Brad Wilcox on the importance of fathers – Full Interview Part 1 | VIEWPOINT — Transcript

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1. 0:00Christina: Brad, I just want to tell you that you caused me a lot of trouble. I was at Stanford.
2. 0:06I was at a debate with two feminist professors from the law school, and at one point, I brought
3. 0:12up your research on the importance of stable families, fathers, and its relation to the
4. 0:20absence of fathers and the relation to poverty. Soon as I mentioned that fatherlessness was...a
5. 0:27culture of fatherlessness was dysfunctional, there were gasps. The woman next to me I was
6. 0:32debating is very reasonable, seemingly reasonable professor of law. She was horrified and simply
7. 0:41to mention your research, what seems quite sound to me, I triggered the audience, the
8. 0:45whole audience. Have you met that reaction or did I put it the wrong way? Well, you have
9. 0:52no idea what I said, but I thought it was an accurate representation of your research.
10. 0:56Brad: Well, I think in some precincts of the academy and the public culture, talking of
11. 1:01fatherhood as an important part of kids' lives is triggering. But I think it's also important
12. 1:07to understand and to acknowledge that for more mainstream scholars in psychology, and
13. 1:12sociology, and economics, people like Bill Saw, Hewlett Brookings, people like Sara McLanahan
14. 1:17at Princeton, people like in Bertrand at the University of Chicago, there is, I think,
15. 1:21a recognition that fathers on average matter for their kids and that communities that don't
16. 1:28have lots of fathers are more likely to be struggling in important ways. So, I think
17. 1:33part of it is how close you are to the data, and scholarship really close to the data,
18. 1:38using large national data sets and understand there's...it's at least part of the picture
19. 1:42that's worth focusing on, the role of fathers and the importance of family structure.
20. 1:47Christina: And I think a lot of people are just not aware that both liberal and conservative scholars
21. 1:52are converging on this consensus that a culture of fatherless is dysfunctional, whereas any
22. 1:59child can come from a broken home and make admirable adjustments. But to have millions
23. 2:06of children coming from such homes, we're normalizing it. We haven't taken the time
24. 2:10to look at the consequences. You have and your colleagues have. What sort of things
25. 2:17are you finding; for example, the relationship between poverty and fatherlessness? Brad:
26. 2:22We know that families that are headed by married parents are less likely to be poor than families
27. 2:27headed by single mothers. Single moms are five times more likely if they're heading
28. 2:30up a family to be poor compared to married parents. So that's one example of the way
29. 2:35in which family structure is related to another key outcome that all of us are concerned about,
30. 2:40whether we're on the left or the right, that is poverty and families, poverty among kids.
31. 2:45So, we also have been talking a lot of late about income inequality, and the data suggests
32. 2:50there that about a third of the increase in income inequality for families between the
33. 2:54'70s and the 1990s was related to the retreat from marriage. The fact that if your working
34. 2:59class and poor families have a father in the picture, a married father in the picture who
35. 3:05would otherwise would've been contributing economically to those families. So that's increasing
36. 3:10the economic divide between college-educated families who tend to be much more stable,
37. 3:14more married, and working class and poor families, who tend to be more likely today to be headed
38. 3:19by a single parent, usually a single mother. Christina: But what do you say to critics
39. 3:22who say, "But, well, it's not that if they get married then everything will be rosy.
