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Christina: Well, I guess one thing I wanted to ask you is suppose someone said, "Look,
what's really happening here is that there are people who get married and they have a
stability gene and they pass that along to their kids, so what you're really seeing isn't
the benefit of marriage. It's the benefit of a certain kind of biological inherit..."
What do you say to that? Brad: I think that it's certainly the case that some of the findings
that we've been seeing with regards to family structure are really artifacts of some kind
of genetic thing. So if the mom had a risk for depression and then she ended up getting
divorced, probably because she was more likely to be depressed, and her daughter is depressed.
You might think that divorce causes depression when really there was some kind of genetic
risk that was passed from mother to daughter in that sense. And that seems to be part of
the story in the family structure findings. But there is a lot more work being done today
by people like Bob Emery at UVA and his colleagues with twins. And so they were able to look
at adult twins where both of the twins are getting married and then they track their
kids and see of those adult twins who gets divorced and how their kids turn out. And
they can figure out from that design that some of the effects that we're talking about
today are related to genes and some of them in fact are a consequence, it looks like based
upon these models, of the environmental effect of divorce on kids. Christina: If you had
to choose one study that you've either done or looked at that would really show people
that this matters and it's not just easily explained away that stable families with the
parents...can you cite one or... Brad: I think a good paper that reviews a lot of this evidence
in a very powerful way is by Sara McLanahan, my mentor at Princeton and some of her colleagues.
It's a review piece on the causal effects of father absence for children. So it looks
at a variety of studies and tries to assess how much of the impact of having a father
absent from the home is having a causal impact on kids and how much of the parent outcomes
might be related to some other factors that more sophisticated models are addressing.
So that's a good, I think, article to give to some of those a little bit skeptical about
all this. Christina: I saw the other day after Prince died, they were doing little bios and
he'd been interviewed, and he told a story that his father had been a musician but he
wouldn't let little three-year-old, four-year-old Prince play the piano. And then he left, he
abandoned them, and the piano was there. And the mother let him play, and apparently the
reason the father wouldn't let him play was he said, "You're not good enough, you can't
do it." So he wasn't particularly nice to him, then he abandoned him, and Prince became
obsessed with this piano, of course, became one of the great rock musicians of all time.
And I found that story so poignant because it was clear and made me want to cry as a
mother that he had this heartbreak. He had this, I don't know, people who've been abandoned
by their fathers described just this empty space inside. You could see that in him, but
you could also see what we were talking about, that he's amazing. What it did is it just
turned him to this superachiever. That’s not normal, but it was an example of a kid
how much hurt he is in his case. Brad: And how some kids are...obviously Barack Obama
is the child of a single mother. Christina: We have Barack Obama. We have Bill Clinton.
We have George Washington. Brad: Right, so I mean, again, the point is... Christina:
I think Aristotle and Plato lost their fathers. Brad: So it can be a springboard for some
to fight harder and do better, but I'm just saying on average...so we're talking about
individuals but also we're talking too about neighborhoods and communities and how...so
the story goes much... Christina: That's what I say. Brad: ...much more straightforward.
And so, when you have communities with lots of absent fathers, the work of Raj Chetty
at Stanford, the economist there at Stanford, he's moved from Harvard to Stanford, suggests
that communities that have more single-parent families have less mobility for poor kids.
So poor kids growing up in the Atlanta Metro area, for instance, are less likely to get
to the upper class as adults, whereas kids who are being raised in Salt Lake City Metro
are very much more likely to go up in the upper class as adults. And one reason that's
the case is that they're more two-parent families in the mix in the Salt Lake City Metro area
than there are in the Atlanta Metro area. And so, having... Christina: And you're controlling
for... Brad: He's controlling for other factors. It's not the only factor, again, but it's
just one factor that he has noticed in his work on these patterns of mobility for poor
kids that is, I think, quite suggestive. Or we can think of the work of Robert Sampson.
