TRIGGERnometry - The True Cost of Family Breakdown - Melissa Kearney

00:00:00.880 Kids who are growing up in a single mother home in the U.S.,

00:00:03.880 they are five times more likely to live in poverty

00:00:05.940 than kids growing up in a married parent home.

00:00:08.520 Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely.

00:00:11.680 And why is it that this is controversial?

00:00:15.000 That this is suddenly taboo to talk about?

00:00:17.500 Because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem,

00:00:20.460 when in most cases that one parent is the kid's greatest asset.

00:00:24.880 Can we just talk about this the way we talk about other gaps in society?

00:00:28.280 Just with data, just with evidence.

00:00:30.920 Come at it from empathy.

00:00:32.640 You can't pretend that this is a feminist success story. 1.00

00:00:35.860 This is not a feminist success story. 1.00

00:00:39.700 Melissa, welcome to the show.

00:00:41.020 It's great to have you on.

00:00:42.200 You wrote a book called The Two-Parent Privilege.

00:00:44.960 Very controversial idea that two parents are better than one.

00:00:48.620 Right, right.

00:00:49.400 Welcome to the show.

00:00:50.680 You're actually an economist, obviously, and you did a lot of research.

00:00:53.620 And the data behind what you're talking about would be fascinating for us to talk about.

00:00:58.280 Before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about, you know, what is the state of the family in the U.S.?

00:01:04.600 Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me on the show.

00:01:06.760 It's great to be with you both.

00:01:08.000 So the state of the family in the U.S. has not been great for the past four decades.

00:01:13.440 But a real part of the story is that it's been very uneven across the socioeconomic distribution.

00:01:19.120 And that's really a main story I'm telling in the book.

00:01:22.300 The big sort of headline numbers, I know we're not supposed to get into numbers yet, but the big numbers that motivated me to write the book are now the share of kids in the U.S. being raised in a married parent home is down to 63%, which is sort of shockingly low compared to other countries' recent history in the U.S.

00:01:40.500 What are the numbers in other countries, just for comparison?

00:01:43.700 So let me do it this way, because the way the numbers have been collected across about 130 countries are the number of kids living in single-parent homes.

00:01:50.840 And by this consistent methodology, it's 23% in the U.S.

00:01:54.820 The only country that's even close to us is the U.K. with 21%, but otherwise it's an average of 7% in 130 countries for which there's this kind of data.

00:02:04.180 Wow.

00:02:04.380 So the U.S. and U.K. really stand apart in having a really high share of kids being raised with only one parent in their home.

00:02:10.720 But really the big story is that what's happened in the U.S. in the past four decades is that the decline in share of kids living with married parents, living in a two-parent home, has happened outside the college-educated class.

00:02:24.060 So kids living, kids whose moms have a four-year college degree, they're still living in married parent homes in roughly similar shares to 40 years ago.

00:02:33.200 So it's the middle group, like the middle class, kids whose parents have a high school degree or some college.

00:02:39.560 In a four-decade period, we went from 80% to like 83% to 60% of them living with married parents.

00:02:46.640 So that's a big decline.

00:02:49.020 And why is that?

00:02:50.640 Is it religion?

00:02:53.020 Is it that there used to be a social stigma?

00:02:56.000 Why is it that we've now seen the rise of single-parent families?

00:02:59.380 So I will try to summarize sort of the big narrative that I tell, which will feel incomplete, but I'm just looking at what are the really big drivers of this.

00:03:10.400 And so here's the big story I tell, which is in the 60s and 70s, you know, cultural, social revolution, lots of changes, changing expectations about how tightly having kids has to be within marriage,

00:03:25.260 changing thoughts about gender roles, more economic opportunities for women, a whole bunch of things that, let me be clear, I think are good, right?

00:03:32.900 And in those decades, what do we see?

00:03:34.600 We saw a decline in marriage roughly across the board, like across the socioeconomic spectrum.

00:03:40.720 But then you go into the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and something really interesting happens, which is that the decline in marriage among college-educated adults stalls out.

00:03:50.680 It's like they worked through the cultural, social stuff in the 60s and 70s, and those rates stabilized outside the college-educated class, straight line down for those with a high school degree, right?

00:04:02.660 Like sort of, again, the bulk of adults, the middle class, straight line down in marriage rates.

00:04:07.600 And of course, it's always been lower and continues to fall out for even less educated adults.

00:04:13.460 In the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, as we know, and there's lots of talk about this, there were a whole bunch of economic shocks that were pretty punishing to men in particular without college degrees.

00:04:25.100 And this happened in the U.S. and, you know, in the U.K. as well.

00:04:29.000 And the way I read the situation, drawing on mountains of data in lots of studies, is that the economic attractiveness of marriage as an institution, especially for a man and a woman, that decreased outside the economic, the college-educated class.

00:04:47.740 Why?

00:04:48.540 Because men were, their employment rates fell, their earnings were falling at the same time that women could bring in more money on their own. 0.95

00:04:58.200 And so both in an absolute sense and in a relative sense, non-college-educated men became less desirable as marriage partners, again, in an economic sense.

00:05:08.340 There's a whole bunch of other social things that go along with that.

00:05:11.300 But once you're living in a world where it has become socially acceptable and even commonplace for people to have kids outside marriage and the economic attractiveness of the institution has decreased,

00:05:25.240 then what you see very clearly is that in certain communities, in certain places in particular, where they were hit with these kinds of economic shocks,

00:05:32.120 a decrease in marriage, an increase in the share of kids born outside marriage,

00:05:35.700 and ultimately an increase in the share of kids living with only one parent.

00:05:39.540 And to what extent is this a kind of vicious cycle where parents passing this way of thinking down to their kids?

00:05:48.340 It's not even just passing on the way of thinking, it's passing on an economic reality.

00:05:51.880 And so this is a key reason why I wrote this book, is because we are in a vicious cycle,

00:05:56.600 where this family structure is a key mechanism through which advantage or disadvantage is passed along through the generations.

00:06:04.220 And if we, so my, you know, very strong view on this is, if we don't figure out how to break this cycle,

00:06:09.920 we are cementing class and racial and ethnic inequality in this country.

00:06:14.000 We shouldn't be surprised to see huge class gaps in kids' opportunities, outcomes, preparedness for kindergarten through college.

00:06:22.740 This is a really big, vicious cycle.

00:06:25.120 And let me be clear, this sort of economic inequality is both cause and effect of what has happened to the family

00:06:31.580 and then the disadvantages those kids experience, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:36.000 And by the way, research shows growing up without a dad in the home is particularly bad for boys in the ways that we as economists can track.

00:06:44.040 And so if you've got this sort of decline in the pool of attractive, marriageable men, again, outside the class of adults with college degrees primarily,

00:06:55.220 and then those boys are growing up without dads in their homes, which make them more likely to act out in school,

00:07:01.340 more likely to get in trouble with crime, less likely to go to college.

00:07:04.820 The pool of attractive marriage partners in that segment of the population is going to shrink even further.

00:07:10.180 And we get this terrible, vicious cycle.

00:07:13.560 I was just going to say, we had a woman called Mary Eberstadt on the show a long time ago now.

00:07:18.360 She wrote a book called Primal Screams, which was about the idea that the breakdown of the family partly leads to identity politics

00:07:25.240 because people look for something to belong to when they don't feel like they have a complete experience at home.

00:07:32.460 What are some of the other ways that this is affecting us and our society?

00:07:36.280 Because you talk about this a lot in the book, that so many of the problems our societies are grappling with today

00:07:41.880 are partly caused by the breakdown of the family.

00:07:44.500 Yeah, so I come at this from like a pretty basic, maybe some would even say boring economic lens,

00:07:51.220 which is, and I want to separate myself from, just to be clear,

00:07:57.240 I'm not an expert on the kind of psychological harms or losses that happen when kids don't grow up with two loving parents.

00:08:05.200 What I can see very clearly in the nationally representative data sets is kids who don't grow up with two parents,

00:08:11.420 they have far fewer resources coming into their households, right? 0.87

00:08:14.980 And so again, it's like there's nothing value laden about that.

