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MATT BURGESS: Welcome back to the Free Mind Podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ.  

My guest today is Brad Wilcox. Dr. Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He's also a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss the two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes and culture in the US context, and the important role families must play in any project civic renewal. Brad Wilcox, welcome to the Free Mind Podcast. 

 

BRAD WILCOX: Great to be here, Matt. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So I wanted to talk to you because you study the family, and I think as somewhat of an outsider to this field, my impression is that the family is one of the most important, some would say the most important institutions in our life, not just in the lives of our individuals, but also in terms of its indirect effects in society. And yet, would it be fair to say that within the ivory tower and a lot of other corners of intellectual life, it's a fairly understudied topic? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Well, I think the family is studied a great deal in sociology, economics and psychology, but I think what is sort of the tragedy there in some ways is that I think a lot of the core insights from a lot of research on family life is not necessarily well-known when it comes to family structure and even when it comes to newer research on the relationship between parenthood, say, and happiness for adults in America today. So, I think among specialists, there's a lot of good research being done that comports with reality, but I think that that research is not necessarily well-known by, not just the general public, but by many elites who are weighing in on family issues in the pages of the New York Times or in Bloomberg or other venues like that. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, that's a good summary. And I'm going to ask you about the happiness stuff in a bit, because you had an interesting exchange recently with Matthew Yglesias on Twitter related to an Atlantic article, I think you've written recently that I want to talk about.  

But first I want to talk about the large social problems that dominate the public discourse. And I'm not just talking about things like poverty and inequality and crime that sometimes are associated with the family, but I'm also talking about things like civic breakdown and lack of trust, and the rise in teen and young adult mental health challenges. How important would you say the family is to those trends, and what are some big risk factors or insights that society would do well to pay attention to in these domains? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Well, the first thing I would say, Matt, is it's important to understand and appreciate that I think the family is the core institution in any civilization. It plays a key role in socializing kids, obviously. It plays a key role in superintending the relationships between women and men, romantic and sexual. It plays a key role in organizing kinship relationships. It's crucial.  

And I think the tragedy of our moment in part is that we don't much appreciate that in our public conversation or public policies regarding things like you mentioned, crime and poverty and economic mobility. On these kinds of outcomes, we often see that, for instance, family structure is one of the top predictors if not the most important predictors. So for instance, the work of Raj Chetty at Harvard looking at mobility for poor kids in communities across the United States, finds that the number one factor when you're looking at why a region like Salt Lake is more conducive to mobility for poor kids going from rags to riches mobility, compared to a region like Atlanta, is that there are many more two parent families in the Salt Lake region than in the Atlanta region as a share of families in those two regions. 

So, it's just one example of the way in which what happens in our families matters not just for individual kids and adults, but for entire communities. And when families are strong, we're more likely to see the economy flourishing, the American dream is healthy, crime is lower, incarceration is lower, kids are more likely to be flourishing in their local schools as well. So that's part of the story here. 

But it's also, I think, important to note that when it comes to this newer set of psychological and emotional challenges you referenced, I think that the impact of the family is certainly one part of the puzzle, although it's also the case that the rise of screen culture is a major contributor to all this. I think we have seen an increase in anxiety and depression among young adults and adolescents because they're spending too much time on screens, and they're too captured by social media. And that's sort of, in some ways, orthogonal to what's happening in the family in general. 

At the same time, work that I've done with Jean Twenge and others indicates, for instance, that kids in non-intact families are particularly vulnerable to falling prey to spending too much time on their screens and to being more anxious, depressed and sleep deprived as a consequence of that. So I guess the way I think about the newer psychological and emotional problems we're seeing play out on the American scene is that young adults, adolescents, and even adults who are less connected to a strong family are more likely to sort of, I think, succumb to spending too much time in virtual worlds that aren't good for their emotional well-being. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's a really nice summary. So, a follow-up question that's probably remedial for someone in your field, but I think is important for the uninitiated. When you talk about a stable family, a strong family, a two-parent family being important, what is the mechanistic pathway? So how is it that those things reduce the social problems you were discussing, increase social mobility? Obviously, that's decades of research, but as specifically and concisely as you can. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: So, when I talk about an intact married family, I'm talking about two parents who've gotten married, stayed married, and today the vast majority of those parents will be heterosexual. More than 99% of intact married families are headed by heterosexual parents. And so, it's really this idea that they've gotten together, they've been together, they have a common history with one another and any kids that they have, and their kids are not exposed to instability of one sort or another. If you have kids or if you've babysat little kids, or if you have younger siblings, younger cousins, I think you can appreciate that kids thrive on stable routines with stable caregivers. And so, an intact married family is that institution in the US that's most likely to deliver that to kids, because cohabitation, for instance, the main competitor now, is way more unstable than marriage for our kids. 

If your parents are married at your birth, you're much more likely to go through life with a stable family at your back. And that's good because today, oftentimes both parents, at least at some point over the course of your life, are working so they're bringing in more income. That's good, because you don't have to travel between two households, and kids don't typically like to navigate between mom and dad's household when they're in school or navigating summer break. It means that there's going to be typically less drama between your two parents, less fighting, less inconsistency as well. So when kids' parents stay together, they're more likely to put a common front on things like rules and discipline. And that's sort of good for kids' development as well. So, there are just any number of ways in which having that stability is helpful. 

