Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sre and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today we are recording our second ever in-person podcast, which is exciting, but also technical difficulties have been in sewing. So thank you for bearing with me today on October 23rd, 2024. I'm excited to welcome UVA Professor Brad Wilcox to the podcast, which is why we can record in person because we're both here. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. He is the university professor of sociology here and the director of the National Marriage Project. He's the author of Get Married, why Americans Should Defy the Elites, forage Strong Families and Save Civilization. Welcome to the podcast!

Brad Wilcox 

Great to be here with you, Juliette.

Juliette Sellgren 

My first question for you is more general and that is what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

Brad Wilcox (1:23)

So I think the most important thing that you should know that you don't is that friendships and family relationships are a lot more important for your sense of meaning, purpose, and happiness than what I call the Midas mindset. Focusing on education, building your own brand, especially on your career. And I just hear from a lot of students, not everyone, but a lot of students today at UVA, messages that kind of suggest to me that the most important thing that they have in their framework there are short term, medium term, even long-term kind of life agenda is revolving around work. And I think that's a mistake.

Juliette Sellgren (2:01)

I agree. I was actually thinking about this a lot as I was going back and forth between reading and listening to your book over the weekend because you do mention quite a few times in the book conversations you had with UVA students and as I was listening, reading, I was wondering if it was just us because I don't think it is, but I think there's something specific about the UVA atmosphere. It might be just the college atmosphere, but I'm not anywhere else, so I don't really know. I've been talking to my sister and other people who are just coming in and settling into the university or who have left. And there's something about the institution maybe here, or in general that is very specific. It has almost an anti-marriage attitude because it's so work focused and in part that's the point of the university. But also the university talks about how it's supposed to be an institution where you can become an adult and become yourself and be creative and experiment and all of that. So it shouldn't be anti-marriage or social institutions. Does that have to do, does that have to be the case and is that the case everywhere?

Brad Wilcox (3:17)

So I think we have seen data from the Pew research nonprofit telling us in recent years that more and more Americans think that education is the most important thing for their fulfillment, for their happiness or meaning in life. And we're seeing naive, even parents are prioritizing their own children's education and career over their children's family future. I think it's a bit shortsighted to be frank. So again, this kind of mindset is capturing I think the hearts and minds of a large share of the American population, even a decent share of parents. And we do see, for instance, in one Pew poll, about 70% of Americans think that work is very important to having a fulfilling life. And by contrast, only about a quarter would kind of attribute marriage as being very important for a fulfilling life. So that's just one data point that illustrates the broader trends that I see playing out both here at UVA in particular and in the broader society as well.

Juliette Sellgren (4:22)

I think we have to back up a few steps before we keep going down that line of thought. What are the core beliefs that we have as Americans? And this might not be consistent across different income groups and racial groups, et cetera, towards marriage and life values and goals, and how might those contradict to what is actually borne out in our behaviors? Are there some of the statement beliefs that are held which might be leading us down the wrong path?

Brad Wilcox (4:54)

I mean, there are a couple of different cultural values that I think have a lot of purchase in American life today. One thing that we see is something's called expressive individualism. Kind of this idea that what I personally desire for myself is an extremely important load star for me would be one idea, what makes me seem to feel good in the moment oftentimes as well. Another idea is what we call either careerism or work is this idea that one's work is the source and summit of one's life, kind of the lodestar again of one's life. I think too, there's also a way in which there's a certain kind of hedonism that makes its way into people's thinking as well. Especially in your twenties. You want to have fun, you want to travel, you want to have interesting and new experiences. You want to have a nice Sunday brunch, nice meals, nice restaurants, things that make you feel good again in just sort a relatively simple, pleasurable kind of way, a kind of hedonistic way.

And so when you take these different sets of values, the focus on the individual, the focus on work, the focus on having these experiences that are pleasurable and you put them together kind of makes I think the sacrifices and the risks and uncertainties associated with dating and especially with marriage and even more so with parenthood kind of less appealing, especially kind of in a short-term way. And what I think people are failing to see is that most of the things that we actually take a lot of meaning and satisfaction from a more long-term perspective do require some degree of sacrifice, some degree of suffering. And we actually derive often meaning from things that are hard for us to do. So if you're thinking about just one concrete example is you can kind of drive up any number of 14,000 foot peaks in the Rockies and you can hike up those 14,000 foot peaks in the Rockies as well oftentimes.