40. 3:30They can't get married because they are poor, it's poverty. It's absence of jobs that's
41. 3:36creating the social havoc, and it doesn't allow them to get married," and that you're
42. 3:41not looking at the root causes. What do you say to that? Brad: Well, it's really the case
43. 3:45that poverty is an issue, that issues related to men's involvement in labor force, these
44. 3:50are all major issues that help to explain why it is that working class and poor Americans
45. 3:55are today less likely to get married, but that's not the whole story. And if we looked
46. 4:00at this historically, for instance, at the 1930s, the height of The Great... Christina:
47. 4:05Depression. Brad: ...Depression, there was no dramatic increase in family instability,
48. 4:09no dramatic increase in single parenthood, no dramatic increase in divorce. So, part
49. 4:13of what's happening right now is that the changes in our culture are interacting with
50. 4:19changes in the economy in ways that make working class and poor relationships more fragile
51. 4:25and less likely to either end in marriage or to go the distance. So, class matters in
52. 4:32all this, but also I think we have to acknowledge ways in which culture matters and changes
53. 4:37in the culture matter. Christina: Yeah, I know our colleague, Charles Murray in his
54. 4:41book Coming Apart, he mentioned how you go back to the '40s or '50s and you look the
55. 4:47wealthy, middle class, and poor, and of course, the wealthy had better things and had lived
56. 4:53at a much higher level of prosperity obviously. But in many other ways, there weren't exact
57. 5:03same levels of marriage but very close and family stability, and also connection to community.
58. 5:12And it appears that when you're married and stay with your family, there's more likelihood
59. 5:17to be involved in schools, and clubs, in social organizations. Charles mentions that today,
60. 5:27a lot of people say, "Oh, well, it's not Ozzie and Harriet anymore." Well, it appears that
61. 5:32is for the cognitive elite, for the upper middle class. They do look rather like the
62. 5:381950s and their kids are benefitting from it. And then you look at people that are lower
63. 5:43middle class, poor, and there's not only the poverty but also the social havoc, and kids
64. 5:49not having the benefit of two parents, and you're seeing this. Brad: Right. Yeah, and
65. 5:55there's this growing class divide in American family life and the irony is that well-educated
66. 5:59Americans, who often are more progressive in theory on family issues are, when it comes
67. 6:03to their own marriages and the way that they interact with their kids, quite conventional
68. 6:10in a kind of neotraditional sense. Christina: They don't preach what they practice, as Charles
69. 6:14said. Brad: Exactly. So, there is this walking right, talking left dynamic in play for some
70. 6:21elites that is noteworthy. But the deeper point here is that college-educated Americans
71. 6:27have figured out important ways how to navigate this new world when it comes to their own
72. 6:34families. And they also benefit of course from better incomes and more stable incomes.
73. 6:38And so they're doing pretty well. And we've actually seen divorce rates come down in college-educated
74. 6:43precincts since 1980s. The example that I give is Newt Gingrich versus Barack Obama.
75. 6:49It's not a political point. It's a generational point. I can't really imagine someone in Obama's
76. 6:54position having the kind of marital history that Newt Gingrich does. And so the point
77. 6:58simply is that I think for many elites, their orientation towards marriage and family life
78. 7:04shifted in the late '80s and '90s and 2000s. And so they have figured out that marriage
79. 7:11matters for them and for their kids and they're acting accordingly. Now the challenge, of
80. 7:14course, facing us as a country is can we extend that wisdom and those insights to the broader
81. 7:20country and help rebuild working class and poor marriages today as well? Christina: Well,
82. 7:27tell me about the impact of fathers on kids, and it's different for boys and girls. It's
83. 7:36fashionable in some circle to say, "Well, fathers or mothers, they're interchangeable."
84. 7:40But common sense and maybe the entire anthropological record suggests that the roles are different.
85. 7:50Just to give a mandate example, I've seen kids playing in the park, a child's on a climbing
86. 7:54structure and the mother will say, "Be careful, Timmy." And the dad will say, "Can you get
87. 7:59to the top?" Just that sort of thing. I think most people just see kids benefitting from
88. 8:05both. And if you have only one parent, the other is not there, but typically it's the father
89. 8:12What do we know about the effects on girls and young women? Brad: Well, it's
90. 8:19interesting. When it comes to thinking about the impact of dads on their daughters, what
91. 8:23we see basically is that daughters are more likely to flourish educationally and even
92. 8:30later on in life professionally when they've had an involved dad who's engaged with them
93. 8:35in their lives. And so there's a way in which both fatherhood and marriage done right, of
94. 8:41course, are really, today, I think, acting in service of the cause of women's progress.