I'd also add, too, that one of the problems with family breakdown for kids is that it often introduces a new adult into the household, particularly an unrelated male adult into the household. And it's just a fact of life that men who are unrelated to kids are more likely to physically and emotionally abuse them, to be kind of a risk factor. I'm not saying obviously that every stepfather or every boyfriend in the household is a problem, but just saying that on average we know that unrelated adult males can pose a threat to kids. That's just one more reason why having a stable, married family protecting you is the best [inaudible] 

 And having said all that, it's important to note also, too, that most kids who are raised in a non-intact or a single parent household, like myself, I was raised by a single mom, turn out fine on most outcomes. But we also see in the research that there's an increased risk for things like depression, drug use, delinquency, school suspensions, not attending college, ending up in prison or in jail for kids whose parents are not stably married. 

  

MATT BURGESS: You talked about the gender dynamic in terms of stepfathers. There's also a gender dynamic with the children themselves in the sense that boys are affected much more severely on average by lack of a stable family. Why is that? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I think it's important to actually be careful about that. So, what we see when kids are stressed out, boys are more likely to basically engage in things where they're acting out. We call it externalizing in research literature. And that's manifested by things like getting in fights, floundering at school, getting arrested, ending up incarcerated. Whereas girls are more likely to do what's called internalization, where they turn inward emotionally. They're more anxious and depressed when things are not going well on the home front. 

And so, I think when you look at how boys are affected, they're more likely to be affected in ways that are visible in school and in the criminal justice system, whereas girls are more likely to be affected in ways that perhaps are more subtle and more emotional. And then also, too, I think there's some evidence that when it comes to things like having your own family outside of marriage and having a teen pregnancy, for instance, or being a teen parent, that that's more likely to be manifested for girls than boys. So, I think we have to just realize that family instability, family chaos affects both boys and girls, but in often different ways. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's a great explanation. Thanks for that clarification. So I think it's the case that, however you want to define it, two parent family, stable family, intact family, the fraction of families that have those characteristics, or if you prefer, the fraction of children that grow up in families that have those characteristics has been in decline, correct? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: From the late 1960s to around 2012, we have seen a pretty consistent decline in the share of kids being raised in stable, married families. In recent years, we've seen a slight uptick in the share of kids being raised in a stable, married family. And that's because divorce has come down since 1980, and non-marital childbearing has leveled off since about 2009. And so, you put those two things together, and what you see is that kids who are being born into married families are actually seeing a slight increase in the stability of their family lives compared to say how it would've been in 1975. And then overall, there's just a slight increase in family stability for kids.  

So, what we would estimate is that slightly more than one in two kids today will spend the duration of their childhood with their own married parents. So the big story is that, yeah, the big story is one of decline from the sixties to the present, but it's just important to acknowledge there's been a slight uptick in stable families in the last few years, and that's obviously concentrated among kids who are born to married parents. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's really interesting. So as best as we understand it, first, the '60s to 2012 period, what are the causes of the decline in stable, married families? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: So, this is kind of an overdetermined pattern that we're seeing. I think what we see in the '60s and '70s is obviously a great deal of cultural changes, the rise of what's sort of called, The Me Decade in the '70s, people are thinking a lot more about their own desires and less about their family obligations. We are seeing an increasingly secular society where people are according to less authority and they're less likely to be a part of religious institutions. We're seeing the rise of feminism where women are expecting more from marriage and family than they did in previous generations. A lot of that's good, but it also can lead to more instability.  

So, there are all these cultural changes that are playing out in the '60s and '70s, and they've been with us really since then. We also see legal changes, the rise of no-fault divorce that weaken the power of marriage law in people's lives. We're seeing welfare policies that end up penalizing marriage among poor and working-class couples. And we're seeing a shift in the economy where men who don't have college degrees are much less likely to be stably employed full-time, and the women in their lives are more likely to be earning better and better incomes, so they're less dependent upon the men economically in their lives.  

So, these economic changes, these policy changes, and these cultural changes all come together to weaken family life since the 1960s. And it's also important to know that we are social animals, and that we are profoundly affected by what we see happening among our peers, among our family members, and our friends. And so, if you were in the 1970s and your best friend got divorced and your older sister got divorced, and you're having trouble in your marriage, you're going to think, at that point in time, divorce is the way to deal with this.  

Whereas if you're in a more recent cohort and you're college educated, and you might hear from your best girlfriend that she's having some difficulty in her marriage, but she and her husband are going for counseling, and they managed to work it out. When you hit that difficult chapter in your marriage, you're probably more likely to try to figure it out and stay together than to get divorced. Again, I think part of what's happening both in the '60s and '70s and then more recently is that all these factors are also mediated through our social networks in ways that either augment family instability or actually minimize it in some groups today. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Great. So let me follow up on a couple of those. So, you mentioned welfare programs as incentivizing single parent families, and that is an argument that I think has been common among conservatives for the last few decades. The other argument that I've heard more from liberals is that we would do well to promote the upward mobility and well-being of our young people and maybe even the stability of our families by having more social welfare, cheaper school, public education, access to college, healthcare, childcare, maternity leave. Are those conflicting stories, or are those two stories that focus on different parts of the welfare system in different ways? And what's your take on this? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I think there are somewhat distinct arguments being made here. I think the conservative argument, which I basically buy, is that when you look at the calculus that young adults, couples, people having kids back in the '60s and '70s could make or were making, basically they had this reality unfolding where it often made more sense for a couple having kids not to marry because a single mom could get more money or more benefits from the federal government or from a state agency than she could were she to be married to the father of the kids. And that dynamic has continued to play out in different ways since then, although it hits working class couples now more than it does poor couples.  