00:08:18.600 There's nothing moralistic.

00:08:19.700 There's nothing even deeply psychological.

00:08:21.820 Those kids are much more likely to live in poverty.

00:08:25.480 It's not just about poverty, but let's be clear on the poverty numbers.

00:08:28.340 Kids who are growing up in a single mother home in the U.S.,

00:08:31.200 they are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up in a married parent home.

00:08:36.380 Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely.

00:08:39.380 If you just look at median household income,

00:08:43.300 kids growing up with one parent,

00:08:45.520 their median household income is, unsurprisingly, about half as high, right?

00:08:49.920 Because now most moms work, and so you've got two incomes versus one. 1.00

00:08:54.320 Income is pretty predictive of the kind of neighborhood you live in,

00:08:59.340 the kind of schools you go through, the kind of extracurricular activities you have.

00:09:02.920 It's a really important determinant, right?

00:09:04.900 So kids with only one parent have less income, have less resources.

00:09:09.960 We also know, and we can get into this later, but they get less parental time.

00:09:13.620 Their parents have less bandwidth.

00:09:14.700 But what we see, again, in the data, in a, in a, like, just very evidence-based way,

00:09:21.420 those kids are then less likely to graduate high school.

00:09:24.480 They're more likely to get involved in the criminal justice system.

00:09:27.380 They're more likely to have an early non-marital birth.

00:09:29.860 They're less likely to have high earnings and be married themselves as adults.

00:09:33.840 And so all of the psychological sadness, loneliness, identity crisis, all of that

00:09:41.140 is on top of the very irrefutable screams out at the data.

00:09:47.200 If you want to talk about primal scream, it screams out in the data in dozens of studies.

00:09:51.300 These kids are just at a disadvantage when it comes to hitting all these sort of educational economic markers.

00:09:58.000 And why is it that this is controversial, that this is suddenly taboo to talk about?

00:10:03.580 Because as somebody who was working in teaching for a long time, well over a decade, it was pretty obvious.

00:10:11.900 It was pretty obvious.

00:10:12.620 So kids who were struggling when it came to behaviour, when it came to following instructions,

00:10:18.200 a vast majority of them is because they didn't have a father at home.

00:10:21.800 Mum was working two jobs, maybe even three jobs, exhausted, barely there,

00:10:26.820 trying to put food on the table, a roof over the home.

00:10:30.280 She had two or three kids who pretty much raised themselves.

00:10:33.880 It was obvious, unless you're a very, very special type of kid,

00:10:37.020 that you were going to stray from the straight and narrow as it is.

00:10:40.420 Yeah. So there's so much about what you just said to unpack.

00:10:43.640 And I love the, you know, the image you set, which is one of a struggling single mom.

00:10:47.940 So one of the real reasons this is controversial to talk about and people don't want to talk about it

00:10:51.960 is because as soon as you say kids benefit from two parents, there's an initial reaction of you're

00:10:59.280 blaming single moms. 0.99

00:11:00.720 I'm not blaming single moms.

00:11:01.620 You're not blaming single moms.

00:11:02.680 Like what I just heard from you is the way I come at this, which is let's be empathetic.

00:11:06.820 Of course, it's freaking hard to do this by yourself.

00:11:09.400 Right.

00:11:09.760 And so we're not helping anybody by pretending it's not hard for single parents to do it by themselves. 1.00

00:11:16.160 We have a two-year-old at home for our first child.

00:11:18.740 It's so hard with two people.

00:11:20.580 I'm starting to think the nuclear family is a bad idea.

00:11:23.480 We need like the whole grandparents, aunts, uncles to actually do it properly.

00:11:27.900 Yeah.

00:11:28.060 So for a single person to do that while also trying to provide.

00:11:31.600 Yeah.

00:11:31.920 That's impossible.

00:11:32.940 It's impossible.

00:11:33.760 Exactly.

00:11:34.100 So, so I'll get to, there's a variety of reasons actually why it's controversial to

00:11:38.560 talk about, especially in the U S but on this point, um, to your point, like I, I'm fully

00:11:46.160 aware that I come to this topic from a position of privilege, right?

00:11:50.000 I'm raising my kids in a two parent home with a lot of resources.

00:11:53.000 We both have well-paying jobs still really hard, right?

00:11:56.320 Really hard.

00:11:57.020 I was raised in a two parent home, which is probably why the issue feels it's less,

00:12:03.920 it's, it's less uncomfortable for me to talk about, right?

00:12:06.540 If I grew up in a home where I saw my parents fighting all the time, maybe I'd just sort

00:12:12.580 of be less comfortable highlighting with the data show, right?

00:12:16.120 Um, and so I'm acknowledging both of those things.

00:12:19.200 This is actually why I wound up calling the book, the two parent privilege.

00:12:23.400 Initially, I was calling the book, the family gap, because the whole theme in the book, right?

00:12:27.320 There's gaps between the college educated and not on all sorts of things.

00:12:30.680 There's this family gap.

00:12:31.680 It leads to gaps and outcomes.

00:12:32.500 And then when it got time for the book to come out, the marketing team at the University

00:12:36.020 of Chicago Press was like, that's a terrible title.

00:12:38.340 Nobody knows what the family gap is.

00:12:39.700 We're going to call it the one parent problem.

00:12:41.680 I was like, I will not put out the book called the one parent problem, because this is why

00:12:45.620 no one will talk about the issue.

00:12:47.120 Because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem.

00:12:50.220 When in most cases, that one parent is the kid's greatest asset, right?

00:12:54.680 Like they are doing all they can to raise their kid to the best of their ability without the

00:13:01.780 committed help of a resident partner, second parent.

00:13:05.900 And so then I was like, no, no, how about we flip this and call this the two parent privilege

00:13:10.560 and just acknowledge, because it's silly not to, and counterproductive not to, that raising

00:13:16.340 kids in a two parent setting is a privileged position for those of us who have the committed

00:13:20.560 help of the second parent.

00:13:22.620 It's a privileged position for the kids who are lucky enough to be born into a household

00:13:27.420 where they have two parents investing their resources into them.

00:13:32.120 And now it's the most educated, high-income group in society, the privileged group, that's

00:13:38.380 largely getting the benefit of these healthy, strong, advantageous family situations.

00:13:43.320 So the, you know, let's get back to your initial question.

00:13:46.440 Why is it so controversial?

00:13:47.600 I do think because a lot of people hear it as you're blaming the victim, and we don't

00:13:52.360 want to do that.

00:13:53.180 Okay.

00:13:54.380 The second issue, this has been interesting to me.

00:13:57.660 I didn't anticipate that this would be the greatest backlash I got.

00:14:00.960 The greatest like sort of onslaught right away when I put out the book, writers who in

00:14:05.320 the first 48 hours had essays, you know, saying what a ridiculous, old-fashioned scold I was,

00:14:11.580 there was an immediate backlash from the feminist writers. 1.00

00:14:13.920 When they hear this message, they hear it as, you're saying women can't do this just 1.00

00:14:19.380 as well as men, or just as well, they need a man to do this, right? 0.92

00:14:23.720 You're saying a woman can't do this on her own, which, again, to your point, I don't 0.95

00:14:28.820 know, I'm pretty, like, I think it's pretty helpful to sometimes have my husband around

00:14:32.940 to help out, right?

00:14:34.140 And I don't think that makes me less of a feminist to admit that.

00:14:38.380 But that was interesting.

00:14:39.840 And also, before the book came out, I presented a bunch of the research at an academic conference

00:14:44.600 in London, where it drew on, it was hosted by UCL, and there was a bunch of European

00:14:50.000 demographers, sociologists, and economists, and people came up to me afterwards, and they

00:14:54.380 were like, I can't believe you're saying this.

00:14:56.780 This is so anti-feminist. 1.00

00:14:59.140 And they were like, we would never write this in Europe.

00:15:01.400 And one researcher said, I just did a whole report on poverty, I won't name her country,

00:15:05.280 for my government, and I didn't even mention family structure.