And I think for most of us you are going to get the same view from driving and hiking at least at the top, but the experience of hiking up a 14 footer in the Rockies is much more meaningful, I think satisfying than the experience of driving up one of those Rockies. And so I think understanding that family life is kind of hiking up a 14,000 footer, it is sacrificial, it is hard, there's a lot of suffering at times involved, but the experience you have of both meaning and satisfaction once you've reached that peak or those peak moments as a parent and as a spouse, I think is without parallel. And that's where I think a lot of young adults today are missing. It's just the way in which this experience of marriage and family life is, yes, hard, but it's also incredibly meaningful and has many moments of being deeply satisfied or joyful.

Juliette Sellgren (7:55)

So I love that analogy. When did we as Americans just historically move from making that choice, whether it was an individual choice or a cultural norm to walk up those mountains? When did we stop walking up the mountains and start driving instead? If you can say that and why?

Brad Wilcox (8:26)

Well, when it comes to sort of marriage and fertility, the story is a bit different. So when it comes to marriage, you see a really consistent decline basically in the marriage rates since the 1970s when it comes to fertility, it's kind of ebbed and flowed in recent decades. There was a decline in fertility in the 1970s, then it went back up in much of the eighties, nineties and early two thousands. And it's fertility has fallen consistently since the Great Recession began, basically. And a lot of us who kind of tracked fertility thought that it would kind of increase once the economy recovered in the wake of the great Recession, but it did not. And so I think part of what's happening is that since the seventies there has been this increase in what we sociologists call expressive individualism, this kind of focus on doing things that I want to do as an individual.

And there's been a devaluation of what we call familyism [?], kind of prioritizing your spouse, having children, your kin kind of family life more generally in our society. But I think what's also new since about 2010 is just the incredibly important role that social media and smartphones more generally have played in our lives and have kind of made both socializing and then also dating. And then I think even marriage and childbearing kind of less salient or less common, if you will, in a culture that's more likely to be distracted by what I call the electronic opiates that have become incredibly powerful forces in our daily lives today. And again, they do tend to kind of pull us away from in-person interactions and relationships in ways that lead to, again, less dating, less meetingless marriage and less childbearing as well.

Juliette Sellgren (10:23)

So a key part of the title of your book, other than the Get Married part, which is out there for today's cultural narrative, is the Defy the Elites part. Who are the elites in this context? And does the narrative of expressive individualism and the benefits of getting married and childbearing, is that narrative perpetuated by the elites and how does it affect elites versus everybody else, the non elites?

Brad Wilcox (10:54)

Right. So I think when I'm thinking about elites, I'm thinking about the Americans who kind of control the commanding heights of the culture, especially and thinking about people in journalism and the academy, people who are making decisions about the pop culture in Southern California and now gaming and other kinds of platforms too that are influential in Silicon Valley as well. And I think the mistake that they often make is assuming that a kind of more individualistic approach to life is better than a istic approach to life. I think another mistake that they make is assuming that every mark of progress, every change that happens in our society is necessarily good and that we should be dismissive of the tradition, especially family traditions that have shaped our common life for generations oftentimes. And so I think it's sort of like this kneejerk progressivism and kneejerk individualism that often blinds them to the value of family goods like marriage and parenthood, and even a lot of the traditions that have kind of built up over generations that we actually still know today are helpful to us.

So one concrete example on the tradition point is that if you look at financial professionals and the advice that they give couples, and you look at gurus in finance like Suze Orman, they won't recommend to couples that they should have separate accounts like his account and hers account for instance. And I kind of look at this through a prism of a more individualistic way of thinking about approaching marriage and family life and also a more progressive, obviously way too rejecting traditions where people would pool their resources once they got married. And yet we see empirically that couples who pool their resources, pool their accounts do better in their marriages than those who do not. And what's striking is we now have even experimental evidence from a new study in Indiana University where they randomly assign couples to pooled accounts, separate accounts or accounts where they were to kind of do as they pleased, and the couples who were randomly assigned to joint accounts did markedly better in their marriages in the first two years of marriage than couples who were assigned to other strategies.

