Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 656 | The ‘Family Diversity’ Myth | Guest: Dr. Brad Wilcox

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Today we’re joined by Dr. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, to discuss the importance of family structure in our lives and in society. Rates of idleness and incarceration are significantly higher among young men who didn’t grow up with a father in the home versus those who did. We discuss the data that supports this in Dr. Wilcox’s study “Life Without Father": Less College, Less Work, and More Prison for Young Men Growing Up Without Their Biological Father, which provides evidence that present fathers in the home statistically prepare boys for safer childhoods and more successful adulthoods. Then, we discuss the progressive movement’s push to replace family with the state and the hypocrisy of progressive policymakers regarding their family policy agendas. --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order, get free express shipping, and donate life-changing food to kids in need! Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code 'ALLIEBASIC' to save 20% off your first order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! Reliefband — save 20% off plus free shipping at Reliefband.com when you use promo code 'ALLIE'! --- Show Links: IFS: "‘Life Without Father’: Less College, Less Work, and More Prison for Young Men Growing Up Without Their Biological Father" https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-without-father-less-college-less-work-and-more-prison-for-young-men-growing-up-without-their-biological-father --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I am so excited for you to hear this conversation that I'm going to have with Professor Brad Wilcox from the University of Virginia. He is an expert on the importance of the family and family formation and how, the formation and structure of the family contributes to child development. And he has just released an amazing study that shows based on data the importance of fathers in not just children's lives and in families, but in society as a whole. You are going to learn so much from him. I know you're going to enjoy this conversation. So we are going to get straight into it.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com slash alley that's good ranchers.com slash alley. Dr. Wilcox, thank you so much for joining us. First, can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? I'm a professor of sociology, University of Virginia, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. Awesome. And I want to talk to you about this new study that recently came out about fathers,

about sons. You've talked about this subject for a long time. I've used your research, actually, and some of my writing for World Magazine. But before we get into it, can you tell us kind of how you got to the position that you're in now? I didn't know until a couple years ago that there was this institution, this program, at the University of Virginia. Some people are going to be surprised by that, that in liberal academia, the people are even studying this subject. So tell us how you got here, why this interests you, and maybe a little bit of the history of this program at UVA.

Yeah, so I got interested in these issues actually as an undergraduate here at the university. of Virginia. I kind of came to the realization as someone who was raised in single mother household that dads were important and that marriage was an institution that kind of connects dads on average to their kids. And then said about to study family at the Princeton University in sociology, got a PhD at Princeton and then came back here to teach at the University of Virginia. And then in 2009 brought the National Marriage Project from Rutgers University where it was led by David Popano and Barbara Diffa Whitehead to UVA. And since then, the National Marriage Project has sponsored a number of reports and conferences and lectures here at UVA to kind of spotlight

the important role that marriage and stable families play in the lives of kids, communities, and our country at large. It's kind of the quick story behind my work on marriage and family life. Well, I'm so glad that this program exists. This is something, of course, that conservatives have been talking about for a long time, the deficit of fathers in the country and how that leads to all kinds of social ills, it seems to be something, at least from our perspective, that many in liberal academia really don't want to touch her in liberal media, liberal institutions. They don't want to talk about the problem of fatherlessness, how that leads to idle young men, sometimes delinquent young men and young people. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that you think that you are

kind of a rarity or this program is kind of a rarity in academia? That's a great question, Alia. I mean, I think what's, you know, striking when you look at the data is how often family and marriage emerges as the number one predictor of things that occupy our public conversation and yet family is kind of cast to the side. So for instance, when you look at the work of Raj Chetty at Harvard, what he finds is the number one predictor of mobility for poor kids and communities. across the US, you know, rags, which is mobility where they're going from poverty as kids to being successful as adults is not, it's not race, it's not school spending, it's not inequality, it's

two-parent families in a community. It's kind of one example. In our recent brief that you just, I think, mentioned, we find that a family structure is a better predictor of incarceration, of being in prison or in jail for young men than is race or family income growing up. So families a huge factor in you know in our lives or kids lives or country's lives and you it's often the elephant in the room it's the sort of family elephant in the room I think people are reluctant to talk about family for a couple of reasons I think one of those reasons is that you know all of us make mistakes all of us have you know family members who've made mistakes when it comes to marriage of family life so there's kind of a reluctance I think to sort of broach the issue