00:15:08.460 And I was like, well, take note from what's happened in the U.S., because you can't pretend

00:15:14.260 that this is a feminist success story. 0.83

00:15:16.520 This is not a feminist success story. 1.00

00:15:19.520 The third reason why it's been controversial to talk about in the U.S. basically since the

00:15:25.200 late 60s, and the thing I was most nervous about was because in the U.S., there remains

00:15:31.880 today, but there's been for the past four decades a black-white divide.

00:15:38.200 And so when Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1968 first called attention to the rise in the

00:15:45.460 share of urban black children in the U.S. being born to single moms or unmarried moms and then

00:15:53.500 being raised in single mother households, he was met with a huge backlash that he was blaming

00:15:58.900 the victim, he wasn't sufficiently acknowledging racism, structural discrimination, and there

00:16:05.880 was a huge backlash on the topic itself being perceived as having like a racist undertone

00:16:11.760 to it.

00:16:12.900 And I think that episode silenced the conversation for a long time among those of us in the social

00:16:20.980 policy world.

00:16:21.780 That's really unfortunate because I'm aware of that gap, but there are also other ethnic

00:16:26.880 and racial gaps that go very much in the opposite direction.

00:16:29.820 And that kind of opens up the reality of it, which isn't just a black-white thing.

00:16:35.460 There's a lot of things going on.

00:16:38.400 Asians, for example, you talk about this, irrespective of education, are way more likely to raise their

00:16:44.280 kids in a two-parents household.

00:16:46.380 So it's so unhelpful, isn't it, to think about this issue through that very simple prison.

00:16:51.380 It's so unhelpful.

00:16:52.820 I will say, to my great relief, I have not gotten that line of pushback as much.

00:16:59.080 And when I've reflected on why that might be, I think perhaps for two reasons.

00:17:04.560 One, it's really hard for anybody to deny in a well-meaning, honest way that the decline

00:17:12.100 in two-parent families, the decline in marriage, isn't particularly challenging for the black

00:17:17.080 community, right?

00:17:18.280 And to say that is not to suggest that there's not a whole terrible history of structural discrimination

00:17:25.440 that has led to weakened labor market opportunities, high levels of incarceration, exclusion from

00:17:32.440 neighborhoods that has led to that position.

00:17:34.120 But let's be clear that we need to get out of this.

00:17:37.340 And more black children would benefit by having two parents in their home.

00:17:41.500 And more black moms would benefit by having the help of a committed, employed partner. 1.00

00:17:46.460 And more black men, you know, at least in ethnographic survey evidence, would like to be

00:17:50.680 positive forces in their kids' lives.

00:17:53.080 And so denying that reality is not helpful to anybody.

00:17:57.120 It's also the case that now the share of kids being raised in one-parent homes is quite

00:18:04.420 high outside the college-educated class for white and Hispanic families as well.

00:18:09.080 So we can talk about this as a class-based issue, as much as a racial-ethnic divide issue.

00:18:17.520 The sort of exception of ethnic Asians in the U.S. I think is fascinating that that group, 0.94

00:18:26.540 and again, I'm drawing on census data.

00:18:28.320 Can you give us the data on all of this?

00:18:30.540 So based on children whose moms in the 2019 U.S. Census of all households identify,

00:18:38.700 according to these, you know, identify as these in these four largest racial ethnic groups in

00:18:44.880 the census, here's what we see.

00:18:46.500 88% of kids whose moms identify as ethnically Asian are living in married parent households.

00:18:51.300 Sorry to interrupt you there, because there is a slight difference in the way the U.K.

00:18:56.060 see Asian and the way the U.S. see it.

00:19:00.040 So when we hear Asian, we think Pakistani, Indian, Bangladesh.

00:19:04.000 In the U.S., it's, you know, Korean, Chinese.

00:19:08.040 So what do we mean by Japanese?

00:19:09.560 What do we mean by Asian?

00:19:11.560 So what I'm going by is in the census, how a mom identifies herself,

00:19:16.400 and there's a huge list of countries.

00:19:18.480 Ah, okay, got you.

00:19:19.480 Yeah, and so that's 88% of kids, 77% of kids whose moms identify as white, and then 64%

00:19:27.920 of kids whose mom identifies as Hispanic, and 38% of kids whose moms identify as racially

00:19:32.980 black.

00:19:33.480 38. 0.76

00:19:34.380 Wow, wow.

00:19:35.600 38.

00:19:36.380 Versus 88.

00:19:37.900 Versus 88.

00:19:39.000 And so again, like if we actually really are committed to helping kids, and we say,

00:19:44.640 oh my goodness, you know, kids coming from households identifying as Asian do so much

00:19:50.860 better in school, shouldn't we ask how much of this is because they have two parents versus

00:19:55.480 one, right?

00:19:56.620 How much is driven by family structure?

00:19:58.240 In the U.S., we don't actually report or collect education data by family structure,

00:20:04.580 which is not helpful.

00:20:06.200 No.

00:20:06.740 Not helpful.

00:20:07.980 So that's a big thing.

00:20:08.920 But also, even within, again, with the exception of Asians, within groups, there are big education

00:20:15.700 divides, specifically a college gap.

00:20:18.400 So when you look at kids whose moms identify as racially black, if their mom has a four-year 0.50

00:20:23.900 college degree, 60% of them are living in married parent homes versus 30%.

00:20:28.340 Wow.

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00:20:58.160 You know, I think the problem here is that with a lot of these issues, not just this one,

00:21:07.520 we're afraid to be honest and talk about things fully and frankly.

00:21:11.720 And if we are not going to be talking about issues honestly, then what we're not going

00:21:16.820 to be doing is talking about every facet of this particular issue, which means you are

00:21:22.500 never going to solve the problem.

00:21:24.180 Yeah, thank you for saying that.

00:21:26.260 That's exactly why I decided to write this book, which, you know, depending on your inclination,

00:21:30.820 you need to read this book and you're like, I didn't really need a professor to tell me

00:21:34.100 that two parents were helpful, right?

00:21:35.720 Like, how many years of data did I have to look at to come to that really intuitive conclusion?

00:21:41.400 On the other hand, I've been for two decades now engaged in policy conversations about inequality,

00:21:48.200 threats to social mobility, and we don't talk about this.

00:21:51.080 We don't talk about this.

00:21:51.740 And we have study after study after study showing that family structure is super predictive,

00:21:57.480 both at an individual level and at a neighborhood level for how kids do and their educational

00:22:03.500 attainment and their college attainment, right?

00:22:05.560 So we know that that's the case.

00:22:07.840 And then when we get to the conversations, we decide, well, that's out of bounds.

00:22:12.080 Let's not talk about that.

00:22:13.300 Let's keep talking about schools and what schools can do.

00:22:15.640 Um, let's keep talking about the need to have early childhood education, to strengthen the

00:22:21.820 safety net, all things that I'm all in favor of.

00:22:24.160 And I've written essays and policy essays and papers on the need to do those things, but

00:22:29.020 we're swimming upstream, right?

00:22:30.800 We are fighting against what's been happening in the home.

00:22:34.460 And at some point we have to say, wait a minute, while we're doing all these things to make

00:22:39.260 sure that there's more school counselors in school, to make sure that kids who go to

00:22:42.880 school can get fed in school because they don't have sufficient resources at home.

00:22:47.220 Um, why don't we think about how to strengthen the family?

00:22:50.400 And I agree entirely.

00:22:52.340 It got to the point, in my view, we're never going to have an honest, productive conversation

00:22:56.320 about closing gaps, improving kids' well-being, addressing a whole bunch of social ills that

00:23:02.160 we're not seeing if we don't have that conversation about what's been going on in kids' homes and

00:23:08.040 families.

00:23:08.940 Because I've seen it with my own eyes.

00:23:11.520 The boy gets to a certain age in a one-parent household.

00:23:14.780 They hit puberty.

00:23:16.020 Mom can't control them. 1.00

00:23:17.160 They can't control them physically because a boy is bigger and stronger.

