The True Cost of Family Breakdown - Melissa Kearney
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
Melissa Levy is an economist who wrote a book called The Two Parent Privilege, about the controversial idea that two parents are better than one. In this episode, she explains why this is so controversial, and why single-parent families are more common than ever.
Transcript
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Kids who are growing up in a single mother home in the U.S.,
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they are five times more likely to live in poverty
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Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely.
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Because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem,
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when in most cases that one parent is the kid's greatest asset.
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Can we just talk about this the way we talk about other gaps in society?
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You can't pretend that this is a feminist success story.
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You wrote a book called The Two-Parent Privilege.
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Very controversial idea that two parents are better than one.
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You're actually an economist, obviously, and you did a lot of research.
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And the data behind what you're talking about would be fascinating for us to talk about.
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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.?
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Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me on the show.
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So the state of the family in the U.S. has not been great for the past four decades.
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But a real part of the story is that it's been very uneven across the socioeconomic distribution.
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And that's really a main story I'm telling in the book.
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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.
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What are the numbers in other countries, just for comparison?
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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.
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And by this consistent methodology, it's 23% in the U.S.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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So it's the middle group, like the middle class, kids whose parents have a high school degree or some college.
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In a four-decade period, we went from 80% to like 83% to 60% of them living with married parents.
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Why is it that we've now seen the rise of single-parent families?
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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.
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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,
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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?
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We saw a decline in marriage roughly across the board, like across the socioeconomic spectrum.
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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.
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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?
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Like sort of, again, the bulk of adults, the middle class, straight line down in marriage rates.
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And of course, it's always been lower and continues to fall out for even less educated adults.
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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.
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And this happened in the U.S. and, you know, in the U.K. as well.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There's a whole bunch of other social things that go along with that.
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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,
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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,
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a decrease in marriage, an increase in the share of kids born outside marriage,
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and ultimately an increase in the share of kids living with only one parent.
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And to what extent is this a kind of vicious cycle where parents passing this way of thinking down to their kids?
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It's not even just passing on the way of thinking, it's passing on an economic reality.
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And so this is a key reason why I wrote this book, is because we are in a vicious cycle,
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where this family structure is a key mechanism through which advantage or disadvantage is passed along through the generations.
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And if we, so my, you know, very strong view on this is, if we don't figure out how to break this cycle,
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we are cementing class and racial and ethnic inequality in this country.
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We shouldn't be surprised to see huge class gaps in kids' opportunities, outcomes, preparedness for kindergarten through college.
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And let me be clear, this sort of economic inequality is both cause and effect of what has happened to the family
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and then the disadvantages those kids experience, et cetera, et cetera.
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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.
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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,
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and then those boys are growing up without dads in their homes, which make them more likely to act out in school,
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more likely to get in trouble with crime, less likely to go to college.
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The pool of attractive marriage partners in that segment of the population is going to shrink even further.
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I was just going to say, we had a woman called Mary Eberstadt on the show a long time ago now.
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She wrote a book called Primal Screams, which was about the idea that the breakdown of the family partly leads to identity politics
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because people look for something to belong to when they don't feel like they have a complete experience at home.
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What are some of the other ways that this is affecting us and our society?
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Because you talk about this a lot in the book, that so many of the problems our societies are grappling with today
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are partly caused by the breakdown of the family.
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Yeah, so I come at this from like a pretty basic, maybe some would even say boring economic lens,
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which is, and I want to separate myself from, just to be clear,
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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.
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What I can see very clearly in the nationally representative data sets is kids who don't grow up with two parents,
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they have far fewer resources coming into their households, right?
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And so again, it's like there's nothing value laden about that.
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Those kids are much more likely to live in poverty.
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It's not just about poverty, but let's be clear on the poverty numbers.
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Kids who are growing up in a single mother home in the U.S.,
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they are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up in a married parent home.
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Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely.
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their median household income is, unsurprisingly, about half as high, right?
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Because now most moms work, and so you've got two incomes versus one.
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Income is pretty predictive of the kind of neighborhood you live in,
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the kind of schools you go through, the kind of extracurricular activities you have.
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So kids with only one parent have less income, have less resources.
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We also know, and we can get into this later, but they get less parental time.
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But what we see, again, in the data, in a, in a, like, just very evidence-based way,
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those kids are then less likely to graduate high school.
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They're more likely to get involved in the criminal justice system.
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They're more likely to have an early non-marital birth.
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They're less likely to have high earnings and be married themselves as adults.
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And so all of the psychological sadness, loneliness, identity crisis, all of that
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is on top of the very irrefutable screams out at the data.