So, we've seen data for instance, that indicates that say a working-class couple with, I think, two kids in Arkansas would have about a 30% hit to their real income were they to marry rather than just have the mom apply for a number of different benefits like Medicaid and SNAP and the income tax credit. So that's one reality. So, the issue there is that the way in which we means test programs leads to a situation where if your income goes above a certain level, you either lose a benefit or you lose a portion of the benefit. And that means we've got marriage penalties that are affecting poor, working class couples at different points in our recent history. And that's played out in different ways at different points in time.  

Now, it is true that most progressives would kind of discount the effect of welfare on trends in marriage and single parenthood. I'm not saying it's the only factor, but I do think it's one factor, and it's a factor, obviously, that affected poor and African American couples and families just because they're disproportionately affected by means tested programs in the '60s and thereafter. So that's sort of one part of the argument.  

Now in terms of the progressive response, they're more likely to make a case today for universal policies, for universal child allowance, for instance, and for something like universal access to healthcare and even a college education as well. And the thought there from their perspective is that if you make these things universal, you're not going to have any marriage penalties built into them. And so, you would make people's lives materially easier, and you would not be penalizing marriage. And for those two reasons, you would see stronger and more stable marriages and families.  

I think that that's something that might be explored in certain kinds of ways, in certain kinds of policy contexts. Certainly, when it comes to healthcare, for instance, I think that there's a case to be made for that progressive perspective. But what I think they don't appreciate is that if you are giving people a lot of free public goods, number one, you're going to have to pay for them in ways that are going to often affect middle class families' tax burden and their capacity to support their own families in a context where they're going to be paying a lot more in taxes. And then secondarily, they're often, I think, minimizing the need for young men, middle-aged men to function effectively as good providers.  

And so, one of my problems with the Universal Child Allowance is that it allows single moms to have kids and raise kids on their own without any support from the father financially. So, it just reinforces a pretty profoundly negative dynamic in many poor working-class communities where men are not expected to and often don't really do much in the way of providing financially for their mate and for their kids. And that is not good for the men. It's not good for their relationships with the women in their lives. It's not good for their kids not to see a father in the household providing and showing up for work every morning in the week.  

So again, I think that my primary problem with the progressive agenda is that there is really no recognition that they're often creating a series of programs and systems that make working class and poor men redundant or unneeded. And that only increases a lot of the more sobering family dynamics that we're already seeing play out in poor working-class families across the US. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So really interesting. Quick follow-up question about that. So, this reminds me of climate in a weird way. Hear me out. So, one of the things that comes up a lot in climate is what we call hysteresis or path dependency. So, for example, there have been times in the geologic record, I'm pretty sure, where we had temperatures and CO2 concentrations similar to today and much, much, much less ice. And basically, the reason is, if you are melting ice, growing ice versus melting ice happens at a different temperature. So, you have to be a lot colder to grow the ice than to melt it, I think.  

So, what that has to do with what we were just talking about is the following. So I think a lot of our listeners are going to buy the argument that when you put these incentives in place in what was previously communities that had high rates of marriage and intact families, which I think regardless of what community you're talking about, whether you're talking about poor urban communities or Appalachian communities, is the case. I think it's easy to buy the argument that you're putting forward that these incentives contributed to the decline in marriage. 

What about going the other way, right? So, if we took away, say, welfare programs, whether it's SNAP or child benefit or whatever it is, do you think that the result would be at least immediately more marriage, or would it just be more destitute poverty for children? If the latter, what do you do about it? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Sure. Well, I think we actually already... We've conducted this experiment, right? So, in 1996, we had welfare reform, Republican Congress, Democratic President. Bill Clinton said we were going to end welfare as we knew it. We did, and we made it much tougher for people to get welfare without a job, basically. And there were other reforms that were passed. And before welfare reform passed, there were many voices including Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who projected that there would be just absolute chaos. There'd be tons of families and kids that would be left destitute by this welfare reform agenda.  

And when it passed, none of the great forecasts of destitution came to fruition. There were obviously some people who suffered, but in the main we saw, actually, child poverty fall, including poverty fall for single mothers, in large part because the average single mom was more likely to be working in the wake of welfare reform than she was prior to welfare reform. Now, there are some negative outcomes that we see with some child measures in the wake of welfare reform. But in the main, it worked to reconnect a lot of single moms to the workplace.  

It also was the case, sort of the dramatic increase in non-marital childbearing and single parent, that had played out prior to welfare reform, kind slowed down the wake of welfare reform. There are debates among academics about whether welfare reform was a key factor in all this, but you can't deny that the pace of family change and the increase in single motherhood really slowed down once welfare reform had passed and become institutionalized.  

So, if we were to go forward from here, I think that if we were to reform our welfare policies in ways that are even more marriage friendly, we might see even better outcomes than we saw with welfare reform. I'm not convinced. I'm not saying that we should go to zero on any of these programs, but I just think that we could think about re-envisioning them in ways that are more marriage friendly.  