He's a Harvard sociologist and he has shown that one of the best predictors of violence
at the community level is the share of single-parent families in the community. So again, if you're
concerned about public safety, if you're concerned about lack of mobility for poor kids, and
you think about how the village is constituted and...it takes a village to raise a child
and I think that's true. But the point from this evidence, I think, is that a married
village is more likely to help kids to rise. Christina: And I worry about young men in
my research on boys who may live in a fatherless home and then goes to school, where all the
teachers are women, and boys aren't the favored gender in most schools. They're there on sufferance
and they like that rough-and-tumble play and that goes on and the teachers and mothers
are not nearly as female teachers and mothers are not nearly as tolerant and understanding
of it as male fathers and teachers. And I just worry about boys in growing up with,
it just seems, very few men. Then sociologists talk about hypermasculinity, and boys who
learn to show their manhood not in ways which are socially productive, I mean healthy. Men
who evince healthy masculinity, they build things, they protect vulnerable people. Hypermasculine
males do just the opposite. They destroy things and they prey on weaker people. It appears
that, for young males, having fathers, father figures, male teachers, mentors, that this
is critical. And a lot of people understand this, and they're trying to bring that resource
to boys. But we live at a time where people want to deny that there are differences between
males and females. They want to deny these phenomena, that this is going on, that there
are boys at risk of this pathological form of manhood. And there just seems to be so
much politics that prevents us from trying new things. I happen to think it's going to
be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. When I talk to gender scholars and
they have this vision of men and women becoming interchangeable. It's not going to happen.
You're not going to get rid of masculinity and femininity, it's here to stay, and I think
it's a fairytale. But I also feel the way sometimes people talk about marriage, that
we live in a society now where divorce is the norm and a lot of people are living together
before marriage and it's just not clear to me that we will ever, that it's almost a fairytale.
However, having said that, both with the gender scholars, I say, "Okay, then do some reasonable
things and make sure they're not harmful because some of their ideas of making boys and girls
alike seem to me to be...they just go too far and it's almost like trying to reengineer
children, it's not going to work, but it could make them quite unhappy. I don't think it's
going to make people unhappy by looking for ways to strengthen marriage and tell people
to at least be honest about them, the risks that... Brad: Exactly, right. So yeah, and
I think the idea is that, marriage is not going to look in 2020 like I did in 1820,
no matter what happens. But the question is can we build a new marriage culture for the
21st century that acknowledges the lots of change, that is aware of the fact that in
most homes with married dads, dads are doing much more child care, much more housework
than was the case 50 years ago, and that's great. So, how do we create... Christina:
Still not enough. Brad: How do we create a marriage culture... Christina: That won't
happen either. Brad: ...where that's taken into account and where I think in particular
with working class and poor families, we're able to see men's contribution is not only
obviously in terms of the ability to take and bring money to the table, but also the
way in which they might be great coaches, great playmates, etc., for their kids. And
I think one reason why marriage is so fragile in working class and poor families is that
we haven't yet developed enough of the appreciation for the distinctive role that dads play in
lives of their kids and to recognize that, "Look, just because dad may have lost his
job or is having difficulty finding a job or he's only working 20 hours a week right
now, doesn't mean he can't play an important role in the life of the family both now and
10 years down the road. So I talked to an African American father, for instance, in
the Atlanta area and he had lost his job with a telephone company and his wife and daughter
left because he was no longer able to provide for them financially. But I think we need
to understand that he could provide in other ways to his daughter practically and emotionally
and to appreciate that men's role extends beyond just their financial contributions
to the family. So that's the thing we need to build on and work on, I think for the 21st
century marriage model. Christina: And I remember reading in, sociologist David Blankenhorn,
his book on fatherlessness, he said a father doesn't have to be perfect. You can be an
okay dad and you can watch too much football and spend Saturday, whatever, watching the
games and drinking beer and roughhousing with your kids. You don't have to be always in
touch with your feelings, and still do that role. You don't have to be this...sometimes
it seems like they set a standard of fatherhood and most men, it's like, "I'll never do that."