It kind of just tells us that a we first team oriented approach to marriage, which is again, more formalistic, more collective, more traditional is more successful than the more progressive, the more individualistic model that's often held up as the way that couples should do things today. So that's just one example of how our leads are often I think conveying messages that are not helpful and not truthful. I should say too, one other point in terms of what elites I think do wrong is they embrace what's called in my telling the family diversity theory, which is kind of this idea that every family form is equally valuable. And so it doesn't matter if your parents are cohabiting or married or if you part of a stepfamily or a single parent family or what have you. And that family diversity theory, which a lot of elites would subscribe to today or at least give the tip of a hat to, does not correspond again to the truth, which is that kids are more likely to thrive when they're raised by stably married parents in a home. That then tends to have more financial resources and more parental attention, more consistent discipline and kind of deeper ties between the parents and the kids in that household as well. So those are some examples of the way in which elites are often kind of, I think buying into and then propagating messages that are not especially helpful for both kids and adults today.

Juliette Sellgren (14:48)

So would you consider students at UVA or students at most universities, I guess as elites, they might not be the ones driving the culture, but they're the ones fitting into the cultural narrative, and if they're not the ones driving it, they're gearing up to take over. There are these narratives of influence and you can be the change, that sort of thing.

Brad Wilcox (15:14)

Yeah, so I think many of the students are coming from relatively elite families, families where there's a substantial degree of income and education and then influence in their parents' sphere. And again, they could be in education, in journalism, even now corporate America is obviously kind of big cultural footprint as well. So they're coming from elite families oftentimes, and they're kind of on track to being elites themselves once they move into their own professions.

Juliette Sellgren (15:51)

And I'm guessing, I guess that the focus on work at the university not only aggravates that, but it's kind of like a catalyst. Of course, you're going to fall into the narrative of the elites. That's how you get into the elites. They're the ones in the universities or who hire outside of universities, maybe, that sort of thing. So the way you get there is through the work you do when you're at the university and the connections you make while you're there, the elites you are surrounded by. Are there other ways to get into these elites or is it really tied to your job and your economic status as an individual?

Brad Wilcox (16:39)

Yeah, I see it primarily in terms of work. I'm pretty particular kinds of jobs give adults the ability, the power, the authority to kind of shape the culture, shape the policy context, and then shape the economic character of our society today. And so it's primarily through work that one would be an elite in this context today.

Juliette Sellgren (17:07)

So the reason I'm asking about this is because I've been thinking about something related to this in our conversation and young people, relationships, marital norms, stuff like that a lot. And I'm kind of wondering how it relates. So let's start with a case example. My sister lives with her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend basically lives with them even though he has his own apartment elsewhere. I don't know if this is historically new or anything, but I found it kind of weird that unmarried maybe, obviously because they're second years and they're literally 19 year olds, people and in relationships are living together and they're doing kind of this resource sharing thing. They have dinner together every night, they divide up the chores, kind of like what you would do with your roommates, but with a significant other. If you could call the person you've been in a relationship for six months, a significant other.

I'll stop being snarky now. So one of the main arguments that I think of when I think of why you would live with someone regardless of the marriage stuff is an economic one. It's about resource sharing. It's cheaper to live with other people and you can again, divvy up the chores, stuff like that. And so it's convenient to pool resources. And yet my sister's roommate's, boyfriend Mouthful, is paying for a thousand dollars plus a month in rent elsewhere, basically his insurance, because how are you supposed to know if your six month old relationship is going to survive? And I mean given that you're 19 olds are it. So I thought it was kind of odd, but obviously it would be worse to go into that sort of arrangement without insurance. A lot of young people and people around me seem to be acting together in their relationships or if they even d to call it a relationship sometimes, like to act as though they're married when they're keeping their resources separate and they're maintaining their status as individuals along the economic front while they're living with someone and treating them as though they're married, the way they talk to each other, the way that they live together.

