
That when you have a single mom who's frazzled.
00:18:08.160
And the other thing is, like, this didn't exist when I was a kid, but the shocking difference
00:18:16.460
So kids in the U.S. from families who earn $35,000 or less per year spend two hours more
00:18:21.500
per day on screens than kids from families who earn $100,000 or more per year.
00:18:25.300
So basically, poor kids spend two hours using screens more per day than kids from rich families.
00:18:30.220
And I think that's part of it, that if you're a lone parent, you don't have a lot of money,
00:18:33.560
you don't have a lot of income, and your kid is, you know, being disruptive, misbehaving,
00:18:38.360
you just give them an iPad and say, hey, chill out, here you go.
00:18:41.360
But if you have two parents, you're thinking, okay, interact with the kid.
00:18:46.480
Well, you've basically got more time between the two of you.
00:18:52.480
I mean, even just having those little breaks can go a long way.
00:18:56.180
Yeah, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing.
00:18:58.960
The other story is that I left out of the book was, you know, there was a, when I was 13,
00:19:05.340
I had this friend, Christian, and he was raised by a single mom.
00:19:14.780
They got in a huge yelling match in the middle of the night.
00:19:18.940
And, you know, she said something like, you know, if you don't want to live here,
00:19:22.800
And he was, you know, he thought he was this tough 13-year-old kid.
00:19:25.780
And he walks out of their apartment and then suddenly he realizes he has nowhere to go.
00:19:33.720
And at that time, when we were 13, I was the only one who had two parents.
00:19:39.920
And, you know, it was a small house, but we had two parents.
00:19:42.480
And of the five friends he could have called, he called me.
00:19:48.880
And, you know, this is the middle of the night.
00:19:51.200
My mom and Shelly sit him down and ask what happened.
00:19:53.220
And they sort of speak with him and say, hey, you know, you can stay with us.
00:19:57.700
She has a right to know where you are, that kind of thing.
00:20:01.380
And, you know, at the time, I thought it was just cool that I had my friends staying over.
00:20:04.800
But in hindsight, I think that the reason he chose to stay with us rather than our other friends is because he felt safer.
00:20:11.000
When you have two adults present who trust one another and care about one another, kids can sense that and they feel safer.
00:20:17.920
And it creates a sort of space for kids to express themselves, to trust not just the adults, but the other kids around them.
00:20:26.860
And the whole sort of atmosphere changes when you have two adults present who have a strong bond with one another versus just the one by themselves, just one adult and a bunch of kids, just completely different.
00:20:37.600
And, yeah, he stayed with us and he felt better.
00:20:40.780
And so if you multiply that across like a neighborhood of two-parent families versus one-parent families, the whole vibe changes in that area, right?
00:20:49.160
And so I think that's something else that people don't really think about is it's not just the resources that the other parent brings, but it's the kind of intangible benefits of emotional trust and security in those things as well.
00:21:01.720
And, Rob, one of the things I love about your book is in addition to talking about your personal story, you weave it into culture and politics and the social fabric of what's going on.
00:21:11.060
And I think people will have a flavor now from what you've just talked about, about essentially some of the issues that you're highlighting that have become very difficult to talk about.
00:21:21.360
I mean, I remember I was recently on Question Time in this country and I was asked a question about knife crime.
00:21:27.480
And I talked about the fact that as long as we've got a skyrocketing divorce rate and lots of young men are growing up without dads, this is going to happen.
00:21:35.560
And the internet basically said, oh, he's a racist.
00:21:39.760
And I didn't mention anyone's race, but this is how we now think about it.
00:21:43.780
And, you know, it's so sad to me because you're not a parent yet.
00:21:50.340
When my son was born, you get these visits from the health visitor to come and see it.
00:21:56.000
And, like, my wife and I, we don't have any family living nearby.
00:21:59.200
It was basically just me and her, which is really hard with a baby, especially the first time.
00:22:06.520
So we were kind of, like, basically surviving, coping.
00:22:11.280
We were still doing okay, but basically we felt like we were having a hard time of it.
00:22:15.840
And then this health visitor came around and she was there for, like, 10 minutes.
00:22:19.060
And she said, oh, it's amazing what you guys have because so few children have this nowadays.
00:22:24.080
And our subjective experience was that we were struggling, but her experience from the outside was, like, oh, this is rare now.
00:22:33.220
And so the thing that you're raising really is that we now live in a society where increasing number of children are effectively having a worse and worse and worse childhood experience because of the breakdown of the family.
00:22:47.260
Yeah. And the breakdown of the family is primarily in kind of lower income, kind of working class areas.
00:22:54.440
I mean, so we hear about these snapshot aggregate statistics.
00:22:57.680
And they roughly, you know, they're roughly the same in the U.S. and the U.K.
00:23:01.860
Something on the order of 40 to 45 percent of children in both countries are raised by unmarried parents.
00:23:14.100
Like, I speak with college educated people now and they're like 40 percent.
00:23:20.180
They have, like, the one token divorced friend or the one token.
00:23:27.700
But, you know, these things are very strongly divided along class lines.
00:23:31.020
And so in the U.S., like where I grew up in California, it's everyone.