So, for instance, what we see in the US military is that. This is based upon research. It's about 10 years old, so I would like to see new work on this front. But it's one of the few places where there isn't really a big class divide or a big racial divide in marriage. And so, some people say that the federal government has never successfully prosecuted a pro-marriage policy, but that's not true. If you look at the military, it's a place where you can't get benefits for your partner unless you're married to him or her. So, talking about housing benefits, healthcare benefits especially, and those are meaningful benefits in the military. 

And so, what we see is that marriage rates are much higher in the military, and that there isn't really a big, for instance, racial divide in the share of whites and Blacks that are married, and most of the folks are married at higher rates than their equivalent civilian peers. So, we think about that's one example. We could imagine other ways that our means tested programs programs could be reconfigured to be more marriage friendly. 

So, one example would be, for instance, on Medicaid, just to raise the threshold for married couples with kids in terms of who gets access to Medicaid. And so, eliminate that marriage penalty that many working-class couples now face when it comes to thinking about marriage versus Medicaid for their family healthcare. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, would it be fair to say that the debate about should welfare programs be more or less marriage friendly can almost be separated from the question of should they be bigger or smaller? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Yes. 

  

MATT BURGESS: The other area where I think somebody might... Just [inaudible] what you were just saying. Somebody might say, "Well, if you look at Scandinavia, they have a lot more social welfare programs." I'm not sure what their marriage statistics are like, but they certainly have much less of some of the social problems that in America we associate with family breakdown. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Yes, I think we should distinguish between public spending or the size of programs and their marriage friendliness. So, when I talk about making our means tested programs more marriage friendly, it would be in the short term that we would probably spend more, because we would have higher thresholds for married families, working class families with kids. We might want to, having done that, then rethink how we organize them, how we could consolidate them, et cetera.  

But what I'm saying is there's one issue, sort of, how much we spend and what we do in the social welfare space versus are we spending it in ways that do or do not reinforce marriage or at least not penalize marriage as a way of life? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Right. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Now, in terms of the Sweden point, I think Sweden's a very different society than the United States. Marriage is weaker in Sweden, but there's also much more of a collectivist ethos in Sweden that I think helps to foster solidarity in that country. America's a much more individualistic society than Sweden is, and so we necessarily depend, I think, more on our nuclear families to give core, social and material support to our adults and kids than is the case in Sweden. So people who talk about the Swedish model have to recognize that it's really a very different country. And if we were to move to that model, for it to work, it would require not just more spending and more generous programs, but a much more collectivist ethos. In terms of the norms that govern social life are much more stringent in Sweden. You have to do things a certain way. If you're not, you're sanctioned by stigma. I think we have to be a little bit careful about thinking that we could just easily switch the Swedish model here in the US. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, it's a really interesting point and a perfect segue to the second thing I wanted to follow up on. And that is, you mentioned what I think Jean Twenge refers to as, the narcissism epidemic, basically the rise in me-culture. You talked about it, I think, in Gen X, but of course people are also talking about it in terms of millennials and Gen Z. And maybe a way to put it in regard to what you were just saying is, is there a way to have a strong society without a sense of duty in some domain of life?  

One way, I think, to rephrase what you were talking about earlier, is that in America, because we're an individualistic culture, the family is a place where we have or historically had a sense of duty, and that was binding, especially maybe for husbands, to avoid the problem of aimless young men that is well-known to be challenging for society, societal stability. It sounds like you're saying Sweden has this sense of duty in another way through its collectivist culture. Am I getting to the rub of it, or is there something more to it than that? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Yeah. I mean this is just basic Sociology 101, right? I think a lot of Americans are a little bit naive about the way that society works. They think it's about rights and freedoms and that's about it. But if people are going to respect your rights, if you're going to be able to navigate our society freely without worrying about people stealing things from you or in other ways harming you, then they have to also be aware of their responsibilities and their duties towards others. And then also, if you fall into some kind of difficulty, whether it's an illness or the loss of a job, for instance, then talk about rights and freedoms becomes a lot less compelling and much more like you're looking for people to be caring for you and helping you either financially or with healthcare of one sort or another. 

So yeah, I think any successful society needs to have basically ways to reinforce solidarity where people are caring for the vulnerable, whether that's the you, the old, or adults who are in some way impaired or injured or sick. And the family is one vehicle for doing that, and the state can be another vehicle for that. Obviously, civil society, too, whether it's churches or other community institutions can be vehicles for solidarity, what were called the little platoons. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So I think historically, three of the really important ways that solidarity has been promoted in America are through the family, through patriotism or what people call, civic religion, and then through actual religion, all three of which have largely been in decline except maybe for this slight uptick recently in family structure that you talked about earlier. How do we get it back? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: And I would say, I think this story is pretty negative, at least in terms of the polling that the Wall Street Journal has been doing and that NORC at the University of Chicago has been doing, that we're seeing pretty marked declines in the public's regard for patriotism, faith and family. So even though actual kids who are being born and raised today are more likely to be raised in intact married families at the margins, there are many fewer kids being born today than there was the case say 15 years ago. And so, what that means is the average adult or the shift from the kids to the adult [inaudible]. The average adult is living a much more anomic life today than was the case even 10 years ago in terms of being less likely to be married, less likely to be attending religious services, less likely to have a strong sense of patriotism. And so, there's just fewer norms, fewer social events, more loneliness playing out. 