in part for fear of offending people who've made mistakes on the family front I think a second reason that it is sort of swept to the side is that a lot of progresses would prefer to focus on what they call structural issues. You know, things like poverty, things like inequality, things like racism that are kind of from their perspective easily addressed with public policy, you know, solutions that don't require people making changes in their own personal lives. I think that's the second reason why, you know, this is a challenge for us. And the third thing that I would say is there's been a kind of progressive commitment undergirding academia for many, many years now. And this progressive commitment tends to kind of embrace family change as kind of an intrinsic good, that every single change that sort of washed over American family life since the 60s is good for us and our country. And that we should not in any way kind of reconsider a lot of steps we've taken on the family front. I think that sort of progressive assumption is also a big reason that undergirds why we have

difficulty in talking about the importance of stable marriage and of even fathers in our kids' lives. Well, I've heard you say before that progressives kind of have the idea that the only thing that kids need is love and money. And as long as they have that, it doesn't matter if they're raised by a single mom. It doesn't matter if they're raised by two moms or cousins or whatever it is. they kind of have this idea that, you know, this coalition of people can raise a child and that child will be fine as long as their basic needs are met. But does the data show that? Is that true that kids who grow up with just some kind of love and some kind of money end up just as well or just as the kids who are raised with both a mom and a dad?

Yeah, that's right. I think what I've been talking about kind of is family diversity theory. And it's this idea, again, as you just put it, that, you know, all that kids require is love and money. And the family form, family structure doesn't really matter for kids. And yet when you actually look at the data, what you see is that kids are much more likely to be flourishing when they're raised in an intact biological married family with their own, you know, mother and father. And we see this when it comes to incarceration, when it comes to college graduation, when it comes to depression. And there's just no question that, you know, on average, kids benefit from a stable, married household. So that's what sort of the research tells us.

And what I would kind of go on to add is that I don't think progressive scholars really appreciate journalists as well, that even when it comes to love and money, kids are more likely to have more money in a stable, married household, you know, that's accessible to them. And they're more likely to get the love of both of their parents, you know, more attention. more affection, more consistent discipline when they're being raised by their own stably married parents compared to the alternatives. So you can kind of on its own terms, kind of the family diversity theory breaks down because, again, it doesn't appreciate how much having, you know, that strong stable family, that stable family on the home front actually delivers more money

to kids and more love to kids as well. Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you

about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. I don't know if you're able to assess this, but why do you think? Why do you think kids are typically better off and have better outcomes when they are raised

by their biological mom and dad? No matter their socioeconomic background, no matter if mom and dad are rich or not, as you're saying, they are typically better in that kind of structure, in that kind of home versus a single mom who maybe makes more money than the mom and the dad over here. Why do you think that is? Well, you know, I think it's about a couple of things. It's partly about the fact that, you know, on average you have two parents and today, you know, either you have, you know, both parents bringing in income and they're going to be

much more likely to kind of allocate that money towards their kids, if both of those kids are their biological children. And when you've got one stay-at-home parent, you have the other parent who's typically working that much harder to kind of bring in money for, you know, his spouse and his gets usually, you know, the father who's doing that. So that's part of the financial picture. It's also important to know financially that they're not kind of paying the costs of family instability. And that's things like obviously child support, things like keeping two households, you know, going with kids going back and forth, you know, selling a family home if there's a divorce. So family stability is linked to having a better financial foundation underneath kids.

It would be part of the story. When it comes to just sort of the sort of social and emotional side, you know, kids are getting, you know, more attention from their two parents. Biological parents tend to be more invested in their kids and step parents and boyfriends and girlfriends and girlfriends. So they also benefit from having, you know, that parental presence in the household. Two parents who are biologically laid to the kids are less likely to sort of lose their temper with their own biological kids compared again to step parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends. So it's a safer household for kids on average than one where there's school happening parents

or, you know, step parents of one sort or another. And then in terms of just thinking about the sort of mobility issue, what we see is that kids who are raised in non-attack families tend to be more likely to be having to travel between apartments and homes, whereas kids who are raised by our unstably married parents are much more likely to stay in one home and in one neighborhood. And if you have kids, if you babysat kids, if you've taught kids, you know they thrive on stable routines. with stable caregivers. And the intact married family is much more likely to deliver stability, not just in the household, but even kind of in that neighborhood context compared to the alternatives. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you can see how those who are more driven kind of by ideology within what the data shows