00:23:20.600 He will do whatever he wants.

00:23:22.900 He will be defiant.

00:23:24.680 And he will go looking for a father figure.

00:23:26.940 And when he goes looking for a father figure in a community which has a dearth of father

00:23:31.220 figures, where is he going to end up?

00:23:33.360 Most likely a gang.

00:23:35.060 Yeah.

00:23:35.600 Yeah.

00:23:36.320 Yeah.

00:23:36.760 Actually, one of, um, one summer in college, and this is, you know, maybe this was the moment

00:23:41.820 where I really got committed to this topic, which 25 years later I'm still writing about.

00:23:46.420 I, I worked as an intern at a welfare to work center, um, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

00:23:53.000 It was one of those things that like, there was this great program in my college.

00:23:56.980 If you did an internship for a group that worked for social change, you could get funding to

00:24:03.060 go do that internship.

00:24:04.060 Right?

00:24:04.460 So you're like, okay, I'm going to do that.

00:24:06.360 Um, and so I worked at this center and it was all with single moms. 1.00

00:24:10.240 Many of them were my age because I'm a junior in college and many of these women were my 1.00

00:24:15.400 age.

00:24:15.620 One of the women on the staff who was a single mom, her son was about to go into high school

00:24:20.900 and her biggest worry was he basically was going to have no choice, but to join a gang.

00:24:27.200 And it was just like really, you know, eyeopening and heartbreaking, uh, as a junior in college,

00:24:34.360 like this mom is doing everything she can.

00:24:37.300 Why is she in this position? 1.00

00:24:38.700 And I'm not right.

00:24:39.800 Like, what is it about the environments we grew up in that she is having such a different

00:24:45.140 life and, and now her son, to your point, like, what else is he supposed to do and what

00:24:50.340 she's supposed to do? 1.00

00:24:51.460 You know, um, she was researching options for him to go to different schools.

00:24:55.540 It didn't really seem like she, you know, he was going to get a scholarship or she had

00:24:59.660 those.

00:24:59.940 And so it is, again, no one, I'm not pointing fingers at like, I never use the word deadbeat

00:25:06.100 dads.

00:25:06.600 I'm not pointing figures at moms saying, why did you get pregnant in this situation? 0.99

00:25:10.980 It's just a bad situation for everybody, especially the kids.

00:25:13.960 The interesting thing you've mentioned being a teacher, I've gotten so many emails since

00:25:19.040 the book has come out from teachers and from pediatricians who have said, this is what I've

00:25:24.700 seen in my classroom and my practice for the past 25 years.

00:25:29.060 These kids no longer have two parents in the household and they have all, you know, sorts

00:25:33.520 of deficits, um, and disadvantages that come along with it.

00:25:36.800 And I'm not allowed to say it.

00:25:38.540 Like if I try bringing this up to my principal or whatever, this is not, this is not something

00:25:43.880 we're supposed to be talking about.

00:25:45.200 And so like maybe what my book has done is said, Hey, can we just talk about this the

00:25:51.280 way we talk about other gaps in society, just with data, just with evidence, come at it

00:25:56.480 from empathy and let's be honest about what a lot of people who work with kids have been

00:26:02.800 seeing and know is true.

00:26:05.700 Let's bring that into the public conversation.

00:26:07.920 And this is why it's so important because I remember one boy who I used to teach, he got

00:26:12.440 expelled from his high school and I was his primary school teacher and he came back to

00:26:16.900 see us.

00:26:18.200 And I knew he was in a game.

00:26:20.120 And I said to him, how's it going in school?

00:26:22.500 He was like, not well, been expelled.

00:26:24.720 They want me to go to another school.

00:26:26.320 And I said, well, Darren, what's wrong with that?

00:26:29.120 You, you school, you start, you'll be able to, you know, make a, it's a clean slate.

00:26:34.660 You have a bright lad.

00:26:35.620 You can, you can get on now.

00:26:37.140 And he goes, I can't go there, sir, because they'll murder me.

00:26:40.880 Oh, my God.

00:26:41.660 And then, yeah.

00:26:43.160 And then you look at his mom who had other kids, couldn't control them.

00:26:47.980 This kid went completely off the rails.

00:26:49.900 Dad was nowhere to be seen.

00:26:52.540 And you go, that's by refusing to have an honest conversation about these issues.

00:26:59.460 That is the inevitable consequence.

00:27:02.080 That is the inevitable consequence.

00:27:03.920 And I get really frustrated with, you know, feminists who go, oh, it's sexist to say this 1.00

00:27:08.800 or you're being done.

00:27:09.720 No, no, I'm not.

00:27:10.720 What I'm trying to do is, what we're trying to do is show the realities of this situation.

00:27:16.280 And the fact that it's not pleasant and it's not nice isn't anti-feminist.

00:27:21.820 Yeah.

00:27:22.440 So here was like a, you know, like that reality moment where he's like, I can't go to that

00:27:27.340 school.

00:27:27.840 Right?

00:27:28.140 Like, what don't you get?

00:27:29.100 I had a conversation recently with someone who works with these responsible fatherhood

00:27:34.300 programs.

00:27:35.000 So there are programs around, you know, in communities across the country.

00:27:38.120 They're not very well funded because this isn't a funding priority, but there are communities,

00:27:43.480 community groups working with not mostly non-resident dads to say, how can you be more engaged in

00:27:48.980 your kid's life?

00:27:49.940 Let's do healthy fatherhood classes.

00:27:52.620 Let me teach you about appropriate parenting.

00:27:54.600 Um, and I was saying to this gentleman who, um, you know, runs one of these programs, uh,

00:28:03.460 he's a black man and most of his, he's running it in a neighborhood that's pretty, you know,

00:28:08.260 he's working with black dads.

00:28:09.580 And I was like, yeah, because even the ones, if they have unstable employment, surely they

00:28:13.820 can offer something positive to their kid, right?

00:28:15.760 Like they can go to their basketball game or they can go to the parent teacher conference.

00:28:19.820 And he looks at me and he goes, no, they can't.

00:28:21.620 So they can't.

00:28:22.100 He goes, no, they have drug charges.

00:28:23.660 They can't go anywhere near their kid's school.

00:28:25.940 I was like, oh, it's hard.

00:28:28.220 It's hard, right?

00:28:29.120 There's a lot of barriers.

00:28:30.860 Now, let me be, let me just step back a moment.

00:28:33.540 40% of kids in the U.S. are born to unmarried parents.

00:28:36.760 It is not the case that 40% of kids have dads who have drug charges or who are out of work.

00:28:43.700 Okay.

00:28:43.980 So I want to remind us that there is a continuum here.

00:28:49.060 Um, there's a continuum.

00:28:50.180 There are kids whose parents are stably employed, have high school degrees, just sort of decided

00:28:56.440 that, you know, they're not the love of the life and decided not to be married.

00:29:00.240 There are kids who are in really bad situations who, you know, do have a parent with a criminal

00:29:06.740 history, deep poverty, et cetera.

00:29:08.700 There's a continuum.

00:29:09.500 And I think the way to address this as a society is to realize that there are different, um,

00:29:18.420 you know, sort of different innovations and, and ways of help strengthening those families

00:29:23.420 across the board.

00:29:24.640 Uh, Melissa, one of the things I've been thinking about from the beginning of this is whether

00:29:29.680 the economic explanation is sufficient.

00:29:31.660 And the reason I say this is if, if what we're talking about is the shocks, the, the loss

00:29:36.480 of manufacturing jobs, et cetera, made men without a college degree less attractive as

00:29:41.560 a marriage partner, that doesn't explain why women are still having kids from those men 0.91

00:29:47.240 and then not having them in the home.

00:29:48.960 Right?

00:29:49.660 So what I don't, help me work this out.

00:29:52.380 Why would, why would somebody have a child with somebody and then not marry them, even 0.91

00:29:58.360 though they still would be contributing resources and time and parenting time and whatever?

00:30:03.060 What, what's gone on there?

00:30:04.020 Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

00:30:05.040 No, you're not misunderstanding.