00:23:35.260
Like, it's not even, like, I can't even, no, no, no.
00:23:38.640
But even they had some, there was some infidelity and some issues there.
00:23:41.960
But that was like, so it's the reverse experience where you have a bunch of people raised in various kind of family configurations.
00:23:48.080
And then you have, like, the one token friend who has two parents.
00:23:52.060
And, yeah, so, you know, I cite some statistics in the book about how in 1960,
00:23:57.980
95% of children in the U.S. were raised by both of their birth parents.
00:24:01.780
And by 2005, it had dropped slightly for the upper class from 95% to 85%.
00:24:06.360
And for working class, children born and working class families, it dropped from 95% to 30% by 2005.
00:24:13.220
And my guess is today it's even more pronounced, sort of that gap, the magnitude of that gap.
00:24:18.600
And it's funny, you know, people who say that this is like a racist statement to point out, I mean, where I grew up.
00:24:24.760
So the foster homes I lived in, it was very sort of mixed race.
00:24:27.580
You know, you had Hispanic kids, you know, a couple Asian kids, black kids, white.
00:24:33.140
But when I moved to Red Bluff, this town in Northern California, located in one of the poorest counties in the state,
00:24:40.000
it's a part of California no one even knows about.
00:24:42.040
It's just completely overlooked, kind of, you know, forgotten.
00:24:45.300
And it's majority white with a very strong kind of Hispanic population as well.
00:24:51.020
I mean, my high school was probably roughly like 60% white, 30-something percent Hispanic.
00:24:57.480
And then we had a handful of black and Asian kids.
00:24:59.760
But most of my friends were white and Hispanic.
00:25:06.220
I mean, you know, I don't know if you could call someone racist for pointing this out,
00:25:09.400
that white, working-class families in the U.S. look very unstable.
00:25:14.800
And they continue to sort of deteriorate like this.
00:25:22.100
So I learned a new piece of information since the last time I spoke to you guys.
00:25:26.060
So I knew that my mom, my birth mother, was Korean.
00:25:33.740
And I grew up thinking, okay, I'm like mixed-race Asian.
00:25:45.400
So some forensic psychologist interviewed my mom.
00:25:53.480
And so I took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test last year
00:25:57.960
and discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.
00:26:01.920
And, you know, in hindsight, it's like, you know, I was born in L.A.
00:26:15.840
I just think, like, the whole preoccupation with race is misguided
00:26:24.720
And, you know, but people seem to think it matters now.
00:26:28.700
And it's like, it's interesting, kind of the, like, racial consciousness
00:26:31.900
or preoccupation with race is actually higher in more educated environments.
00:26:35.720
Like, I didn't even think of myself as, like, a half Asian person
00:26:42.460
And then suddenly it's like, you know, people are, like, asking me
00:26:47.720
But, you know, when you're in a poor environment,
00:26:49.860
like, the thing that matters most is that you don't have money.
00:26:57.760
But, yeah, the line that I use now is, you know,
00:27:04.800
and then I woke up as an underrepresented minority.
00:27:11.920
But do you think sometimes our over-focus on race
00:27:21.900
So we kind of attach or grasp at these certain things,
00:27:32.760
What was important is where you grew up, your roots.
00:27:41.660
I think now we're kind of grasping for identity now.
00:27:46.260
So most people who grow up in low-income communities
00:27:59.480
you know, they go to another state or another city
00:28:01.540
and they feel maybe kind of unmoored from their roots
00:28:14.160
a lot of people get sort of obsessed with race.
00:28:19.880
We kind of went full circle back to racial consciousness.
00:28:22.180
But from like this stance of sympathy or something,
00:28:25.200
I don't remember which college this was in the U.S.
00:28:30.760
the white professors and students and academics,
00:28:44.360
Basically, like, people of color have had enough of our shit
00:28:49.540
So we're just going to have a white people meeting.
00:28:51.120
And I'm like, do you guys realize what this sounds like?
00:28:53.260
That like, we're just going to have white people only at this meeting.
00:28:56.020
And it's like, they sort of like reverse rationalize themselves
00:28:59.820
into this position of like racial segregation again.
00:29:02.880
And it's just mind-blowing just how, like, narrow-minded
00:29:11.300
I mean, I think, like, ultimately, this could be very dangerous,
00:29:13.660
this way of thinking in a multi-ethnic democracy
00:29:31.340
And that's why I don't want to put it under new management.
00:29:37.120
But, you know, interesting, just I wanted to come back a little bit
00:29:42.160
was the deterioration of working-class communities.
00:30:00.480
as you say, and particularly in poorer communities,
00:30:14.800
You know, I think that the kind of received wisdom
00:30:20.880
and probably in Western countries overall is poverty,
00:30:45.740
and arguably they were poorer than they are now
00:30:56.980
You know, I read this article in The New Yorker
00:31:01.880
especially in a publication like The New Yorker,
00:31:23.420
And so I don't think poverty is the whole story,
00:31:27.580
So I've spent some time in developing countries,
00:31:30.520
and I've seen that families don't look the same.
00:31:33.360
The other day, I was walking through an airport.