So it's kind of like they're trying to have it all and either I think that behavior carries over once you're married, right? That you keep yourself separate, you're individual and you're married and you keep all those parts of yourself separate or it prevents you from being able to see the possible gains that marriage can then provide because you already have it all without having to pay for a wedding, commit to someone for life, that sort of thing, if that's even what marriage means nowadays. And so I kind of feel like there's a positive feedback loop into this narrative that marriage is just living together and therefore that maybe there's nothing to gain when you could just live together without being married. So I don't really know what to make of this. Is it a new phenomenon and is it actually a phenomenon that extends past the bubble that I see in front of me at UVA in northern Virginia of young people who don't intend to get married, don't intend to stay with each other, aren't really meaningfully committed in any sort of way, and don't necessarily talk about planning for that act as though they are without kind of the costs associated with it?

Brad Wilcox (20:42)

Yeah, so I think one of the challenges of cohabitation is that it is an alternative to marriage today that many young adults and many middle aged and older adults now kind of enter into. And on the one hand, they kind of think of it as the same thing as marriage or as leading to marriage. And yet because it is less committed, there's no legal framework, typically, there isn't the same kind of cultural meaning that's both for a couple and for their family and friends. It doesn't enjoy the same kinds of actual commitment features that marriage enjoys. And so people think it's kind of the same thing. It's kind of a good way to test their relationship for marriage. And yet what we see from the data is there's no evidence that cohabiting increases your quality of marriage or stability of marriage. And there's actually pretty good evidence that people who cohabit with a number of partners or cohabit prior to an engagement do worse if they go on to get married.

So it's kind of from the perspective of marriage, not a great option, but from the perspective of a young adult who's looking for a convenient option to spend time with their romantic partner looks very attractive. But again, it's one of those things where there are some developments in the contemporary culture that have some kind of short-term appeal and a logic that makes sense today, and yet kind of their longer term consequence, both for particular couples and for the broader society is I think much more ambiguous. And the most, I think important point to make though about cavitation we haven't yet touched on is just that for kids it's not a good deal, it's just much less stable. There's more violence, there's more infidelity. And having kind of a lower commitment option, obviously to have a family if you will for kids is not great. And so we do see that kids in collaborating relationships, and there are many of them now today, about 40% of kids will experience some kind of time in a cohabiting relationship, either of their own bio parents or their parent, usually mom and someone else. This more lower commitment arrangement does not tend to work out very well for children. So that's also kind of a point worth mentioning on this score too.

Juliette Sellgren (22:52)

Yeah, I wanted to get into that, but it reminds me a lot when you said convenient- that it doesn't sound like hard work or an investment. It sounds like low commitment. That's what it means. A lot of these college students don't intend to move on that far into their relationships. And that's an odd notion to me. In my roommates in particular, almost all of us have European moms, either French or Russian, who are relatively strict on this front. And from the beginning, from day one have told us that that was the stupidest idea you could ever have. Now, whether that is fully what it is, right? There are probably definitely stupider ideas out there, but that was just the baseline. That was just the expectation. There's a culture for us for it to be off the table. And so when we look at other people who do this kind of living together thing where they're not even planning to pursue a long-term relationship, we think, what on earth are you doing?

And we acknowledge that the pooling of resources can be convenient, but a lot of the time they just aren't doing that. And even if you are, it kind of means you're treating relationships that come before the same way that you would treat relationships that are marriage worthy, which kind of changes things, changes the way you might view marriage. So even if it does work out, you indicated that doesn't work out most of the time, but what are actually, since we haven't run through it yet, the benefits of marriage and childbearing within marriage instead of out of marriage. So what are the benefits simply of being married and then add children into the equation?

Brad Wilcox (24:41)

So when you look at kind of the recent discourse on marriage, what you see oftentimes is that there are voices, Juliet on the left and now voices on the right who are kind of discounting marriage. And so there was a piece in the New York Times not too long ago that said that sort of married heterosexual motherhood in America is a game that no one wins. So basically telling women that emotionally marriage, psychically marriage is and motherhood are not great deals for women today. And then now of course, we're getting a message from parts of the right. Andrew Tate is telling us, for instance, the online male influencer, he is telling us that there's zero statistical advantage for men when it comes to marriage. And so we're hearing that marriage in a sense is a path to misery and a misery from different parts of our culture for women from the left, for men from the red pill.