00:30:05.680 So the economic, uh, argument is definitely not sufficient.

00:30:11.040 Um, it's part of it.

00:30:12.680 And, and I'll, let me be specific about that.

00:30:15.200 Um, and then we can try and think about what are, why people are making these choices.

00:30:19.060 So for a long time, I did think a bit, um, to, you know, glibly as an economist, like,

00:30:26.040 look, I know the studies, there are causal arrows, manufacturing jobs go away in this

00:30:31.340 community, men lose their jobs, decline in marriage, share of kids living outside a two

00:30:36.920 parent home.

00:30:37.660 We know this, what we need to do is improve the economic position of these men.

00:30:41.320 And so then we did have this exogenous shock happen in the U S we're in a whole bunch of

00:30:47.520 communities around the country.

00:30:49.580 Um, there was an increase in job opportunities and earnings specifically for men.

00:30:54.220 And these were the localized fracking booms.

00:30:56.320 Okay.

00:30:56.680 So I'm not looking at North Dakota and South Dakota, where you had a whole bunch of men

00:30:59.340 going to take those jobs, but all throughout the country, I mean, there's, you know, hundreds

00:31:04.120 of communities throughout the country outside of North South Dakota, where the fracking

00:31:09.280 technology became, you know, less expensive, accessible.

00:31:12.860 They just happened to be sitting on the geological, um, requirements to, to do this.

00:31:18.780 And there was an increase in jobs, not just an oil and gas and extraction, but they were

00:31:23.180 local booms.

00:31:24.120 Okay.

00:31:24.560 And what we can see in the data, this is work I did with Riley Wilson.

00:31:27.620 We can see in the data that in fact, male employment went up, male earnings went up both

00:31:32.180 in an absolute sense and relative to women. 0.86

00:31:34.260 And then as a social scientist, you're all excited.

00:31:36.680 You run the regression.

00:31:37.640 Okay.

00:31:37.920 Non-marital birth share.

00:31:39.540 What happened?

00:31:40.680 It didn't fall like zero.

00:31:43.080 I was like, well, that's not what I was expecting.

00:31:45.240 Turns out though, births went up.

00:31:47.480 So in the, in the, uh, you know, language of economists, kids are normal goods.

00:31:52.680 When people get like an inflow of income, one of the things they do is consume it on having

00:31:56.900 kids because kids are expensive.

00:31:58.900 Um, so births went up in equal proportion to married and unmarried people.

00:32:04.200 So unmarried people and married people both had more kids.

00:32:07.360 Yeah.

00:32:07.500 And this gets to your question.

00:32:08.500 Like, wait a minute.

00:32:09.720 If he was good enough to have a kid with, why didn't you marry him? 0.88

00:32:12.420 Okay.

00:32:12.840 We'll come back to that.

00:32:13.800 I don't have a great answer to that.

00:32:14.980 Or cohabit or whatever, but stay together.

00:32:16.720 Right.

00:32:16.760 So, so yes, actually let's sidebar on that for a minute.

00:32:20.460 In the U S cohabitation, even among parents is a very fragile arrangement.

00:32:25.200 So the reason I focus so much on marriage in my book is because it turns out that in the U S

00:32:29.720 that's the institution that basically delivers to parents, to kids for their childhood.

00:32:34.740 Um, cohabitation, even among parents who at the time of the kid's birth say, yes, we want

00:32:39.200 to stay together.

00:32:39.800 Um, in survey data, it's not nationally representative, but in survey data of those parents, a majority

00:32:46.220 of them will not stay together.

00:32:47.380 So it's very, it's a very unreliable arrangement.

00:32:49.880 It's an unreliable arrangement, less reliable than in Europe where you're more likely to have

00:32:54.380 long-term cohabitation among parents.

00:32:56.300 Okay.

00:32:56.540 Um, so anyway, but so that was a surprise.

00:33:00.040 And then we went back and looked at what happened in the seventies and eighties in the U S where

00:33:05.240 in similar communities, the price of coal went up and that increased male earnings in 0.76

00:33:09.740 these coal producing towns.

00:33:11.140 And what you saw there was an increase in marriage and increase in birth only to married

00:33:15.920 adults and a reduction in the non-marital birth share.

00:33:18.420 And so this was super interesting because you've got a very similar economic shock in

00:33:24.180 very similar communities in the eighties and early two thousands and a very different family

00:33:29.240 formation response.

00:33:30.420 And I think one interpretation of this is that how people respond to economic situations

00:33:36.740 depends on the social context they live in.

00:33:38.920 And so now when you're in a position in the U S in the early two thousands, where socially

00:33:45.340 childbearing and raising kids and marriage have already somewhat been decoupled, you don't

00:33:52.220 get the same response of, well, I I'm going to, this is great.

00:33:55.940 He has a job now.

00:33:56.760 We're going to get married and have kids.

00:33:58.040 You get the response.

00:33:59.280 Oh, he's a job.

00:34:00.200 He has some extra earnings.

00:34:01.000 We'll have a kid.

00:34:01.880 Maybe we'll get married.

00:34:02.680 Maybe we won't.

00:34:03.960 And so I do think the social norms are really important here.

00:34:07.580 And in fact, we do see sort of a larger increase in births outside marriage in the communities

00:34:13.400 in the two thousands and the fracking boom in communities that already had baseline higher

00:34:17.900 rates of kids being born outside married parent homes.

00:34:20.740 So, so why do people make this decision?

00:34:23.860 You know, we've talked about the fact that I want to acknowledge it in some cases, there

00:34:28.660 are real barriers, right?

00:34:30.320 There's not just unstable employment.

00:34:33.220 There's untreated mental health challenges.

00:34:35.640 There's addiction.

00:34:36.600 There's intimate partner violence.

00:34:38.380 There's real reasons why people don't get married.

00:34:40.820 I think it's also hard to not conclude from the large numbers of people we're talking about

00:34:45.900 that there is among large segments of the population, basically agnosticism.

00:34:51.360 Like, eh, I like him well enough.

00:34:54.000 I'm not sure I like him enough to be married to him.

00:34:56.380 Um, the relationship isn't perfect.

00:34:58.380 And so maybe we won't do this together.

00:35:01.060 And this is where I think it's decidedly unhelpful that we're not honest about, this is going

00:35:07.060 to be hard for you.

00:35:07.740 This is going to be so hard.

00:35:08.700 This is going to be hard.

00:35:09.540 You're going to need, like, as a new parent, this is going to be so hard.

00:35:13.020 You're going to need all the help that you can get.

00:35:14.720 So if this guy is not, is not a bad guy, you might want to think about that a little

00:35:19.400 bit more careful.

00:35:20.140 Yeah, I think.

00:35:20.680 We should be able to say that.

00:35:21.400 We should be able to say that.

00:35:22.460 We should be able to say that.

00:35:23.360 And maybe more people will start to say that now that it's, like, abundantly clear that

00:35:27.700 it's not honest.

00:35:28.260 And by the way, this thing about, like, well, women don't, you know, like, as a dad, I definitely 0.83

00:35:33.740 couldn't do it by myself.

00:35:35.520 My wife is a hero.

00:35:37.000 She probably would manage.

00:35:38.080 Do you see what I'm saying?

00:35:39.200 It's like, it's not a one person job.

00:35:41.080 Yeah.

00:35:41.380 It's just not.

00:35:42.460 Look at the animal world.

00:35:43.840 Birds that have, like, offspring.

00:35:46.520 One person's, one bird's doing one thing.

00:35:48.720 The male bird's doing something.

00:35:49.780 Like, they work together.

00:35:51.740 Yeah.

00:35:51.920 That's how we evolved.

00:35:53.580 That's how, that's how human society has existed.

00:35:57.460 The fact that we're having to explain this now is really kind of worrying.

00:36:00.380 That sounds pretty sexist to me.

00:36:02.780 You know, but it's so interesting.

00:36:04.780 I mean, this is where the agnosticism comes in.

00:36:07.480 You know, I tell this, this story in my, in my book and someone, a reviewer is even like,

00:36:12.520 you should take this out because you're not an ethnographer.