For your kids, just being there... Brad: Yeah, and being a good enough father is the idea.
That's something to hold onto as well. Christina: Now, I want to bring up a group of scholars.
You've mentioned several researchers and their important findings on the need to stabilize
families, but there's a group, I think you've called them or others have, the family structure
denialists. I'm thinking of Stephanie *** and Philip Cohen at University of Maryland,
and I think even Vox was citing these and other scholars, looked very authoritative
on, "Oh, it's silly to say that single families are unstable." Brad: [inaudible 00:36:19]
for kids, yeah. Christina: ...bad for kids. And some of their arguments were interesting.
They pointed out that a lot of...you and your fellow researchers have found that it puts
kids at risk for violence and academic failure when the father is absent. However, today,
if we look at the Millennials, many who come from broken homes, they're allegedly, as the
data that I've seen, there are fewer teenage pregnancies or out of wedlock pregnancy, there
are fewer...well, there are fewer teenage pregnancies. There are still a lot of out
of wedlock pregnancies. There's less violence and more kids are graduating from high school.
So, where's the evidence of social breakdown when the kids are all right, as the movie
said? Brad: Right, sure, yeah. Now, I think it's great point that in some important respects,
in some outcomes, we're doing better now than it were 20 years ago. So it does show us that
fatherhood and that marriage are not the only factors that affect our kids. I think we've
seen improvements in policing in the last 30 years. In some important respects, there's
obviously still much to be done on that front. We have seen improvements, I think, in some
ways in educational sector, more kids are, well... Christina: And people have fewer kids.
Brad: And people have fewer kids, parents are more protective, there are obviously pros
and cons to that, but so all these wider cultural and economic shifts that I think have helped
many kids flourish in important respects. But it's still the case that when you compare
kids, whether they were born in 1970, as I was, or if they were born in 2000, as other
kids obviously have been born, in intact married versus, say, a single-mother household, there
are these gaps. And these gaps continue, and the scholars that you mentioned tend to be
pretty concerned with inequality. And I think we have to appreciate the fact that for kids
who are being raised in single-parent homes, they are getting unequal parental attention,
unequal parental resources economically, and the outcomes are unequal. Christina: Yeah,
this is a precious resource and it's not there for them. Brad: Right. The point that I would
make is that kids would be doing that much better if there was more stability in our
families and if it wasn't so stratified. So when it comes to inequality, one of the most
striking things that I have seen is work of political scientist, Robert Putnam's new book,
Our Kids, and he has a graph basically showing that the share of kids being raised in single-parent
homes among less educated moms is growing, growing, growing, and growing, and the share
of kids in single-mother households when mom was college-educated is actually declining
since the mid-1990s. So the point I'm making here is that what's happening in our families,
vis-à-vis marriage, and fatherhood, and family stability is I think playing an important
role in fueling this growing social and economic divide in America. So again, if we're concerned
about equality and reducing social and economic inequality, we need to be thinking about ways
to bridge this marriage divide and bridge this family divide that's emerging. Christina:
I have to agree with you because even in my work about boys in school, what I saw continuously
is that there's a cohort of boys who probably would've been okay in previous decades because
there was a time where you could graduate from high school, get a job at the local factory
or something and make it into the middle class. That is increasingly difficult. Researchers
at Harvard Graduate School of Education that said that the new passport to the American
Dream is education beyond high school. And increasingly girls are getting it and boys
are not. And especially boys from poor families and especially single-parent families, they
are less likely than their sisters to find a place in the economy. Now, in England, in
Australia, and Canada, they're very worried about this cohort of young men who are...they're
worried about their labor force, plus the personal lives of these kids. And so, they're
looking for ways to, I don't know that they're talking about family stability but they are