And yet we see in the data though is kind of the exact opposite story, is that on average women, for instance, who are married are 85% less, 80% less likely going to be poor, and men are 55% less likely going to be poor. I mean controlling for things like education and other factors that would confound that relationship. And then we see also too when it comes to assets that stably married women and men in their fifties about 10 times the assets as their never married peers do. So there's just those kind of financial patterns we see too on the happiness front that married women and men are almost twice as likely going to be very happy with their lives compared to their single peers and that no group of Americans are happier and their prime age to eight to 55, then married fathers and married mothers. So marriage and parented often have a bad public reputation, both financially I think and emotionally. And yet what's I think striking about the data is that actually women and men who are married are more likely to be flourishing both financially and emotionally. And so I think the challenge is how do we kind of communicate the good news about marriage and family to a rising generation who often don't hear that message in the current culture.

Juliette Sellgren (27:09)

Before I move on to tackling the narrative problem, I want to talk more about the financial aspect of it. A while ago, Melissa Kearney came and talked about the economic factors of families which impact a child's potential economic status in the future. The most striking thing that she said was actually quite simple, that two is better than one super easy. Two means that there is more time and more income and more love and more everything than from one parent. And this can be extended to basically anything. Two is almost always better than one. So when you're talking about these statistics of married couples with parents versus their unmarried counterparts, when you say that married women with children are less likely to be in poverty than their unmarried counterparts, is that a function of having more time and more resources because you're in a pair or is it because of their individual resources?

Brad Wilcox (28:03)

Yeah, Matt Bruenig, for instance, is a progressive policy advocate, and he's critical of the kinds of arguments that I'm making with you on this podcast. And he would say that marriage doesn't make people prosperous, prosperous people get married is sort of his basic point. And there certainly mean there's truth to that in terms of, we've seen unfortunately in the last five decades, marriage has become a lot more selective for things like education and income. So again, he would just say, you're just taking people who already succeeded basically, or already on the path to success and they're just merging their lives and they're benefiting from both being reasonably successful. And I don't deny that there's truth to that sort of selection account that Matt Bruenig wants to make, but what I think he doesn't appreciate is that the institution of marriage per se, also adds an additional value to people's lives financially.

We see, for instance, a twin study in Minnesota looking at twin guys who are married compared to their twin brothers who are not married, and they're making 26% more money than their twin brothers who are not married. So they've got the same basic biological background, the same environment growing up. And yet in part I would argue because of the institutional norms and expectations and practices associated with marriage, guys who get married, they work more hours, they're less likely to be fired, they move more prudentially through a labor force. They value money more than guys who are not married as one consideration in their work. We know too that family instability is incredibly expensive, both for folks who get divorced and for folks who have kids outside marriage and then separate. So you've got two households to support. You've got to often pay child support if you're not a resident parent, usually the father, if you're a single parent residing with your kids, usually a single mother, you don't have that income from the other parent coming right into your household.

You move more between houses and apartments if you're divorced or never married and separated. And so the folks who kind of like Matt Bruenig can make this argument selection really don't account for the way in which two family instability ends up being incredibly expensive for both single parents and for non-resident parents as well in ways that kind of degrade their financial wellbeing. I mean, I was talking to one father for the book, for instance, who had three sets of kids with three different women, and every paycheck a substantial share of his paycheck is deducted to care for financially care for this other kids. And that's a real big drag on his finances. And you can sort of make any judgment you wish about his situation. But just the point is that kind of departures from stable marriage, especially when it comes to kids and up being financially a real disadvantage for both men and women.