95. 8:48So my research, for instance, shows that young women who have come from an intact family
96. 8:53are more likely to be flourishing in their late 20s compared to young women who haven't
97. 8:57had that in their background. So again, there's a way in which today girls benefit from having
98. 9:03an active father in their life. Christina: And this is across class lines? Brad: Across
99. 9:06class lines. We also see too when it comes to teen pregnancy that women who have a father
100. 9:11present are much less likely to become pregnant as teenagers and women who have a close emotional
101. 9:17relationship with their dad are much less likely to become pregnant as teenagers. So
102. 9:20having both a father present in your life and having an engaged and affectionate dad
103. 9:25in your life is a real resource for our girls here in the U.S. Christina: And I remember,
104. 9:31and I've tried to debate this sometimes with gender scholars and they never say much about
105. 9:37it, but isn't it protective for children but particularly girls with the father, the biological
106. 9:45father in the home. The likelihood of violence or sexual predation, it increases exponentially
107. 9:55when the dad's gone and you have a mother's live-in boyfriend. You've talked about that.
108. 9:59Brad: Yeah, so the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publishes a report on a
109. 10:04fairly regular basis on child abuse and child neglect. It may have a figure that maps out
110. 10:10or charts out the relationship between family structure and child abuse, so the physical
111. 10:15abuse of kids, the sexual abuse of kids, and the emotional abuse of children. And I think
112. 10:20they actually come out in boys and girls in this particular figure, and there's a very
113. 10:24strong association between family structure and kids' safety on these three outcomes.
114. 10:29And so kids who are being raised in an intact biological married family have much lower
115. 10:34rates of abuse than kids in other arrangements, and the most risky place in America is where
116. 10:40you have a biological parent and an unrelated adult. They don't specify how that's arranged
117. 10:44but that's typically the mom and an unrelated male boyfriend, that's a much riskier place
118. 10:49for our kids. They're about nine times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally
119. 10:53abused in those relationships with family contexts than kids who are being raised in
120. 10:59intact married families. So that's just one indication of the way in which, in this case,
121. 11:03both girls and boys are safer from the scourge of child abuse when they're being raised by
122. 11:10their own married parents. Christina: And I read in various reports and they wrote about
123. 11:16this in the Oregon's Boys, the latest edition, that boys from broken homes, especially poor
124. 11:23boys, that this family instability has more adverse effect on boys than girls. The daughters
125. 11:29are, for whatever reason, appear to be doing better educationally and vocationally. Brad:
126. 11:35Yeah, no, it's interesting, it's ironic that you had a colleague at Stanford who was an
127. 11:39economist who was concerned about this point about fathers because there's more evidence
128. 11:43coming actually from economics specifically that is suggestive here. Raj Chetty at Stanford,
129. 11:50Marianne Bertrand at Chicago, especially David Autor at MIT, they're doing work that suggest
130. 11:57that poor boys in particular are being hit hard by this retreat from marriage, that they
131. 12:02are the ones who are most likely to be suspended from school, for instance. And what's fascinating
132. 12:07about David Autor's work is he's been doing a research with colleagues in Florida and
133. 12:12what they're finding is that generally speaking, boys are more likely to be suspended than
134. 12:16girls in school, but the gap between boys and girls is much smaller for kids from more
135. 12:22affluent families and much bigger for kids from poor families. And a substantial part
136. 12:27of that story is the kids from poor families are more likely to have a single mother at
137. 12:30the head of that household. And so, it's... Christina: I read...yeah. Brad: So basically
138. 12:34not having the father in the household is one reason why poor boys, it looks like based
139. 12:38upon Autor's work, are more likely to be suspended from school. Christina: You've written about
140. 12:44what fathers do for boys even in terms of teaching them how to roughhouse and how to
141. 12:52control their... Brad: Their bodies, yeah. Christina: Tell us a little bit about that.