certainly paying attention to the education of those kids. I look at them and think that
it's going to influence their ability to form families. It's not just that they're not going
to find jobs, which is terrible, but there are going to find it very hard to get married
and to form families. And so it seems to be we should be putting...one thing I recommend
is putting more resources into educating disaffected, academically disengaged young boys. Brad:
Right, right. That's a great point. I think David Autor has made this point as well. He's
talked with the way in which...when you make the argument that we need dads, we need marriage
to be stronger in working class and poor communities, many scholars in many journals said, "Well,
look, we may not have really great options with these guys, and what can they do?" And
my point is, well, look, if that's where you leave things, you're basically consigning
a large share of the male population to this vicious cycle where the dads are never married
to their mothers. The boy is never raised in-home with their father, and it just continues,
this pattern, this cycle. Christina: It just amazes me that people think that was okay,
"Oh, it's all right. The men just aren't worth marrying." Brad: So I think the challenge
for us is how do we help working class and poor boys and men who are not on the college
track find their identities in terms of educational work? And I think we could do a lot better
when it comes to vocational education, for instance, [inaudible 00:42:38] training. Christina:
That's exactly right. In Australia, they did a major study of adolescents and they asked
boys of all social classes, but they were especially interested in disaffected, lower
middle class poor boys. And almost without exception, these kids said they were bored
with their classes in high school. They just couldn't take it anymore. And they said, "What
will keep you in school?" And they said, "Something that would help me get a job." And so we now
have models of excellence in vocational education. It's not what voc-ed was in the '60s. It was
a place to place kids that people thought were academically hopeless. But now these
schools combined academics. I visited a high school called Aviation High School in Queens,
New York. It's one of the most inspiring places in New York City, and it's in this gritty
kind of section of Queens. You go in there, and the kids, they have to do well in their
academic classes in order to tinker with...I think they have an Cessna 411 or something
out in the parking lot. And to tinker with that, you have do to do well in your classes,
to take these other courses. So they work hard and they can have academic careers, but
they can have jobs in an airplane mechanics and some of them go on to become pilots. They
draw poor and working class kids from all backgrounds across New York City, and it's
just such an obvious solution. I just want to go back because I have a couple of more
questions from these critics, the family structure denialists and they say, "Well, look at Europe.
In Europe...here you are encouraging marriage because you say there will be all of these
unfortunate consequences, but in Europe, marriage, all over the world, it's increasingly less
popular than it once was or less common than it was once. But especially in Western Europe,
it's becoming the norm in France, I think, to have children out of wedlock. They don't
appear to be suffering the social consequences. So maybe you're looking in the wrong place.
Maybe we should be getting the same social programs they have, and that would solve the
problem." Brad: Well, it's really the case that a general safety net can be helpful in
minimizing any kind of economic impacts of single parenthood, but it's important to note
that even in Europe, kids who are born to cohabitating parents, is often the case, particularly
in Northwestern Europe, are still more likely to see their parents part ways by the time
they turn 12 compared to kids who are born to married parents. This is France and Sweden
and elsewhere. So, what's interesting about marriage is that it's an institution and it's
not a Christian thing, it's a human thing. So we see obviously marriage in China, in
India, in Egypt, in Europe. It's this thing that we've used across time and space to stabilize
adult relationships, then integrate typically dads in the picture on a longer-term basis.
And to do so with some rituals and some vows and some involvement of friends and family
members and entry into this new state in your life. And so not surprising, whether you're
in Sweden or in Saudi Arabia or in China or in Columbia or in the United States or in
Uruguay, you would tend to see more stability in families that are formed around marriage
than families that are formed around other arrangements. I think that's an important.