And that's not often acknowledged in this sort of some parts of this conversation about the financial benefits of marriage. So just combining your resources, combining having a division of labor of some sort. As married couples tend to do all these things just make on average the financial side of things much better. And they have. I think it's also important to note it's not just that marriage matters financially. I think it probably matters more than ever. And so my own work, for instance with Wendy Wang, my colleague Dr. Wendy Wang, shows that the financial premium associated with marriage in terms of household income is larger now in 2024 than it was markedly larger than it was in 1970. It's in part because of course women are more likely to be working, but again, the argument that someone on the left want to make that marriage doesn't really matter if financially just does not fit the facts, is sort of the bottom line here. And probably fits the facts even less today, ironically, in a more progressive moment than it did in 1970 when women were less likely to work outside the home.

Juliette Sellgren (32:05)

So on the happiness side of things, something that I've been really struggling with just in the general discourse about happiness, but also when it comes to looking at happiness about marriage and what makes you happy, I'm wondering if when we talk about happiness in this context, does it mean the same thing as contentment and satisfaction or are there different measures for those types of things or colloquially, when we're talking about them, even when we're talking about research, is it all the same thing?

Brad Wilcox (32:37)

Sure. I mean, I think you can of think about happiness and satisfaction as maybe measuring or tapping somewhat different kinds of things or contentment even as well. But certainly in terms of the research, there's no question that married Americans report more happiness and more satisfaction than their single peers. And there are other kind of variables too, like income and religious attendance. They're also linked to reports of greater happiness and greater satisfaction. So there's just something about both resources, financial resources, but also about, I would say relationships and community that do link correlate. I think probably cause in some important ways, these outcomes, these reports of satisfaction or happiness. And the way I think about this in part too is just shaped by this idea that Aristotle articulated, which is that we are social animals, and so we're more likely to be thriving when we have good friendships and good family relationships. And for many of us, our marriage is the most important of those, especially men is the marriage. That's the most important thing for us. Yeah,

Juliette Sellgren 

It's like the Harvard happiness study about the people you're close to is the best indicator of whether or not you’re right.

Brad Wilcox (33:55)

They looked at people in their eighties and they were looking initially at men, especially the guys who, and this is guys who were from Harvard, also guys who were in more lower income backgrounds too, in I think the Boston area who had those strong, and they talk about relationships in the Harvard study, but it's basically marriages. Those guys were, if they had strong marriages and good friendships across the life course, they were just in much better place both physically and emotionally in their eighties than the guys who did not have those relationships.

Juliette Sellgren (34:25)

And then I guess as someone interested in research and economics, when I see studies in economics, I'm always skeptical of surveys because of revealed preferences. This idea we have in economics that we look at facts and behavior and not just the opinions of what you think about yourself or your status or whatever it is that you have an opinion on, even if it's an opinion about your behavior, you might be misperceiving the way you actually act. Obviously, in a certain sense, that's all we have in terms of studying marriage, but how do you grapple with that?

Brad Wilcox (35:02)

Yes and no, right? And we also have mortality data, Juliette, and so we just know that. So you could say, I'm really happy today, but if I commit suicide tomorrow, it's probably suggests there's some disconnect between my report to some kind of survey firm that I'm really happy with my actual underlying mental state. And so we do know today that there is a very strong connection between what are called deaths of despair in terms of suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol poisonings, and marriage. So Jonathan Rothwell at Brookings in Gallup did a recent piece of research for us in the family studies just looking at regions and patterns of deaths of despair, and found that yes, things like race, and I think education and poverty were correlated, linked, associated with deaths of despair at the regional level. But the number one factor he found in his models was the share of adults who were married in a region that was protective against death of despair.

Other scholars have found similar patterns on this topic as well. And there's just a broader body research on suicide and mortality as well that just shows that married folks are less likely to die at an earlier level, an earlier age, or to commit suicide if they're married. Oh, it's interesting. For men, it seems like the effect is a bit stronger for women. There's also an effect. But for women, we'll see that motherhood is protective against suicide for men more powerfully than fatherhood is for men. So I think on the suicide outcome looks like marriage matters more for men, and parenthood matters more for women. But I would just think about this in terms of, again, this kind of idea that we're social animals and having these deep and profound ties to others, be they our spouse or our children, for most of us as productive, not just in terms of our emotional wellbeing, but even our risk of suicide or dying, some other kind of early death.