00:36:15.700 You're not doing real interviews the way ethnographers do.

00:36:18.140 I'm like, no, but I talk to people and what people say is valuable.

00:36:21.200 Right.

00:36:21.540 So this, the little anecdote I tell in the book, but I think, you know, we've all had

00:36:25.940 these conversations with lots of people across different, um, different places.

00:36:30.040 So I was in the cab and I was driving with a guy and he had a picture of a little girl

00:36:34.860 on his dashboard.

00:36:36.300 And I was like, Oh, is that your daughter?

00:36:37.820 He's like, yes, she's four.

00:36:39.260 Do you want to see more pictures?

00:36:40.260 I'm like, yes.

00:36:41.020 And he gives me his phone and I'm scrolling through.

00:36:43.740 And then of course, because I studied this stuff, I was like, um, do you live with her?

00:36:48.740 And he was like, no.

00:36:50.460 I was like, can I ask why not?

00:36:52.560 Just because I study these kinds of questions and I'm interested.

00:36:55.320 And he says, you know, her mom and I talk about it.

00:36:58.640 Um, if I get more money, maybe we'll get married.

00:37:01.200 And I, you know, now I'm like pushing it, but I'm like, you know, if you and her mom

00:37:06.460 get along, I'm just saying from a research point of view, it's probably beneficial for

00:37:10.740 her.

00:37:11.000 If you guys were like, tried to be together, is there a reason why you don't try to get

00:37:14.880 married?

00:37:15.420 And he literally turns.

00:37:16.500 He's like, did my mom send you?

00:37:17.940 Did my mom?

00:37:18.480 Right.

00:37:18.740 We missed the exit.

00:37:19.660 He wasn't even mad.

00:37:20.600 He was just like, who is this lady?

00:37:22.560 But it was just so revealing.

00:37:24.220 And I've had so many conversations like this with people since where there's just a like,

00:37:28.280 maybe, but why not?

00:37:29.800 But one thing I don't get into in the book, but I think is really interesting is that level

00:37:36.380 of agnosticism.

00:37:38.420 Again, I don't get into in the book because in the book, I write the book as an economist

00:37:42.320 and I have a really, really high bar of, can I cite a study that I know gets this right?

00:37:47.160 So now I'm just speculating, right?

00:37:49.500 We know that in Asian American families, they, they're together much more.

00:37:55.340 So the, the only real explanation there has to be a stronger social norm because even

00:38:01.460 in families where there's similar economic position issues, right?

00:38:06.100 So there has to be a social stronger norm towards it.

00:38:09.000 In college educated families, do we really think that college educated parents just like

00:38:14.220 each other day to day more than everybody else?

00:38:16.760 No, I think they have a lot of resources that make it possible for them to get help if they're

00:38:23.200 struggling, right?

00:38:25.080 They may, they have resources that make it less likely there's going to be frictions over

00:38:30.160 money.

00:38:30.600 So maybe there's some of that, but they're also, again, if you just talk to college educated

00:38:34.840 people, I mean, like how many of us have had the conversation where it's like, you know,

00:38:39.040 we're not getting along, but we're trying to make it work.

00:38:42.100 We'll at least stay together until the kids go to college.

00:38:44.780 There's this deep idea that people have to stay together for the sake of the kids that

00:38:50.840 again, just extracting from what we call revealed preference, what we see outside the college

00:38:56.180 educated class, people don't seem to have that level of awareness.

00:38:59.140 And then you've got the college educated being like, well, I don't want to tell anyone how

00:39:03.000 to raise their kids, but I sure as hell I'm going to raise my kids in a two parent home

00:39:06.500 and do everything I can to make it work.

00:39:07.940 Right.

00:39:09.080 And so this is what Rob Henderson calls luxury belief.

00:39:13.040 Yes, exactly.

00:39:14.360 Look, I hesitate to drag you into values related conversations, but from my perspective, I have

00:39:20.240 to ask people would argue or have argued that over the last 60, 70 years, we've become much

00:39:28.480 more focused on the individual, much more focused on ourselves.

00:39:32.180 Let's say this got to be part of it.

00:39:35.280 Surely, Melissa.

00:39:36.120 Yeah, surely.

00:39:36.840 Absolutely.

00:39:37.840 And again-

00:39:38.840 It's got to be part of it.

00:39:39.840 A hundred percent.

00:39:40.840 I don't write about this in the book because I am in the book, I'm all like, here, here

00:39:45.300 are the data and here are the studies-

00:39:46.840 Well, you're an economist.

00:39:47.840 That's why you've been there.

00:39:48.840 So can we at least agree that this family divergence has added to inequality and it's bad for kids?

00:39:55.000 Okay.

00:39:55.900 Then, and I know that economics is a part of the story.

00:40:00.060 Now, let's talk about the individualism.

00:40:02.700 For sure, that is part of it.

00:40:04.120 And this is where, when we get to like, well, what do we have to do about it?

00:40:09.040 I mean, this takes humility for me as an economist to say, this isn't going to take like tinkering

00:40:14.700 with the tax code.

00:40:15.700 I don't have an economic policy lever that I can pull that's going to change this, which

00:40:19.840 is precisely why I feel like as economic policy folks, we've been spinning ourselves in circles

00:40:24.280 for the past 20 years talking about everything but this, right?

00:40:27.460 So in some sense of what I'm doing is there's an economic reason.

00:40:30.600 This has been a disaster.

00:40:32.200 Now, let's be honest about it as a society and figure out what to do about it.

00:40:35.840 So I was on a panel discussing my book with folks from the University of Chicago.

00:40:40.680 Super smart, right?

00:40:42.000 And so one of the things they push back on me is, well, you say we need to reestablish

00:40:47.100 a social norm of two-parent families for kids.

00:40:50.600 And this very accomplished, very smart scholar from the University of Chicago says to me, I'm

00:40:55.900 not comfortable saying that we should have social norms because social norms restrict

00:41:00.800 people's individual freedom, to your point.

00:41:02.900 I'm like, yes, that is exactly what they do.

00:41:05.260 And once I have a child, I have given up some of my individual freedom.

00:41:08.660 I owe that child something.

00:41:10.240 I have to take care of them, right?

00:41:12.460 And I said, are you not comfortable establishing a social norm of if you have a kid, you can't

00:41:16.480 walk away.

00:41:17.420 If you father a child with somebody, you owe that child and that woman something. 0.99

00:41:22.040 You can't just walk away.

00:41:22.760 He's like, I guess I'm comfortable with that social norm.

00:41:24.800 I'm like, well, now we're just talking about what social norms we're comfortable with.

00:41:28.120 That's right.

00:41:28.800 The idea that we're not comfortable restricting people's freedoms, like we're well past that.

00:41:35.680 Well, they restricted their own freedoms.

00:41:37.840 They restricted.

00:41:38.600 It's not that we are coming in from the outside.

00:41:40.980 No, we're not saying you have to have this kid and then you have to take care of them.

00:41:43.560 But once you create this other person, you have a duty to raise them to the point where

00:41:48.620 they're self-sufficient.

00:41:49.460 That's what being a parent means, surely.

00:41:50.920 Yeah.

00:41:51.720 And, you know, I and I also again, I'm sympathetic to some of the dads here.

00:41:57.560 I know, you know, I know family my kid went to nursery school with the mom decided she

00:42:04.180 wanted to go find herself and she left it at home with three little kids.

00:42:08.580 And there was definitely a, you know, just by what I just said about college educated

00:42:12.600 communities, like having a strong, there was a, you know, I hope you find yourself.

00:42:16.640 And I was like, how about like, this is where it is judgy, right?

00:42:21.500 But like, I'm willing to judge and say, you have children and you had children with this

00:42:25.260 person.

00:42:25.900 And, but if we're not willing to say that.

00:42:27.740 Especially with three kids, when you, if you had one by accident, you sort of go, well,

00:42:32.140 whatever.

00:42:34.480 If you've had three kids, that's a conscious choice at this point.