really are uncomfortable with that fact, because if you, if your number one value is tolerance, you talked about that family diversity theory, or it's, acceptance of any new form of family or any new form of lifestyle or behavior, then really everything else is secondary. Everything else kind of has to submit to that number one value, even the well-being of kids. There is this book that recently came out by a woman named Sophie Lewis, and she's a professing communist, and she's written a lot of stuff that I consider crazy. But her latest book is called Abolish the Family.

Of course, she believes that the family, the mom, dad, child structure is a tool. of the oppressive patriarchy and that children should really be liberated from the oppression of their family. And that's kind of an idea, this anti-hierarchy at all costs idea that comes from the left. You can kind of see how that would apply if that's your idea to the family. But liberation is not something that is achieved for children, whatever that even means when there are no parents involved. I mean, you talked about the importance of that biological connection. I mean, what would that look like? I know that that's not really on the horizon, the true abolition of the family. But what are some of the consequences for kids if they are raised in a society that really

doesn't value that family structure and really does just say anything goes? Yeah, I think what we're seeing in part is there's a move on the left to kind of replace the family as a core institution with the state, right? And to have the state take a bigger role when it comes to things like, you know, daycare providing, you know, publicly provided daycare, for instance, would be kind of an example here or even too now, unfortunately, kind of sort of seeing public schools kind of given their own power to sort of shape the moral ethos, you know, an orientation of our kids as well, kind of of displace what the parents would like to see happening, you know, in their own public schools, in their own, in county, cities, and towns across America. So this is a lot of. So this is a

This kind of status orientation is an expression of the kind of viewpoint you were just articulating over the one you just particularly was pretty extreme. But I think another point to make here is what's striking about, you know, our elites often is how much they talk left when it comes to family but walk right or how they're kind of supporting a more progressive agenda, you know, in the companies that they lead or in the public initiatives that they champion in state houses across America or in halls of Congress as well. And yet again, on the home front, they're often kind of living a fairly traditional lifestyle. And my colleagues and I looked at this in California, for instance, a report we call

a state of contradiction. And we found in California, was that college educated elites in California were much more likely to embrace publicly family diversity theory. And yet in private, had plans to marry before having kids. And again, on the home front, we're much more likely to stay married than their fellow Californians. So this is kind of one example of how elites in California end up talking left and walking right. And we found even in the heart of Hollywood that there were a few neighborhoods running right through the heart of Hollywood that had exception high rates of two-parent families. And you can imagine sort of the showrunners, the producers, the executives living in those neighborhoods, kind of sitting in the hills of Hollywood,

probably are, you know, producing shows and behind, you know, videos, music videos that send a very different, you know, message to the American public. Right. The content that they are producing is telling America that all forms of family life are equal, no matter the family set up or who's taking care of the child. And yet they're not actually living that way, which would maybe speak to the fact that they don't actually believe that. I mean, I'm sure that they, would say that they believe that the diversity of families is a good thing for society. But if they really believed it, would they be leading this pretty conservative lifestyle? It doesn't seem that way. So what are the ramifications of that? You're preaching a particular message

to average America who is watching Netflix, whatever, they're taking it in and they're thinking, well, I'm going to be just as well. If I decide to have kids before I get married, cohabitation is just as good as getting married. Marriage is just a piece of paper. I mean, that's what we've been hearing for a long time, not to mention the redefinition of marriage and family is two women, two men, whatever it is. And so, like, what are the ramifications of that? And I guess, why do you think that is?

Like, why is there that state of contradiction between, I know these are two different questions between the people who live a certain way and are communicating another message to everyone else? Why would that be the case? Why wouldn't they do be consistent? Right. This is what I call inverted hypocrisy in the part of our elites. Again, they're talking left about family walking right in practice oftentimes.