Juliette Sellgren (37:00)

So lifelong satisfaction shown in basically the probability that you're not going to die and your choice to stay alive if you can. Even if you don't control that, it seems that it's influenced by whether or not you're married. Then happiness is kind of a side benefit, something that we measure, but not really the most important thing. Happiness is really something that we want for people, but it falls into place after you're surviving. And if you're married, maybe it is that you have more of your place in the universe.

Brad Wilcox (37:37)

So we could talk about different outcome, we talk about meaning. So I think we'd also acknowledge that even when life is difficult and challenging and you're suffering, maybe you're sick, maybe you're depressed, maybe other things are going badly in your life, but if your life is still meaningful, if you have the sense that you're here for a purpose, there's a plan that can be, I think, really viable too for people. And we do see, again that people who are married and people who are parents report more meaningful lives than their peers who aren't married and don't have children. So again, there's the sense that there's someone out there who is concerned about me, and there are people who depend upon me. I've got a spouse, I've got kids. And so I'm living not just for myself, but for something larger than myself. And I think for many of us, that sense of having people in our lives that are more important is incredibly important in terms of giving us a sense of meaning.

Juliette Sellgren (38:35)

Something that keeps circling in my mind is the idea that all of these benefits of marriage that we've been talking about are contrary to the narrative that elites push. And yet there's that statistic that elites do not in fact get married at lower rates and that they're consistently having children within marriage and that they are getting married so their children get all these benefits, economic, social, otherwise. Is there a reason why this doesn't hold for elites, and how does the narrative hurt non elites?

Brad Wilcox (39:10)

So yeah, I talk about how our elites talk left and walk right off of times when it comes to marriage family. So they would sort publicly discount the importance of marriage or just not talk about it in their professional capacities oftentimes, or they would kind of embrace this idea of complete gender fluidity or flexibility, for instance, when it comes to sort of work and family arrangements. And yet when you actually look at their families, they're much more, what I would say describe as neotraditional than working class and poor families are oftentimes. And so I think what's happening here is that in part, elites implicitly have some kind of practical understanding of the way in which they and their kids and their partner benefit from marriage and from, again, kind of a Neo-Traditional model of family life where at least the husband is employed typically full-time and earning a good income, and things wrap around that economic reality in one way or another.

And so again, which is striking is if you look at upper middle class families, you find that they're typically stably married. The husband is typically employed full time, typically earning at least half, roughly speaking or the majority of the income. And so in that way, they kind of look right or Neo-Traditional walking, right? But then when they talk about gender, when they talk about family diversity, they're talking left oftentimes, and you see this in the academy, you see it in journalism, you see it in the professional world and in the business world as well. And that's, I think, an unfortunate irony because they're not giving voice to ideas about the value of marriage, the value of sticking it out, the value of having your kids in marriage, in their capacities as CEOs or as school superintendents or as New York Times journalists or as college professors.

And they're not telling their different audiences or Hollywood producers. They're not sharing that wisdom, that insight with their various constituencies. And so a lot of working class, middle class and poor Americans are not getting the message, for instance, that marriage matters and civil family survival for them and for their kids. And I think that's partly why working class and poor couples are less likely to have their kids in marriage and less likely to stay married because they're not getting a number of cultural messages, touchpoints, norms that would steer them in a more marriage and family friendly direction.

Juliette Sellgren (41:52)

So when we talk about the narrative and the norms around this stuff, I think about how my mom said to me that there's nothing like having a first child to change the way that you feel about having children and life and the decisions that you make going forward. There's a biological element to this, but there's also a spiritual, religious and practical element of this. We see that when women have children, there's something that changes within them and their brains reorient towards this new life, they restructure a bit, kind of like when you're growing up, that's what's happening in your brain. So when we talk about the importance of marriage and children, it feels like there's almost this language barrier between people who have children and those who don't, that there's a difficulty communicating this idea. Do you see that as being true? And how do we get around that?