142. 12:55Brad: So it's fascinating. When you think about a dad roughhousing with his kids on
143. 13:01Thursday night, maybe exasperating the mom. She's like, "I'm trying to get kids to bed
144. 13:06and here is my husband on the floor wrestling with them," or on Saturday morning wrestling
145. 13:12with his toddlers. And you might think, what's the big deal? But what's interesting about
146. 13:17this, is that work by Ross Parke, who is a psychologist at University of California,
147. 13:23indicates that this kind of rough-and-tumble play on the part of fathers helps kids develop
148. 13:32and that kids, both boys and girls, are more likely to be doing well socially, popular
149. 13:37in their classes if they have lots of rough-and-tumble play with their father. And so I think the
150. 13:42story here is that having that experience with your dad basically teaches kids, to some
151. 13:49extent, how to control their emotions and their bodies and then they take that knowledge
152. 13:53and they bring it with them into the classroom or onto the soccer field or the football field
153. 13:58or to the playground. Christina: And how to be rambunctious and playful without being
154. 14:03violent. Brad: Yeah, without being out of control. Christina: That you can...without
155. 14:04losing control. Brad: So if the kid is biting or kicking his father in that, he soon learns
156. 14:09that's not appropriate and that's not acceptable. And so, they're taking some life lessons from
157. 14:16the family room floor to their classroom, and the playground, and the soccer field.
158. 14:20Christina: So the girl, she'll have a mother who's...so many single mothers are heroic
159. 14:28and they're working so hard and the kids love them and respect them, but the daughter also
160. 14:33emulates her. And the son is less likely to emulate a mother but more likely to for a
161. 14:38male role model. And if the father is not there, it'll be, well, we hope there's a surrogate,
162. 14:44but if not, it would be friends, I guess, or peers. Brad: Right, and so one of the things
163. 14:50that David Autor is hypothesizing in his work, again, showing that poor boys are being hit
164. 14:54particularly hard by fatherlessness in their communities. Autor at MIT, again, is thinking
165. 15:02that what may be happening here is that poor boys are often in a situation where they don't
166. 15:06have regular access to in their own home to a father who is going to work every day and
167. 15:16who is involved as a husband and a father in the home. And so that may affect how they
168. 15:22approach school, how they approach work down the road, and how they approach relationships
169. 15:28as well. So again, not having that father might be particularly salient for boys for
170. 15:34the reasons that Autor has suggested in his reports called Wayward Sons. It was well worth
171. 15:39putting up on the Internet. Christina: Yes, I was very impressed by that and did mention
172. 15:43it in some of my research. I can imagine someone saying, "Well, the kind of fathers who remain
173. 15:52married and stay in the home, they're more stable individuals," but you've actually shown,
174. 15:59and others, that marriage and staying with your kids, it changes the man. How does that
175. 16:08work? Brad: So what you've been finding in the research is that men are transformed by
176. 16:17marriage and by married fatherhood, so men who get married and stay married and have
177. 16:23kids in marriage tend to work longer hours. They tend to work more strategically. They're
178. 16:27less likely to be fired, for instance, even controlling for a range of background characteristics,
179. 16:32and they make more money. Christina: They also live longer and they're healthier. Brad:
180. 16:35That's also true as well. Christina: Because their wives make them go to the doctor, otherwise
181. 16:37they won't. Brad: And also less likely to be riding a motorcycle without a helmet and
182. 16:40less likely to be going to bars on Saturday night, all that kind of stuff. So when men...