 And that does not spell anything good for, not just the emotional well-being of adults in the US but just the capacity for this republic to flourish. I think we've seen certainly from the 20th century that when people feel rootless and disconnected from others, they're more likely to succumb to the siren songs of demagogues of one stripe or another. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So how do we fix it? And obviously it's not something that's easy or else we would have done it already. But is there anything that... And it doesn't just have to be policy. One of my pet peeves in left dominated academia is that anytime there's a problem, the first thing we talk about is policy. But maybe there is policies. Some people have talked about this idea of mandatory civic years. You can imagine civil society, simple things like let's not socially reward people who espouse nihilistic views towards important institutions. What else can we do? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: So obviously from my perspective there are lots of things one could do in different sectors and spheres, but I think renewing marriage and family is crucial. And so part of the case there is just helping people understand that work and money and education, while important, don't compare to marriage when it comes to your odds of flourishing in terms of meaning and happiness and a sense of sociability, that married Americans are much more likely to be happy with their lives. They're much more likely to report meaningful lives than their peers who are not married and don't have kids. And that because we're social animals, having opportunities to care for others and to be part of families is extraordinarily important for our well-being.  

So I think trying to get young adults to appreciate how much marriage matters, giving them opportunities to date more successfully, giving them some strategies for dating would be, I think, helpful. Also, trying to strengthen and stabilize existing marriages and families, too, to give those families a greater shot of success and also to make the cause of marriage and family more attractive to people who are not themselves yet married would be good.  

So that means concretely, too, in terms of policies, doing things like eliminating the marriage penalty in our means tested programs and policies. It means eventually, I think, reforming divorce law to make it more conducive to lifelong marriages. It means doing more to educate kids in both public and private schools about both the benefits of marriage and some of the steps they can take as young adults to increase their odds of forging a good marriage as adults. And it also means, I think, recognizing that for those young adults who have either any religious formation or an openness to a religious tradition of one sort or another, that they're much more likely to succeed in getting and staying married and being happily married by connecting themselves to some local religious congregation. So those are a couple of ideas that I think would strengthen marriage and family, and that would be a major help to reviving the fortunes of the American experiment. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So the religion thing is really interesting, and I want to come back to it at the end. But first, one thing that you alluded to, which you've written about, is the happiness benefit of marriage. And am I correct in remembering that that's an especially large advantage for moms? I think you had an article in the Atlantic recently [inaudible] called, The Married Mom [inaudible]. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: So, in the Atlantic piece, we're just saying that... We're not comparing moms to dads, we're just saying that I've just been struck by the number of negative articles published in the New York Times and The Atlantic and Bloomberg, other venues as well, just basically saying that marriage and motherhood are difficult, hard misery inducing, depending upon the article. But there's just been so many of them published since COVID hit. And obviously, COVID was tough times for many families and couples. But what these articles overwhelmingly neglect to mention is that as tough as it was for many married people to navigate COVID and fathers and mothers, COVID, it's still the case that on average they did better than their childless and single peers. So that was true for both moms and for fathers, and that's what I pointed out for moms in the Atlantic, with my colleague, Wendy Wong. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I remember when I saw that article, it reminded me of this quite famous pattern that I think Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers were among the first to describe called, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. And so I think the pattern is that 50 years ago, there was a happiness gap on average favoring women, and that gap has closed largely due to female happiness declining. And the reason it's a paradox is that it coincides temporally with the large increase in women's rights and women's access to the workplace in other male dominated spaces. Is that pattern related to the decline in intact, stable, married families that we were just talking about earlier? How should I understand that pattern in general? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I don't want to make any strong claims about women's experience in particular since the 70s, because that's a whole nother literature. But what I would say is that I have looked at trends in unhappiness since 2004, adults ages 18 to 55 in the US. And I can say that there's no question that increases in reports of unhappiness are higher among adults in their prime who are not married, and that the gap between the unmarrieds and the marrieds on this negative outcome for happiness has been growing since 2000.  

So I think it's quite plausible to say that part of the challenge facing adults today, both men and women, is they're less likely to be married and less likely to enjoy the fruits of a good marriage. It's important to note also here that when I look at what predicts global life satisfaction, a lot of Americans today think it's more about money or work or maybe even education, but there's just no question that the number one predictor of global happiness or global life satisfaction in the data that I see is a good marriage. 

And so, what we see is that couples who are happily married are just way more happy with their lives in general compared to both couples who are not happily married and people who are not married. When you report that finding, people would say, "Well, maybe it's just that happy folks end up being happily married and happy with life in general." 

And that's a legitimate, I think, pushback. But what that doesn't appreciate is that no other factor in the data that I've looked at predicts global life satisfaction like a happy marriage. So for instance, having a satisfying job is definitely a predictor of being happier with your life in general, but not nearly as powerful of a predictor as having a happy marriage. So I'm just trying to get people to understand and appreciate that our current cultures focus often on money and job and on education. And these markers of status, to some extent, often I think puts people on the wrong path, when they should be focusing more on family and friendship. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So the reason I asked you about if there was a gender difference there is that as far as I understand it, there's a liberal and a conservative, you might say, take on the pattern that I just described in Stevenson and Wolfer's data. And the liberal take is a combination of, well, it used to be that there were social norms against women complaining. And so maybe some of the change is survey bias in the older data. The other aspect of what you might call a liberal explanation is that as women have taken on more and more roles in the workplace, it's not necessarily clear that they've taken on less roles in the home. And so are they maybe just being squeezed in terms of their time and obligation?  