Christina: Just the way you described it, so you see it as essential or a critical part
of the human ecosystem and throughout the...and just as we learned that we have to certainly
hesitate and ask questions before we just happily take all the rivers and, "Oh, we don't
need this system. Let's change the course of rivers and..." And then there's unexpected
ecological destruction. This can happen when human beings are too casual about dispensing
with a tradition, an institution. And so that's how you see... Brad: Yeah, it's obviously
kind of a Burkean view to some extent, but then the bigger point here is simply is that,
yeah, there's a human ecology out there, and that when that human ecology breaks down,
either at the family or at the neighborhood level, as we've seen in many low income communities
here in United States for instance, kids pay a big price for that. And looks like particularly
boys pay a big price when the neighborhood is dysfunctional, when the families aren't
being formed around two parents, etc. So, there's, I think, an environmental piece to
this that's important to be attentive to. Christina: I have a final question that goes
back to my experience at Stanford. They were so unhappy when I talked about the need for
fathers and family stability. It occurred to me that maybe...one thing is maybe they
thought I was being judgmental. Maybe they heard me, although I didn't say it, but maybe
they heard me saying that you should have two parents and you're damaged goods if you
don't. Of course, I don't even believe that, but my question to you is when you teach your
classes and you bring up the topic of the divorce revolution and single families, single-parent
families, what do you do about this? I'm sure you do worry about it, but how do you handle
the fact that some kids are going to...many of your students, these days, more than half
may come from broken families, and they may feel like the message is they're damage in
some way or shortchanged, and people don't really want to hear that. It may not even
be true, maybe it is in some cases and it might not be. So how do we convey this information
without appearing to be telling people that there's something wrong with them? Brad: That's
a great question. I think there are three things that I have experienced in the classroom
that are helpful in this regard. The first thing is just...I've been raised by a single
mother and I'm very clear about sort of saying, "I'm not judging people in that context. I've
experienced this myself." So that's helpful I think in terms of just clearing the air
to some extent. A second thing is to actually point out...I quiz my kids anonymously with
these little electronic clickers we can use in the classroom. I have large classes for
some of the classes that I teach at UVA, about 200 students per class. And so in those classes,
what we find is about 66% of those students are coming from intact married families. Christina:
Yeah, University of Virginia. Brad: And so I point out to them, "Look, most kids your
age in America are not coming from an intact married family. So you're exceptional." Usually
both in terms of family income but also in terms of family structure and why that matters,
why it is that their families structure may be one reason why they're actually sitting
in the classroom there at UVA. I think they get that point when they think about it. And
then the third thing that I would stress too is this idea that, "Look, adults, we make
a range of decisions. We can get divorced. We can have a child out of the wedlock. A
number of things can happen, but we think about what we want for our own children. Most
parents don't want their kid to end up as a single parent or to end up divorced. And
so I think we can generally agree that most parents want the best for their kids when
it comes to marriage and family life. And so given that, what are some things that we
can do in the economic arena, in the policy arena, in the cultural sphere to increase
the odds that the generation coming up now will be more successful in forging strong
and stable marriages than was the generation that came up in the '60s and '70s? Christina:
Wouldn't it help if the media was simply a little more positive about marriage and about
dads? I see dads...it used to be, "Father knows best," and now it's like, "Dads are
buffoons." Brad: Although it's nice, some of the audiences have... Christina: They're
changing rules. Brad: Yeah, so Dove has a great series of ads about dads I think that's
both warm and positive. Cheerios has a great peanut butter Cheerios, which is incredible
and great ad about a contemporary father doing his thing and it's just really, really positive.
So I think that's changing a little bit, but I also think too the media could be a lot
more realistic about departures from the intact married family. We've done this section on
teen pregnancy with MTV's program, 16 and Pregnant, but then to extend that insight
and to layer on into the life course and how the breakdown of the family... Christina:
Just to be honest with you. Brad: Yeah, look... Christina: It's not judging anybody but this
is the landscape. This is what we know. Brad: It's more challenging. Yeah, right, and that's,
I think, [inaudible 00:51:42] oftentimes in the pop culture. Christina: Right. Well, this
has been very enlightening, and thank you. Brad: Thank you, Christina.