And I think how do we explain this and why is important? Well, I think you explain it by, you know, sort of underlying the fact that they sort of have some kind of prudential, some kind of tacit understanding that both they, their spouse, and especially their kids, are more likely to flourish. I mean, they kind of probably at some level to know that if they kind of live, the lifestyle that they're preaching to the broader public, you know, it would often be ruinous for their kids. And my own research indicates, you know, released in the last week and a half, that young adults, young men actually, who are raised and non-attack families are more likely to,

you know, not go to college, not graduate from college, more likely to end up in prison or in jail, more likely to be idle as 20-something young men. And so at some level, you know, these smart people realize that, you know, stable marriage is good for them and their kids. And they act in the private sphere accordingly. Now, the problem, of course, is they know they're supposed to be signaling. They're supposed to be signaling in public their allegiance to a very progressive, you know, commitment about family issues and to embrace kind of diversity theory in public. That's what's going to get them status at work. That's what's going to kind of, you know, get them plotted among their peers and all this kind of stuff. So they have a kind of progressive public facing

ideology often because that's, you know, what's demanded of them in their roles as CEOs or there's journalists or professors or school superintendents. That's the kind of challenge there. Now, this is problematic, right, because in the institutions that they control, whether it's, you know, Hollywood companies producing movies and TV shows or that school superintendents kind of pushing forward a certain kind of viewpoint in the classroom, they're sending a message to ordinary young adults to our kids, to our teenagers, that is, you know, one that doesn't underline the importance of marriage

and that often underlines the idea that, as you said, you know, anything goes when it comes to family. And so it's problematic in so far as they're advancing a cultural ethos and message that undercuts the values and virtues that are required to forge a good and civil marriage today in America. Let's talk a little bit about the specifics of the study. Life without father, less college, less work, and more prison for young men growing up without their biological father. The decline of marriage and the rise of fatherlessness in America remained at the same. center of some of the biggest problems facing the nation. Crime and violence, school failure, deaths of despair, and children in poverty. The percentage of boys living apart from their biological

father has almost doubled since 1960. 17% then to 32% today. There are about 12 million boys who are growing up in families without their biological father. They are twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s versus those without a biological dad. So young men with a biological dad are twice as likely to graduate college than those raised without young men who are idle so not working or going to school is almost double when there is no biological father and I've said this before I'm not saying this is what you say in your study in particular but I've said there is nothing more dangerous than a man with no purpose with nothing to live for to with no one to live for there is really nothing more dangerous than an idle man really in idle. Really an idol

anyone, but especially a man. That's another topic that it seems like progressivism doesn't really want to cover that there is this inherent difference. There is a difference in the innate drives of men and women. Yes, we all need purpose. We all need to know why we're here, what we're doing, and to be productive. But a man without a good fight to fight and a good thing to fight for is very dangerous. And so this number in particular scares me and makes a lot of sense to me that young men without dads are more idle. Well, they're going to be doing something with their time, which to me would be the reason why they typically end up delinquent. They typically end up, you know, in situations of violence. Was there anything about this study, whether it's some of the stats

that I just listed or any other parts of this study that you found that actually surprised you after being kind of in this industry and studying this for so long? Not exactly. I mean, I don't think I was particularly surprised. I mean, it is striking, though, how large, for instance. I mean, as you mentioned, we do find there's a market increase in risk of vitalness and incarceration for young men who are being raised without their fathers in the household. But it was striking to me, looking at the college trends. I mean, we just saw a big Wall Street Journal article. I'm sure you talked about earlier in the last year that kind of chronicled this growing gap in our colleges between men and women. We're heading out. to a world where about 60% of college students are female, about 40% are male. So a big gender divide in college colleges in America. And what we see here in this research is that 14% of young men who grown up without their fathers are graduating from college compared to 35% of young men who are graduating in college when their dad's present in the household. This is a large gal. And that was actually surprising how large it was. And it does suggest to me that part of the story

in terms of understanding this growing gender gap in American colleges, is that young men are coming from homes without, you know, their dad to be a model for hard work, to help them with homework, to kind of give them some guidance about how to navigate school and college. These young men are the ones who are particularly likely to be absent from our nation's campuses. And this is problematic in part, of course, because men who don't graduate from college today are more likely to be floundering in our labor markets. and then also to be much less attractive as husbands, you know, later on as well. So the sort of education story here was kind of striking to me. Yeah. So it's not like these young men are not going to college, but they're starting these successful businesses.