And then the more conservative, I would say, take on it is that as much as the way that those social roles were enforced was certainly in some ways restrictive and oppressive to women, there's also an element, again on average across a large group of people, of the social role of the mother figure that was really important to women's well-being in a way that wasn't appreciated. And then as a maybe necessary evil of the movement towards women's liberation was culturally downplayed, the importance of that role in the happiness of some women. What do you think of those two stories and is there any story there that I'm missing? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I think that there's no question that newer opportunities in education and work have been the source of real, added happiness for many women in the United States in recent decades. At the same time though, I think what we are suffering from is a lack of appreciation for how much being a spouse and parent can mean for people. And also, we don't accord enough status towards being a good spouse and a good parent as we can and should. And so people often feel like if they're investing a lot in their husband or their wife or their kids, especially as say, a stay-at-home mother for instance, that those investments are not given a lot of status in their peer groups, particularly if they're in more elite social networks.  

And so that I think means that people often invest less in their families than they might otherwise if there was a different status mix for family investments. And I think that that in turn is one reason why we have seen a decline in marriage and parenthood playing out in recent years. And that in turn is, I think, one reason why we're seeing more adults reporting that they're not too happy with their lives or that they're not completely satisfied with their lives. 

The other thing that I would say is that it's also the case, too, that conservative women are happier today than liberal women. Conservative men are as well, compared to liberal men. But it looks that the gap is bigger for women than for men, and that the gap is more about family status and satisfaction for women than it is for men. So, what that means concretely is that conservative women are happier with their lives than liberal women, and that's in part because they're more likely to be married, they're more likely to be satisfied with their family lives compared to liberal women. So certainly today at least, the family divide that separates conservative and liberal women is noteworthy and one of the big factors explaining why one group is happier and the other group is less happy with their lives. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, this gets at a tension within feminism that I think Christina Hoff Sommers describes as between freedom feminism and equity feminism. And it actually came up in a recent episode I recorded with Alice Evans, who's a scholar from the University College of London. And basically, the crux of it is, okay, so in the context that you were just describing, suppose that we achieved a society where people valued family more. There was more status given to caregiving social roles as a spouse and parent. We made it punishable for corporations to punish people for working part-time. I think it's probably reasonable to predict that all of those things would at least be very likely to contribute to a retreat of women in some aspects of economic and public life.  

So just to give some specific examples, I believe the Netherlands passed such a law where you couldn't punish people for working part-time and something like 60% of women now work part-time in the Netherlands. There was a study that I just saw today that showed that people who chose majors following the idea of following their passions had larger segregation by gender than people who didn't. And the authors of the study sort of framed this negatively as sort of, this is teaching people to follow their passions and is going to increase gender inequality in the sciences.  

And when I was talking to Alice Evans, one of the things that she said was that, "In the context of a culture of patriarchy," as she put it, "freedom can be an illusion," right?  

And so, she gave an example of it was pretty stark in India, I think, where there's extremely restrictive religious patriarchal norms. But I think she had a little bit of a harder time explaining it in the context of... I gave an example of a Western woman who had grown up, somebody I know, who had grown up in a very hardworking, two parent family of recent immigrants and didn't feel like she had a good relationship with her parents. And so for that reason, chose intentionally to stay at home with her children when they were little and doesn't see that as a choice that was imposed on her in any way. And if there was any pushback, it's been from feminists, "You're a bad feminist." 

But on the other hand, to steelman maybe what's the perspective that Alice Evans was discussing in our earlier episode, it is probably true that if this happened, right, that if we had more gender segregation in high paying occupations and disciplines, if we had more gender segregation in status and power seeking roles in government, that I think it would be reasonable to worry about a decline in women's influence in major societal decisions and major economic decisions. And so, it does seem like there's a real tension there. What do you think about that? Do you see that, too? And if so, how do you think we should think about resolving it? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I think we have obviously moved to a society where women are playing a large role in much of our public life and much of our commercial life, and obviously in many sectors that are now outperforming then, whether it's medicine or psychology for instance. So, I think we have to recognize that we're in a different place than we were in the 1970s when a lot of these concerns were first articulated.  

There are certain sectors of the economy that are dominated more by men, but often I think when you look at those sectors, you see that some of this interest is related to the difference between men and women's interests, sort of in persons versus things, as a sort of classic psychological distinction where men tend to gravitate towards things and women towards person related professions.  

One thing that's striking, too, is that the gender paradox we've seen play out in Scandinavia. It's sort of the more relatively affluent societies that give women a lot of options are ones where women actually tend to gravitate towards more person-centered professions. By contrast in Scandinavia, men tend to still focus more on things like engineering and the marketplace, and women tend to focus more on jobs with the government that are more person-centered.  

So, I think that's where Alice's perspective may not really be as... You don't need to talk about India, you can talk about Sweden and how this dynamic is playing out in Sweden. So, I think you have to basically grant this idea that there are some differences by sex in what women and men want to do both when it comes to work and when it comes to family, would be willing to sort of live with those differences rather than to deny them. And again, they're playing out in places like Sweden.  