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If you want to talk about primal scream, it screams out in the data in dozens of studies.
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These kids are just at a disadvantage when it comes to hitting all these sort of educational economic markers.
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And why is it that this is controversial, that this is suddenly taboo to talk about?
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Because as somebody who was working in teaching for a long time, well over a decade, it was pretty obvious.
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So kids who were struggling when it came to behaviour, when it came to following instructions,
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a vast majority of them is because they didn't have a father at home.
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Mum was working two jobs, maybe even three jobs, exhausted, barely there,
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trying to put food on the table, a roof over the home.
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She had two or three kids who pretty much raised themselves.
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It was obvious, unless you're a very, very special type of kid,
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that you were going to stray from the straight and narrow as it is.
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Yeah. So there's so much about what you just said to unpack.
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And I love the, you know, the image you set, which is one of a struggling single mom.
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So one of the real reasons this is controversial to talk about and people don't want to talk about it
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is because as soon as you say kids benefit from two parents, there's an initial reaction of you're
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Like what I just heard from you is the way I come at this, which is let's be empathetic.
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Of course, it's freaking hard to do this by yourself.
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And so we're not helping anybody by pretending it's not hard for single parents to do it by themselves.
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We have a two-year-old at home for our first child.
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I'm starting to think the nuclear family is a bad idea.
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We need like the whole grandparents, aunts, uncles to actually do it properly.
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So for a single person to do that while also trying to provide.
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So, so I'll get to, there's a variety of reasons actually why it's controversial to
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talk about, especially in the U S but on this point, um, to your point, like I, I'm fully
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aware that I come to this topic from a position of privilege, right?
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I'm raising my kids in a two parent home with a lot of resources.
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We both have well-paying jobs still really hard, right?
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I was raised in a two parent home, which is probably why the issue feels it's less,
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it's, it's less uncomfortable for me to talk about, right?
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If I grew up in a home where I saw my parents fighting all the time, maybe I'd just sort
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of be less comfortable highlighting with the data show, right?
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Um, and so I'm acknowledging both of those things.
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This is actually why I wound up calling the book, the two parent privilege.
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Initially, I was calling the book, the family gap, because the whole theme in the book, right?
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There's gaps between the college educated and not on all sorts of things.
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And then when it got time for the book to come out, the marketing team at the University
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of Chicago Press was like, that's a terrible title.
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I was like, I will not put out the book called the one parent problem, because this is why
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Because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem.
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When in most cases, that one parent is the kid's greatest asset, right?
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Like they are doing all they can to raise their kid to the best of their ability without the
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committed help of a resident partner, second parent.
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And so then I was like, no, no, how about we flip this and call this the two parent privilege
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and just acknowledge, because it's silly not to, and counterproductive not to, that raising
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kids in a two parent setting is a privileged position for those of us who have the committed
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It's a privileged position for the kids who are lucky enough to be born into a household
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where they have two parents investing their resources into them.
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And now it's the most educated, high-income group in society, the privileged group, that's
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largely getting the benefit of these healthy, strong, advantageous family situations.
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So the, you know, let's get back to your initial question.
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I do think because a lot of people hear it as you're blaming the victim, and we don't
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The second issue, this has been interesting to me.
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I didn't anticipate that this would be the greatest backlash I got.
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The greatest like sort of onslaught right away when I put out the book, writers who in
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the first 48 hours had essays, you know, saying what a ridiculous, old-fashioned scold I was,
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there was an immediate backlash from the feminist writers.
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When they hear this message, they hear it as, you're saying women can't do this just
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as well as men, or just as well, they need a man to do this, right?
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You're saying a woman can't do this on her own, which, again, to your point, I don't
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know, I'm pretty, like, I think it's pretty helpful to sometimes have my husband around
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And I don't think that makes me less of a feminist to admit that.
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And also, before the book came out, I presented a bunch of the research at an academic conference
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in London, where it drew on, it was hosted by UCL, and there was a bunch of European
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demographers, sociologists, and economists, and people came up to me afterwards, and they
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And they were like, we would never write this in Europe.
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And one researcher said, I just did a whole report on poverty, I won't name her country,
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for my government, and I didn't even mention family structure.
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And I was like, well, take note from what's happened in the U.S., because you can't pretend
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The third reason why it's been controversial to talk about in the U.S. basically since the
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late 60s, and the thing I was most nervous about was because in the U.S., there remains
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today, but there's been for the past four decades a black-white divide.