Brad Wilcox (42:47)

I think it is a barrier, and I think it's why communities that tend to value childbearing and expose their adolescents and adults to infants and toddlers on a more regular basis have less difficulty with making family life appealing and attractive. And so I just think unfortunately, a lot of teenagers, young adults today, both female and male, just are not exposed on a regular basis to babies or toddlers or young kids. And I would say it leaves them impoverished. I mean, I have a daughter who is 13 and very athletic and very social and mischievous, and I've just been amazed though, to see her with an infant or a toddler. She's an completely different person. I mean, she's just so happy and devoted when she's babysitting for families in our social network or just caring for them in some kind of social context, like a family party of once or another.

And so it's been revelatory for me to see my daughter in a very different light with. So I just think, unfortunately today a lot of our teenagers and young adults don't have that experience on their basis. And so I think it makes it even harder for them to imagine as they move into their twenties, what would mean to become a father? What do we mean to become a mother? Because they just don't experience babies and toddlers in their own social world. So again, I think becoming a mother, becoming a father is a transformative experience, but you can't fully anticipate. But I think in this world where people are often kind of separated out from children, especially like UVA, you rarely see babies or toddlers running around this, we call it the grounds or our campus. And I just think that's sad, really, because when you do see young adults interacting with babies and toddlers, often it's just an incredibly generative experience for them.

Juliette Sellgren (44:46)

I remember the first time I went home after college and was immersed into a world with multiple generations living all in the same place, and I was shocked. I saw a toddler for the first time in months and a grandmother and young parents with their child in a stroller walking down the street, and I realized I wasn't on the UVA corner anymore. It had been a long, long time since I had seen life different from professors walking with their grad students or gaggles of college girls going out at night. If you could impart on this specific topic, kind of one specific piece of advice or wisdom that we could act on as college students to try to counteract the negative externality that of being so isolated from other generations and other types of lifestyles, what would you say?

Brad Wilcox (45:37)

I think the main thing I would say is that you should devote as much attention to dating and thinking about marriage as you do towards your career and your education. And so I had an RA last year who I asked him what's his plan career wise, and he had a very detailed plan for the next decade of his life in terms of graduate school and work and where he wanted to go and do this and that kind of thing. And then asked him, well, would you like to get married? He is, oh yeah, I'd love to get married, and what's of your dating plan? Complete silence. So I think just encouraging both young women and young men to be as intentional about dating and not just dating, but also kind of putting themselves in the context. Even if you're religious, it means going to church if you're not, it means volunteering in young adult, I mean nonprofits where young adults are heavily represented or saying yes to that Christmas party that you're kind of inclined to skip at the workplace or in your nonprofit at UVA, for instance. So just putting yourself into social context where you're likely to meet people who might be good prospects for dating and just to be open to for even if the first date isn't incredibly inspiring, if there's some possibility, they're kind of giving it a chance and recognizing that marriage basically, and starting a family down the road is probably for most of us, more important than anything we do with the degree on our wall or the career that we pursue after graduating from college.

Juliette Sellgren (47:24)

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge and wisdom with us from your pursuit of this topic. I mean, I guess multiple pursuits because being a father must be just as informative in some ways as being a professor and doing research and teaching. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Brad Wilcox (47:50)

So Juliette, actually, I was a pretty progressive minded young man at UVA, so I've kind of changed my views on a lot of different things since leaving the university and then going on to become a professor and husband and father, I guess. I think just one thing that I've really changed my perspective on is just sort of the value of tradition. Obviously, a lot of people in our worlds today would kind of discount the value of tradition. Again, want to embrace a kind of progressive worldview and kind of embrace every new thing that comes down the cultural pike, so to speak. And they don't appreciate the way in which, again, not every tradition, but many of our traditions have emerged over the course of decades or centuries to actually facilitate human flourishing. And so I certainly think about a lot of the customs around marriage and family life as ones including celebrating holidays in certain ways as things that actually lead to human flourishing. And the people who don't have the sort of rich rituals, customs, holidays, to kind of anchor and guide their lives or living lives that are just unfortunately markedly more well, less meaningful, we'll put it that way. And so I think just appreciating an Ian fashion referring, obviously, Burke, the way in which, again, many but not all of our traditions actually were down to human flourishing, not to some kind of oppression or sort of needless loss of authentic freedom.

Juliette Sellgren (49:43)

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.