00:42:37.720 That's why I say we need to bring back shame.

00:42:39.600 So I, I'm actually, I get really nervous when I do that, when I hear that.

00:42:44.700 So I, I don't want to bring back shame.

00:42:46.440 We're just, we're messing around.

00:42:48.320 I know, but, but, okay, but, but actually, but it isn't, I know you're joking, but it is

00:42:52.500 a serious point because once I say we need to establish a social norm, then you could understand

00:42:58.980 that some people would get skittish.

00:43:01.060 So it's probably worth being explicit.

00:43:02.880 That I certainly don't ever want to go back to a situation where single moms and their 1.00

00:43:08.700 kids were so ostracized from the community that women had no choice, but to stay in terrible 0.99

00:43:12.980 abusive relationships.

00:43:14.480 Okay.

00:43:14.640 So let's not do that.

00:43:16.060 But, but, and, and, and yes, I'm, I'm not being a Pollyanna, but I'm being optimistic

00:43:21.020 here where I feel like we should be able to walk this line of promoting a positive social

00:43:25.900 norm without severely stigmatizing people, especially the one person who's left behind taking care

00:43:31.960 of the kids.

00:43:32.380 Let's not stigmatize that person.

00:43:34.240 Right.

00:43:35.100 Am I okay shaming the, the parent that leaves?

00:43:38.520 Probably I am.

00:43:39.640 I mean, that's a normative statement, but, but I am.

00:43:42.140 Me too.

00:43:42.480 And, and, and a big part of what motivates me to say all this and write this book and other

00:43:46.700 things I've written is we are just so selfish when it comes to children in our society across

00:43:52.660 the board in the way we now, you know, don't prioritize kids when it comes to family formation

00:43:58.460 in the way kids are all, but like completely ignored in our federal budget spending.

00:44:04.540 Somebody's got to advocate for the kids.

00:44:05.940 And if that means parents have to be less focused on their individual happiness, then I, you know,

00:44:11.860 and here's where, you know, feminists don't like me. 1.00

00:44:14.480 I think that that's a trade-off that I will push for the kids.

00:44:17.120 Um, but, but the shame, like, okay, so here's a positive norm in DC.

00:44:21.880 If you spend time here and you drive up into DC in a bunch of, um, bus stops, there's an ad

00:44:26.920 take time to be a dad today.

00:44:28.640 Super hokey.

00:44:29.500 I love it.

00:44:30.000 It's like dad sitting, like having a tea party with his daughter, throwing a ball to his son.

00:44:36.060 That's a positive message.

00:44:38.440 You're not shaming anybody.

00:44:39.720 We're being honest.

00:44:40.720 Hey, dads, take time to be a dad today.

00:44:43.260 Does it work?

00:44:44.000 I don't know.

00:44:44.940 I haven't seen a good study of those, that kind of campaign, but we have lots of good studies

00:44:50.260 showing that media messages matter.

00:44:53.620 Celebrity endorsements matter.

00:44:55.460 Do you know, I have this paper on MTV, 16 and Pregnant.

00:44:58.400 This is crazy.

00:44:59.140 And this is, I'm talking about like, here's just one study and other people have also

00:45:05.140 written great studies making the point that media images matter.

00:45:08.680 So teen births in the U S by the way, they're down over 70% from the mid nineties.

00:45:13.120 It's amazing.

00:45:13.700 So that's worth actually noting as a statistical fact, because the fact that teen births are

00:45:18.020 down so much, it makes it even more surprising that non-marital births are up, right?

00:45:23.260 Cause teen births were almost all non-marital.

00:45:25.940 That's not where the rise in non-marital childbearing has come from.

00:45:29.520 Teens, good for teens, non-marital births are down. 0.69

00:45:32.300 I mean, births are down among teens, but they were falling 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%.

00:45:36.920 And one year they dropped 7.5%.

00:45:38.660 And I was getting all these calls from journalists because I studied the economic causes and consequences

00:45:43.000 of teen childbearing.

00:45:43.700 They're like, what was it?

00:45:44.400 I was like, I have no idea what it was, but I can tell you this, what other people are

00:45:47.920 going to tell you it is.

00:45:48.600 It's not that it's not sex ed.

00:45:50.420 It's not access to contraception.

00:45:52.260 It's not the unemployment rate.

00:45:53.800 None of that changed so much in this year that that's the story.

00:45:57.760 So then I had lunch with Sarah Brown who ran the national campaign to prevent teen and 0.97

00:46:01.920 unplanned pregnancy.

00:46:02.640 And I was like, what do you think it is?

00:46:03.640 She goes, we think it's the MTV effect.

00:46:05.700 I was like, what?

00:46:06.620 She's like the 16 and pregnant show. 1.00

00:46:08.660 I was like, no way.

00:46:10.420 Because I was one of those people who would see the tabloids at the grocery store and was

00:46:15.140 inclined to think, oh, we're glamorizing teen childbearing.

00:46:18.060 So my colleague Phil Levine and I were like, we're going to investigate this.

00:46:22.260 So we bought ratings data from Nielsen Ratings to see how many people were watching MTV and

00:46:28.580 different things in different areas.

00:46:30.320 And then we do fancy econometric stuff, which I won't bore you with.

00:46:34.160 But basically what we found is when the show came on the air, in places where more people

00:46:39.480 were watching MTV before, so basically you have a whole bunch of people watching MTV,

00:46:43.500 more in some places than in others, then the content changes and you start showing this

00:46:47.500 show about how hard it is to be a teen mom, teen births fell like nine months later. 0.89

00:46:53.340 Statistically significant.

00:46:54.780 Wow.

00:46:54.880 So then we got all of the Twitter and Google data to just sort of confirm what's happening.

00:46:59.880 And you can see that when an episode airs, there was a spike in people searching for

00:47:04.900 how to get birth control.

00:47:06.020 There was a spike in tweets mentioning birth control.

00:47:09.000 And so the show seemed to, this is about like being honest, like who thought it would

00:47:13.660 be easy to be a teen parent?

00:47:14.940 I'm not sure.

00:47:15.480 But this show made it very clear and salient that this is hard.

00:47:19.080 Your boyfriend's probably not going to help that much.

00:47:20.780 You're going to gain a lot of weight.

00:47:22.620 Your friends are going to party without you.

00:47:24.360 Things that were super salient to like young people.

00:47:26.920 Yeah.

00:47:27.120 And it had an effect.

00:47:28.900 And there's, by the way, there's other examples like when soap operas spread to certain areas

00:47:33.780 in Brazil and they showed smaller families, fewer kids, less marriage or more divorce.

00:47:40.080 Then in those communities that got access to those soap operas, their family formation

00:47:44.880 decisions started to reflect them.

00:47:46.560 So we know media messaging matters, right?

00:47:49.160 That's really interesting.

00:47:50.440 In John Ronson's book, The Butterfly Effect, he links the spread of hardcore pornography

00:47:56.720 and kids consuming it to the fact that teen pregnancies went down.

00:48:02.160 So I don't know how...

00:48:03.580 So this is...

00:48:04.220 He's not advocating for this problem.

00:48:06.220 He's not like, this is how you solve this problem.

00:48:08.540 No, but this is actually so interesting.

00:48:12.880 In the majority of college campuses that I've given talks about my book on, some college

00:48:18.760 student will come up to me, sometimes even raise their hand, and they say, how come you

00:48:22.360 don't talk about porn?

00:48:23.460 And I was like, because it wasn't on my radar as an economist.

00:48:27.740 Again, I came to this study like inequality.

00:48:29.500 And now this comes up all, all, all the time.

00:48:33.560 And when I'm talking to people who work on healthy relationship programs with vulnerable

00:48:38.240 families, porn comes up all the time.

00:48:40.540 The idea being there are so many young men who are watching porn all day long on their

00:48:48.300 phones, and that is making it even harder for them to form healthy relationships.

00:48:54.140 And then, so it's making it harder for them to form healthy relationships, and therefore

00:48:58.640 they're less likely to get married, they're less likely to do all of those things.