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And so when Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1968 first called attention to the rise in the
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share of urban black children in the U.S. being born to single moms or unmarried moms and then
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being raised in single mother households, he was met with a huge backlash that he was blaming
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the victim, he wasn't sufficiently acknowledging racism, structural discrimination, and there
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was a huge backlash on the topic itself being perceived as having like a racist undertone
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And I think that episode silenced the conversation for a long time among those of us in the social
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That's really unfortunate because I'm aware of that gap, but there are also other ethnic
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and racial gaps that go very much in the opposite direction.
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And that kind of opens up the reality of it, which isn't just a black-white thing.
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Asians, for example, you talk about this, irrespective of education, are way more likely to raise their
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So it's so unhelpful, isn't it, to think about this issue through that very simple prison.
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I will say, to my great relief, I have not gotten that line of pushback as much.
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And when I've reflected on why that might be, I think perhaps for two reasons.
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One, it's really hard for anybody to deny in a well-meaning, honest way that the decline
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in two-parent families, the decline in marriage, isn't particularly challenging for the black
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And to say that is not to suggest that there's not a whole terrible history of structural discrimination
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that has led to weakened labor market opportunities, high levels of incarceration, exclusion from
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But let's be clear that we need to get out of this.
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And more black children would benefit by having two parents in their home.
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And more black moms would benefit by having the help of a committed, employed partner.
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And more black men, you know, at least in ethnographic survey evidence, would like to be
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And so denying that reality is not helpful to anybody.
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It's also the case that now the share of kids being raised in one-parent homes is quite
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high outside the college-educated class for white and Hispanic families as well.
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So we can talk about this as a class-based issue, as much as a racial-ethnic divide issue.
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The sort of exception of ethnic Asians in the U.S. I think is fascinating that that group,
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So based on children whose moms in the 2019 U.S. Census of all households identify,
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according to these, you know, identify as these in these four largest racial ethnic groups in
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88% of kids whose moms identify as ethnically Asian are living in married parent households.
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Sorry to interrupt you there, because there is a slight difference in the way the U.K.
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So when we hear Asian, we think Pakistani, Indian, Bangladesh.
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So what I'm going by is in the census, how a mom identifies herself,
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Yeah, and so that's 88% of kids, 77% of kids whose moms identify as white, and then 64%
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of kids whose mom identifies as Hispanic, and 38% of kids whose moms identify as racially
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And so again, like if we actually really are committed to helping kids, and we say,
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oh my goodness, you know, kids coming from households identifying as Asian do so much
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better in school, shouldn't we ask how much of this is because they have two parents versus
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In the U.S., we don't actually report or collect education data by family structure,
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But also, even within, again, with the exception of Asians, within groups, there are big education
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So when you look at kids whose moms identify as racially black, if their mom has a four-year
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college degree, 60% of them are living in married parent homes versus 30%.
00:20:30.320
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You know, I think the problem here is that with a lot of these issues, not just this one,
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we're afraid to be honest and talk about things fully and frankly.
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And if we are not going to be talking about issues honestly, then what we're not going
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to be doing is talking about every facet of this particular issue, which means you are
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That's exactly why I decided to write this book, which, you know, depending on your inclination,
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you need to read this book and you're like, I didn't really need a professor to tell me
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Like, how many years of data did I have to look at to come to that really intuitive conclusion?
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On the other hand, I've been for two decades now engaged in policy conversations about inequality,
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threats to social mobility, and we don't talk about this.
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And we have study after study after study showing that family structure is super predictive,
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both at an individual level and at a neighborhood level for how kids do and their educational
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attainment and their college attainment, right?
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And then when we get to the conversations, we decide, well, that's out of bounds.
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Let's keep talking about schools and what schools can do.
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Um, let's keep talking about the need to have early childhood education, to strengthen the
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safety net, all things that I'm all in favor of.
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And I've written essays and policy essays and papers on the need to do those things, but
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We are fighting against what's been happening in the home.
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And at some point we have to say, wait a minute, while we're doing all these things to make
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sure that there's more school counselors in school, to make sure that kids who go to
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school can get fed in school because they don't have sufficient resources at home.
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Um, why don't we think about how to strengthen the family?
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It got to the point, in my view, we're never going to have an honest, productive conversation
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about closing gaps, improving kids' well-being, addressing a whole bunch of social ills that
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we're not seeing if we don't have that conversation about what's been going on in kids' homes and
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The boy gets to a certain age in a one-parent household.
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They can't control them physically because a boy is bigger and stronger.
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And when he goes looking for a father figure in a community which has a dearth of father
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Actually, one of, um, one summer in college, and this is, you know, maybe this was the moment
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where I really got committed to this topic, which 25 years later I'm still writing about.