  But in terms of just the family front, I do think it is the case that we see in the United States, for instance, that the most popular option for married moms today is to work part-time. And yet we don't have a culture in our businesses and our employers, not to mention in terms of law and benefits, that really reinforces that option for married moms. And so I think we should move more in the direction of the Netherlands to make this option more accessible to married moms. I think that would be good for their own welfare, their own emotional well-being, for their capacity to spend more time with their kids, and for the happiness and satisfaction of families across the US. It would mean a certain shift in their engagement with the workplace at that point in their lives. But I think that is fine so long as this is what the women in those contexts are wanting to do for themselves and their families. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Relatedly, what about... One of the things that I've heard from some of the women in my life is that there also needs to be more options for coming back after a long absence. So, there's some women who want to, and some men, who when they have young kids want to stay at home or they want to work part-time, but what about the ones who want to stay home for maybe 10 years while their children get through elementary school and then want to come back? Are there any models that you know of analogous to the Netherlands with part-time for facilitating that? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Again, I think trying to get companies and nonprofits and government agencies to be more open to bringing back stay-at-home parents is good. Although I think in this kind of labor market, there are plenty of nonprofits and businesses and government agencies that are willing to do that as long as the person has the requisite skills. But we can always do more, I think, to help on-ramps be strengthened for people coming back into the labor force from spending time at home.  

But then also thinking about policy changes, and I know that I think American Compass, for instance, has produced a report detailing some shifts in policy related to things like Social Security that would make it easier for people to step out of the workforce and then step back in without paying a big penalty when it comes to their benefits once they're retired. So there are some policy, I think, levers that can be pulled that would make it more financially attractive to take time off a full-time track to be at home with your kids or to work part-time so you can be with your kids more and yet not necessarily pay as big of a financial penalty in some of our public programs for doing so. 

 

MATT BURGESS: So, we're almost out of time. I want to make sure I ask you this, and this will be our last topic, and that is religion. So, religion has come up in a couple of different contexts related to this family issue. The first is civic cohesion. Religion undoubtedly is... It's clear in the data, as far as I understand, it has historically been a driver of civic cohesion, at least within the group. And certainly, that in the US it's the case that people who report regularly attending religious services, I believe, report higher civic trust and other kinds of measures of civic engagement. 

And then birth rates, there's a similar pattern. So, people who are part of religious communities have higher birth rates. One of the challenges that's facing 21st century rich societies is what to do about low birth rates and potentially declining populations in the economic problems that that causes. And I believe the only country that's considered rich that has a birthright above replacement is Saudi Arabia, where religion is obviously a factor there. 

The thing I wanted to ask you is basically that I see a tension between religion as a solution to birthrights and to civic cohesion and the ethic of the secular society. It seems to me that in America, we're quite comfortable with the idea of religious freedom for the most part. So, if individuals want to be part of a religious group, they should. They should have the freedom to do that. They should have the freedom to live by the norms of that group.  

But we're not very comfortable with blurring lines between church and state, right? So if we decided that religion has to be part of the solution to declining civic engagement and declining birth rates, I think a large segment of the country, frankly, myself included, would be quite uncomfortable with that. So I guess my question is if religion can't be a lever for... If religion continues to decline as a fraction of the population despite the higher birth rates, it seems like either that would have to change organically, or there'd have to be some kind of a coercive aspect to changing it, as we've seen dramatic examples of in places like Iran and Afghanistan, or we'd have to fill the roles in society that religion has filled in terms of providing civic support for the family and civic life with other things. 

Is there a fourth option I'm missing, and if so, what are the best and most realistic options there? Because it seems like the option of continuing to decline is somewhat dystopian, and I think to many people the option of state imposed religion is also quite dystopian. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: So, I think one thing that's important to just realize is that just as a factual matter, I think people often have the sense that religion is a pathological reality in today's world. So, I think part of the challenge, for young adults especially, is to realize that yes, there are the Duggers. There are Southern Baptist pastors. There are Catholic priests, and I'm Catholic, who have done horrible things and have really lived in ways that are profoundly evil and wrong. But that on average, people who are engaged in their own religious communities are more likely to be flourishing.  

So for instance, Gallup surveyed people on a variety of fronts across the pandemic, and the only group that really managed to maintain there a plumb across the pandemic were Americans who were regularly attending religious services in person across the pandemic. And happiness, there's no question, religious people are happier, more likely to get married, have kids stably married, they're less stressed out than other Americans. So, on a whole bunch of outcomes, the average religious person is doing better.  

So, I think it's important for people to recognize and appreciate that the generic religious congregation is a place where you can flourish. And so again, if you have a religious bone in your body or you're open to that, I think it's worth knowing that being a part of a community for yourself and your kids ends up being a pretty great thing. So, I think if we could, in a sense, do a better job of just conveying the truth about religion, that would be helpful in reshaping people's norms and practices.  

I'm not suggesting that a state establishment of a particular tradition or of religion in general would be very helpful. And I think we have to understand and appreciate that in Iran, for instance, they've had obviously state sanctioned faith since the Shah fell. And what's happened in Iran is that marriage and fertility are also actually going down pretty dramatically in recent years, and people are not likely to identify with or embrace a faith that is forced upon them. So, I don't think that's the solution. 