00:49:02.640 So again, I don't talk about this in the book.

00:49:05.000 I don't know the causal evidence.

00:49:07.180 Anecdotally, this has come up to a degree that has shocked me.

00:49:10.860 Wow.

00:49:11.360 That's very interesting.

00:49:12.820 And moving on, Melissa, how much of this is to do with the fact that we're now living

00:49:18.280 in an ever more secular society?

00:49:20.500 The fact that people are not religious, the fact that it's not just Christianity, by the

00:49:24.440 way, it's all religions.

00:49:25.720 Because I would presume that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to want to

00:49:30.760 get married and then bring up kids in a stable home with two parents.

00:49:35.860 Yeah, it's really, so certainly over time, religious observance, attendance at, you know,

00:49:42.880 religious institutions has declined, along with the decline in marriage, the rise in one

00:49:48.840 parent homes, also, by the way, the decline in fertility.

00:49:51.480 How much the arrow runs in one direction versus the other, it's hard for me to say.

00:49:57.520 I mean, so much of this is, it's back to an early observation you raised, so much of

00:50:01.100 this is circular, right?

00:50:02.800 So you've got fewer people committed, participating in religious institutions.

00:50:07.100 They are sort of norm-shaping institutions.

00:50:10.320 And then you have people falling out of family life, which is also something that reinforces

00:50:14.840 your involvement with community institutions.

00:50:17.520 So I can't put a number on it as to how much is due to that.

00:50:22.840 But certainly these things amplify one another.

00:50:26.600 And by the way, on the point of messaging, it's hard for me to think that, you know, we

00:50:32.540 will get out of this.

00:50:34.480 We will change our social attitudes if trusted community leaders don't promote the message.

00:50:40.680 But there are fewer and fewer trusted community leaders.

00:50:44.020 And so, you know, 30 years ago, we might have said, this is something that trusted rabbis,

00:50:49.520 pastors, priests need to talk about.

00:50:52.100 But now fewer people actually are involved with those institutions.

00:50:55.920 And again, anecdotally, what I've heard is that some pastors in some communities where

00:51:00.980 many dads are absent, they are nervous about bringing it up because they don't want to alienate

00:51:06.220 the moms who are in their congregation.

00:51:07.780 Talk about vicious cycle.

00:51:09.360 That's a very good example of that, which is why we try to have these conversations on

00:51:13.780 the show.

00:51:14.180 But I think one of the things we really should talk about is what can we do about this?

00:51:18.860 What can be done about this?

00:51:20.820 And that's, I think, the most important bit of this conversation.

00:51:24.620 Yeah.

00:51:25.260 So I, you know, the most controversial thing I say in the book, which is a normative statement,

00:51:30.140 and we've talked a little bit about this, is I think we need to reestablish a norm of

00:51:34.700 two-parent households for kids.

00:51:35.800 And, you know, how we do that, that's leaders being willing to say it, policy leaders, trusted

00:51:43.660 leaders being willing to say it.

00:51:45.540 In 2008, President Obama gave a beautiful speech on Father's Day about the absence of

00:51:52.620 too many dads from homes.

00:51:54.780 He never gave it again.

00:51:56.080 And I don't, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a national democratic leader raising this

00:52:00.020 issue since that's a problem.

00:52:01.700 Um, so I think, you know, we've done a lot of social messaging around teen childbearing,

00:52:07.560 around anti-smoking, social messaging.

00:52:10.800 And, and it doesn't have to come from like media or leaders.

00:52:13.680 It's just also the way people honestly talk about it with other, you know, family members,

00:52:18.100 people in their community, I think has to be part of the story.

00:52:20.060 Two, um, we, I think improving the economic position of non-college educated men in particular,

00:52:27.840 making sure they have the skills to obtain family sustaining wages and stability and employment,

00:52:34.220 making sure they're able to, you know, overcome criminal backgrounds, address untreated mental

00:52:40.200 health challenges.

00:52:40.860 That will, that's necessary.

00:52:42.560 It won't be sufficient.

00:52:43.340 But I do think that's a necessary position.

00:52:46.120 Three, I think we need much more innovation, funding, and research into programs that are

00:52:53.420 aimed at strengthening families, right?

00:52:55.420 So this is not a policy priority.

00:52:56.980 If you look at the U.S. Administration for Children and Families budget, less than 1% goes

00:53:03.380 to programs to support strong and stable families.

00:53:05.820 We spend 6% of that budget on collecting child support, 15% on the foster care system.

00:53:12.380 Both of those things are underfunded, but those are all, again, like treating the symptoms.

00:53:17.820 And then we don't invest in families.

00:53:20.120 We don't help parents achieve stable, healthy relationships.

00:53:23.900 I think because of this sort of allergy to, oh, we don't want to get involved in families.

00:53:28.240 Let's just hire school counselors, right? 0.99

00:53:30.300 Or let's subsidize child care. 1.00

00:53:31.800 But, and so, so we need a lot more of that.

00:53:34.040 And then the skeptic will say, well, we don't know what works.

00:53:36.920 And I'm like, right, because we haven't funded a whole bunch of programs and studied them

00:53:41.520 and expanded them to see what it's going to take.

00:53:43.500 So that, that I think we also need to do.

00:53:45.340 The fourth thing, and this gets back to something you said about, you know, the boys in particular

00:53:50.040 needing father figures and then finding them in the gangs.

00:53:52.800 I do, this is really, really important.

00:53:55.480 This is a long-term challenge and we're going to have to come at it in all sorts of ways.

00:53:59.800 Because in the meantime, we just can't allow kids to continue to suffer the deficits from

00:54:07.200 a disadvantaged family life.

00:54:09.000 And so programs that we can scale up to help those kids to try and break the cycle are critically

00:54:15.820 important.

00:54:17.100 Mentoring of at-risk youth, at-risk boys in particular, job opportunities for at-risk youth,

00:54:22.600 boys in particular, those can have an outsized effect.

00:54:25.460 And they're not that expensive, like, especially because a lot of these mentoring programs,

00:54:29.600 you rely on volunteers.

00:54:31.460 Getting father figures into the lives of those boys, it's not as good as having their own

00:54:35.620 father who's there as a loving presence, but these things can help.

00:54:39.620 And so, you know, this is a, there's not one silver bullet here, but like, we need to get

00:54:45.480 at this in a thousand different ways.

00:54:48.540 And I, and I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic we can break this terrible cycle.

00:54:52.860 Melissa, it's been an absolute pleasure.

00:54:55.200 Thank you very much for coming on the show.

00:54:56.660 Before we go over to locals where our supporters get to ask their questions to you, our final

00:55:02.240 question is always the same.

00:55:03.700 What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

00:55:08.880 Okay.

00:55:09.360 So the, the, what I'm going to raise is tangentially related to this breakdown of the family, but

00:55:15.060 it's got its own actually existential crisis, which is the low birth rates around the globe.

00:55:23.860 Um, you know, the, all, I think all high and middle income countries are now below replacement

00:55:30.520 level fertility.

00:55:31.360 So it feels a little bit weird because I'm like, there's all these kids being born outside

00:55:34.700 marriage, but we actually don't have enough kids to keep societies going. 0.99

00:55:40.340 And this is going to have tremendous pressures on fiscal situations, economic growth in not

00:55:47.540 too long.

00:55:48.400 And then, you know, in generations or down the road, it's going to have actually existential

00:55:54.760 threats to humanity.

00:55:56.480 So that's, it's weird to me that that's not a bigger topic of conversation broadly.

00:56:01.800 Well, it is on this show.

00:56:02.880 Uh, make sure you check out our episode with Stephen Shaw, uh, who filmed a movie about it

00:56:06.760 actually.

00:56:07.300 Um, but when you do that also head on over to locals now for your questions to Melissa.

00:56:14.000 How do we support single moms and their children without incentivizing women to divorce unnecessarily 0.63

00:56:19.820 or to have children by themselves?

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TRIGGERnometry - August 04, 2024

The True Cost of Family Breakdown - Melissa Kearney

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