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I, I worked as an intern at a welfare to work center, um, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
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It was one of those things that like, there was this great program in my college.
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If you did an internship for a group that worked for social change, you could get funding to
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Um, and so I worked at this center and it was all with single moms.
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Many of them were my age because I'm a junior in college and many of these women were my
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One of the women on the staff who was a single mom, her son was about to go into high school
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and her biggest worry was he basically was going to have no choice, but to join a gang.
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And it was just like really, you know, eyeopening and heartbreaking, uh, as a junior in college,
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Like, what is it about the environments we grew up in that she is having such a different
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life and, and now her son, to your point, like, what else is he supposed to do and what
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You know, um, she was researching options for him to go to different schools.
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It didn't really seem like she, you know, he was going to get a scholarship or she had
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And so it is, again, no one, I'm not pointing fingers at like, I never use the word deadbeat
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I'm not pointing figures at moms saying, why did you get pregnant in this situation?
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It's just a bad situation for everybody, especially the kids.
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The interesting thing you've mentioned being a teacher, I've gotten so many emails since
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the book has come out from teachers and from pediatricians who have said, this is what I've
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seen in my classroom and my practice for the past 25 years.
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These kids no longer have two parents in the household and they have all, you know, sorts
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of deficits, um, and disadvantages that come along with it.
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Like if I try bringing this up to my principal or whatever, this is not, this is not something
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And so like maybe what my book has done is said, Hey, can we just talk about this the
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way we talk about other gaps in society, just with data, just with evidence, come at it
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from empathy and let's be honest about what a lot of people who work with kids have been
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And this is why it's so important because I remember one boy who I used to teach, he got
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expelled from his high school and I was his primary school teacher and he came back to
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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.
00:26:37.140
And he goes, I can't go there, sir, because they'll murder me.
00:26:43.160
And then you look at his mom who had other kids, couldn't control them.
00:26:52.540
And you go, that's by refusing to have an honest conversation about these issues.
00:27:03.920
And I get really frustrated with, you know, feminists who go, oh, it's sexist to say this
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.
00:27:22.440
So here was like a, you know, like that reality moment where he's like, I can't go to that
00:27:29.100
I had a conversation recently with someone who works with these responsible fatherhood
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
00:27:54.600
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,
00:28:09.580
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.
00:28:23.660
They can't go anywhere near their kid's school.
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.
00:28:43.980
So I want to remind us that there is a continuum here.
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
00:29:09.500
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
00:29:24.640
Uh, Melissa, one of the things I've been thinking about from the beginning of this is whether
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
00:29:52.380
Why would, why would somebody have a child with somebody and then not marry them, even
00:29:58.360
though they still would be contributing resources and time and parenting time and whatever?
00:30:05.680
So the economic, uh, argument is definitely not sufficient.
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
00:30:37.660
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
00:30:49.580
Um, there was an increase in job opportunities and earnings specifically for men.
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
00:31:24.560
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
00:31:34.260
And then as a social scientist, you're all excited.
00:31:43.080
I was like, well, that's not what I was expecting.
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
00:31:58.900
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.
00:32:09.720
If he was good enough to have a kid with, why didn't you marry him?
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
00:32:39.800
Um, in survey data, it's not nationally representative, but in survey data of those parents, a majority
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
00:33:00.040
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
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
00:33:30.420
And I think one interpretation of this is that how people respond to economic situations
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.
00:34:03.960
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.
00:34:23.860
You know, we've talked about the fact that I want to acknowledge it in some cases, there
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.
00:34:54.000
I'm not sure I like him enough to be married to him.
00:35:01.060
And this is where I think it's decidedly unhelpful that we're not honest about, this is going
00:35:09.540
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
00:35:23.360
And maybe more people will start to say that now that it's, like, abundantly clear that
00:35:28.260
And by the way, this thing about, like, well, women don't, you know, like, as a dad, I definitely
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.
00:36:04.780
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.
00:36:21.540
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
00:36:41.020
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?
00:36:52.560
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
00:37:11.000
If you guys were like, tried to be together, is there a reason why you don't try to get
00:37:24.220
And I've had so many conversations like this with people since where there's just a like,
00:37:29.800
But one thing I don't get into in the book, but I think is really interesting is that level
00:37:38.420
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?
00:37:49.500
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
00:38:25.080
They may, they have resources that make it less likely there's going to be frictions over
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
00:39:09.080
And so this is what Rob Henderson calls luxury belief.
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.