But I think there are ways in which we could increase this sphere of operation or the latitude that religious institutions have in our country in ways that would be, in my view, consistent with American traditions of religious freedom, but would give religious groups more functional authority in American life. And so, one obvious example is to really increase, as we are now, school choice measures across the US to give more religious schools, Catholic, evangelical, Muslim, Jewish, whatever, opportunities to get vouchers that they could use to educate the young in ways that are consistent with their own faith tradition and would also, I think, have the benefit of often stressing the value of marriage [inaudible] much more than we see currently in our public schools. That's a concrete example. You might not like the example, but it's one that's not having the state put the thumb on one faith, but it does give those institutions more latitude to exercise a key role in the cultural formation of the next generation. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, I try not to show my cards too much in some of these interviews, but school choice is actually an issue where I've changed my mind. So, I'm a Canadian. I moved here being pretty convinced by the public schools, public schools only kind of model. And I have to say for a number of reasons that I don't have time to get into in this episode, I've come around to the school choice position.  

I'm really glad that you made the distinction, which I think is really important between state-imposed religion, which many people see as pathological and just religion, which I totally agree is not pathological and certainly is associated with those good outcomes you say. Maybe as a last question, so the solutions that you offered, in some sense, I see as stop the bleeding kind of solutions. So, school choice might keep members of religious communities within the religious communities, but they're not going to probably bring too many new kids into the religious communities. Maybe, maybe not. But it seems like the intent is primarily to allow communities to practice their faith as opposed to grow their faith.  

So you talked earlier about how there's all these statistics that show that people who are in stable marriages and stable families are flourishing. And if we knew that, that would help convince people to make those choices more. That seems like a logically straightforward argument. I think with religion, the challenge is, is there's this middle step. So, you can show people the statistics that say that people who are members of religious communities are flourishing more, but then the middle step is that you have to adopt a specific set of beliefs which aren't directly necessarily the cause of that flourishing. Maybe indirectly they are.  

I imagine it being easier to go to somebody and say, "Married people do better. Kids in married families do better. You should get married." Versus, "People who go to religious services do better. They have more stable lives; therefore, you should believe a specific origin story about the planet." That's a little bit of a cartoon, a caricature of it, but that's what I'm getting at. What's your response to that? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: I think on the religion piece, I think that number one, I think it's important to note that religious people have more kids than secular people, and there's a pretty decent sized gap. I think if religious schools were more plentiful, it'd be easier for them to raise their kids up in their own traditions than it currently is. So, I think retention would be higher, is what I'm saying, if there were more religious schools, potentially. But the other thing I think to note about just sort of the appeal of plugging into a religious school or religious congregation is that I think there are plenty of folks who are on the fence. In my own church, my own local Catholic Church, there are plenty of folks who are not hardcore Catholics, but who show up on many a Sunday. They like the ritual, they like being together as a family. It's something to do on Sunday morning. I think that there are plenty of folks who, if they were given some moderate degree of encouragement, would be more likely to show up at a church or a synagogue or whatever else it might be.  

And the same thing is true for religious schools, particularly since COVID. We've had a lot of non-Catholic families come to our kids' Catholic school. The parents have been overwhelmed by how much more orderly it is, how much warmer it is, how much more effective it is in educating the kids than the public schools in our county. And I'm sure at the margins, the parents are more friendly towards the Catholic Church than they would've been before COVID, and the kids are a lot more friendly towards Catholicism, too. 

So I'm just saying, I think if you give churches and religious schools some greater latitude to operate, you'll have some number of people in the middle, sort of the cultural middle, who will be at some margin more likely to plug into a religious congregation or religious school and push their culture in a somewhat more religious direction. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I've seen that actually. A good friend of mine who's not Catholic, sent his kids recently to Catholic school, because he objected morally to what was going on in the public schools and thought that it would be easier to have a conversation with his kids about a religion that admits it's a religion than about a religion that doesn't admit it's a religion.  

So, kind of related to that, you talked about people... This is my last question, I promise. You talked about people with religious bones in their body. One story that I've heard among sociologists about what's going on with what people call, wokeness, or on the other side, what people call QAnon, is basically people who do have a religious bone in their body, who've abandoned religion for whatever reason, finding new versions of it. Is there any way, do you think, to bring some of those people back into the folds of traditional religions? 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Well, again, I think the QAnon point is actually more relevant here, because I think those people are more likely to be conservative in one way or another and might be persuaded to join an evangelical church. I'm not evangelical. So, I think the challenge there is just to give them opportunities to be engaged in one way or another, to be invited by friends, family members, acquaintances, and that might get them off the conspiratorial track that they would otherwise be heading down. But yeah, I don't have a magic wand here that would allow me to take care of the QAnon or the excessively woke people who I think are religiously committed to a hyper progressive view of the world or to a conspiratorial view of the world. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Well, we could talk about this for hours, but this is probably a good place to end. So thank you so much, Brad Wilcox, for being on the Free Mind Podcast and we'll see you around. 

  

BRAD WILCOX: Thanks, Matt. 

  

MATT BURGESS: The Free Mind Podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ. You can email us feedback at FreeMind@Colorado.edu or visit us online at Colorado.edu/Center/Benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all @BensonCenter. Our Instagram is @TheBensonCenter, and the Facebook is @BruceD.BensonCenter.