They're becoming entrepreneurs. They're being productive in other ways. They're often falling into the idleness that can then kind of have a domino effect on the rest of their life and inhibit success in other ways. Right. Although, of course, I think probably as you would appreciate, you know, one idea that I've been thinking about a lot, you know, lately is this idea that we need to be doing a lot more to strengthen vocational education, sort of recognize and appreciate that a lot of guys

need not go to college to flourish. The problems we don't have programs in most, you know, towns and cities that would do that. Right, right. Yeah, I certainly don't think that going to college is going to be the answer for male flourishing in the United States. I think it's the problem of the absence of alternatives, that when they're not going to college, they're also not, they don't have a leg up on life. This kind of is what you're talking about here. Some other statistics, the percentage of young men who have been arrested by the ages of 15 to 19 is higher among kids without a biological dad in the home than with a biological dad in the home.

And the percentage of young men who have spent time in jail by around age 30 is double among boys who grew up without biological dads than with biological dads. America's young man problem is disproportionately concentrated among the millions of males who grew up without the benefit of a present biological father. The bottom line, both these men and the nation are paying a heavy price for the breakdown of the family. So what would you say needs to be done? Because we all see, I mean, we all see that one commonality in these mass shooters horrific is that they're typically young men. A lot of times, they come from broken homes or different kinds of broken backgrounds. that was certainly true in Uvalde.

He didn't have a present dad in his life. We see the epidemic of violence that happens among predominantly young men, particularly, unfortunately, black young men. Everyone sees that. And very few people seem to be pointing to this problem and trying to come up with policy solutions or any kind of cultural solutions, whatever, to fix this problem. So in your ideal world, like if you were put in charge for a day, a year,

whatever it is, and said, okay, this is what we need to do to fix this problem? What would you propose? Yeah, great question. I think one thing that we need to do is to really look at this as a cultural challenge, as you can appreciate. And that means thinking about ways in which schools across America can introduce curricula, for instance, it's spotlight, the value of marriage for young adults and for their kids. One idea is called the success sequence where you talk about the importance of getting at least a high school degree, then working to work full-time in your early 20s and then marrying before having kids and kind of just telling him that else, if you do these three simple steps related to education, work, and marriage,

your odds of being poor are just 3% and your odds of getting into the middle class or higher are 86%. So it's kind of a pathway to helping adults sort of avoid poverty and establish strong and stable families for themselves and any kids that they have. So it's sort of one idea is talking about the success sequence in public schools and also running public campaigns in, you know, states across America that are supportive of marriage and family. A second policy idea is to address the marriage penalties in our welfare programs, things like Medicaid, for instance, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. These programs often penalize marriage in substantial ways,

really for working class couples of kids. And Congress has actually addressed marriage penalties and income taxes, which fall on higher earning Americans, but Congress has not addressed these marriage penalties in our welfare programs. and can and should go forward in addressing, you know, these penalties. So those are kind of two ideas that we could think about on both the cultural front and the policy front to make marriage both kind of, I think, more attractive and less, in this case, financially problematic for precisely the group of folks who are most likely to be struggling

with marriage today, and that is working class and poor Americans. Well, it's certainly an uphill climb. And we don't seem to be going that direction, especially with how young people seem to think about marriage, seem to think about that kind of commitment, seem to think about having kids. And that diversity of family theory seems to be really popular, especially among young people. And certainly the progressive ideology that we've kind of described, especially as it pertains to the family, seems to dominate most institutions, at least in what they are conveying to the public. as you said, they're kind of conveying the message to the left and walking right themselves. And yet that message is so impactful. The ramifications of that, I think, I mean, we've seen what they are over the past 60 years.

And so I'm thankful for what you're doing. Data matters. Statistics make a difference. They can change people's mind. I like to say that the truth is like a beach ball. You can keep on with ideology or your desires or your personal preferences, try to push it underwater. Eventually, it's going to pop back up.

Right now, the reality of the need for fathers is popping up in the prevalence of violence and idleness among young males. And so I'm thankful to you for highlighting that. I'm thankful to UVA for having you there and allowing you to study this and publish these studies. So thank you so much, Dr. Wilcox. I really appreciate what you do and the time that you've spent talking with us today. Thanks, I'm going to be with you today.

Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.