00:39:40.840
I don't write about this in the book because I am in the book, I'm all like, here, here
00:39:48.840
So can we at least agree that this family divergence has added to inequality and it's bad for kids?
00:39:55.900
Then, and I know that economics is a part of the story.
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
00:40:15.700
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.
00:40:32.200
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.
00:40:42.000
And so one of the things they push back on me is, well, you say we need to reestablish
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
00:41:05.260
And once I have a child, I have given up some of my individual freedom.
00:41:12.460
And I said, are you not comfortable establishing a social norm of if you have a kid, you can't
00:41:17.420
If you father a child with somebody, you owe that child and that woman something.
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.
00:41:28.800
The idea that we're not comfortable restricting people's freedoms, like we're well past that.
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
00:41:51.720
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
00:42:27.740
Especially with three kids, when you, if you had one by accident, you sort of go, well,
00:42:34.480
If you've had three kids, that's a conscious choice at this point.
00:42:39.600
So I, I'm actually, I get really nervous when I do that, when I hear that.
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
00:43:02.880
That I certainly don't ever want to go back to a situation where single moms and their
00:43:08.700
kids were so ostracized from the community that women had no choice, but to stay in terrible
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
00:43:39.640
I mean, that's a normative statement, but, but I am.
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.
00:44:05.940
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.
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
00:44:30.000
It's like dad sitting, like having a tea party with his daughter, throwing a ball to his son.
00:44:44.940
I haven't seen a good study of those, that kind of campaign, but we have lots of good studies
00:44:55.460
Do you know, I have this paper on MTV, 16 and Pregnant.
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.
00:45:13.700
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?
00:45:25.940
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.
00:45:32.300
I mean, births are down among teens, but they were falling 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.5%.
00:45:38.660
And I was getting all these calls from journalists because I studied the economic causes and consequences
00:45:44.400
I was like, I have no idea what it was, but I can tell you this, what other people are
00:45:53.800
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
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
00:46:30.320
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.
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
00:47:06.020
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
00:47:15.480
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.
00:47:24.360
Things that were super salient to like young people.
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
00:47:50.440
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.
00:48:06.220
He's not like, this is how you solve this problem.
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
00:48:23.460
And I was like, because it wasn't on my radar as an economist.
00:48:33.560
And when I'm talking to people who work on healthy relationship programs with vulnerable
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.
00:49:07.180
Anecdotally, this has come up to a degree that has shocked me.
00:49:12.820
And moving on, Melissa, how much of this is to do with the fact that we're now living
00:49:20.500
The fact that people are not religious, the fact that it's not just Christianity, by the
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
00:50:02.800
So you've got fewer people committed, participating in religious institutions.
00:50:10.320
And then you have people falling out of family life, which is also something that reinforces
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
00:50:34.480
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,
00:50:52.100
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
00:51:09.360
That's a very good example of that, which is why we try to have these conversations on
00:51:14.180
But I think one of the things we really should talk about is what can we do about this?
00:51:20.820
And that's, I think, the most important bit of this conversation.
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
00:51:35.800
And, you know, how we do that, that's leaders being willing to say it, policy leaders, trusted
00:51:45.540
In 2008, President Obama gave a beautiful speech on Father's Day about the absence of
00:51:56.080
And I don't, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a national democratic leader raising this
00:52:01.700
Um, so I think, you know, we've done a lot of social messaging around teen childbearing,
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
00:52:46.120
Three, I think we need much more innovation, funding, and research into programs that are
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.
00:53:20.120
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.
00:53:34.040
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.
00:53:45.340
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.
00:53:55.480
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
00:54:09.000
And so programs that we can scale up to help those kids to try and break the cycle are critically
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,
00:54:31.460
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
00:54:48.540
And I, and I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic we can break this terrible cycle.
00:54:56.660
Before we go over to locals where our supporters get to ask their questions to you, our final
00:55:03.700
What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
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
00:55:31.360
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.
00:55:40.340
And this is going to have tremendous pressures on fiscal situations, economic growth in not
00:55:48.400
And then, you know, in generations or down the road, it's going to have actually existential
00:55:56.480
So that's, it's weird to me that that's not a bigger topic of conversation broadly.
00:56:02.880
Uh, make sure you check out our episode with Stephen Shaw, uh, who filmed a movie about it
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
00:56:26.480
Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, a beautiful noise is coming to Toronto.
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The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs
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you love, including America forever in blue jeans and sweet Caroline like Jersey boys and
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The Neil Diamond musical, a beautiful noise now through June 7th, 2026 at the
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the princess of Wells theater, get tickets at mirvish.com.