183. 16:43Christina: And more likely to be a little nagged, but it's worth the health. Brad: Yes,
184. 16:46right. It's worth the long-term...yes, there's a long-term benefit. So yeah, marriage has
185. 16:51a big impact on men's lives. And work done by Harvard sociologists, for instance, suggests
186. 17:00that this marriage premium is highest among men who are married in intact families with
187. 17:08their kids in the household. So having that motivation to provide for your kids is a big
188. 17:13factor for many men. Christina: Yeah, so all of these things, we look at the benefits for
189. 17:19women and, well, did we talk about that? Brad: Well, it's an important, I think, point to
190. 17:24hit on actually because there was a time in recent history when women were getting married
191. 17:32and they would pay a marriage penalty for marriage. What's fascinating is that today,
192. 17:37it's a new world. And so, what we're seeing from a new study at Columbia University, for
193. 17:42instance, is that we do...women still have a motherhood penalty. Women are more likely
194. 17:47to withdraw to some extent from the labor force when they have children. But what's
195. 17:50fascinating is that today married moms have a smaller penalty than unmarried moms do.
196. 17:56And I think the story there probably is that the married moms have a partner who's helping
197. 18:01them navigate the challenges of juggling work and family, and maybe spelling them at certain
198. 18:07times, taking the kids at a certain times. And having that husband in the picture makes
199. 18:12it easier for them to remain in the labor force. So, the classic concern that marriage
200. 18:20was a patriarchal institution that held women back, I think, in some important respects
201. 18:24needs to be revised, maybe even dramatically revised in 2016. Christina: So it's just another
202. 18:30advantage that most professional, highly educated women have; and poorer women, that's just
203. 18:39something else that's undermining their ability? Brad: Right, so the way in which marriages
204. 18:45now are much more common in some ways and more stable and secure in upper middle class
205. 18:50homes only further advantages not just men and kids in those communities but also women
206. 18:57it looks like today, on average. Of course, we have to talk about the exceptions and we
207. 19:01all know there are exceptions to the kinds of things I'm talking about today. It's also
208. 19:03important to acknowledge that many kids who are raised by, say, a single mother turn out
209. 19:07just fine. In fact, most kids raised by single moms turn out okay. I was raised by a single
210. 19:13mom. I think mom did a good job with me and my sister. We've turned out fine but... Christina:
211. 19:16Oh, I read about you. You were a bit of a hell-raiser. You threw your lunch pail across
212. 19:22the cafeteria. Brad: That's true. I had a summer camp experience. It was a little bit...yeah.
213. 19:29Christina: That and other things because... Brad: Yeah. But I got through that experience.
214. 19:35So yeah, I think that it's important to acknowledge in all these debates and discussions that
215. 19:38there are plenty of kids flourishing in non-traditional families. At the same time, though, as a sociologist,
216. 19:46I would say that kids are more likely to struggle. We don't have the benefit of intact married
217. 19:52family. Christina: Well, I wanted to ask you about that because in my family, not my immediate
218. 19:57family but extended family and probably everyone's, there have been a lot of broken marriages
219. 20:02and kids raised in different situations. And I look at some of these kids, who in my opinion,
220. 20:09turned out very well. I think what would've happened if their parents stayed together
221. 20:12and I think they would've been different. I can't say for sure that it would be so much
222. 20:21better. They had a hard time, some of them, but it also made them survivors. You look
223. 20:30today at these helicopter parents in these upper middle class homes and some of the kids
224. 20:36that I'm seeing in college, and then you meet working-class kids who had a more difficult
225. 20:40time or even some of the kids in my family who had to be...you just wonder if there are
226. 20:45some advantages, I don't want to say advantages because you wouldn't want to put someone through
227. 20:50that. But on the other hand, a lot of those kids do seem, I don't know, seem to be a little
228. 20:56more, yeah, I can't even say well-adapted, but just ready to take on the world than these
229. 21:03hyperprotected kids. Brad: Yeah, I think being raised by a single mother can, I think, in
230. 21:07some ways, for instance, that's my experience, can give you certain experiences that are
231. 21:15challenging in ways that actually do prepare you later in life for a tough scenario once
232. 21:22or another. But I think we have to acknowledge that on average, again, the average story
233. 21:26here is more risk for kids raised apart from the intact married families. Another important
234. 21:30point here... Christina: That's a good point. It's a risk. It's not saying this will happen,
235. 21:34it just says maybe 25% of kids from broken homes are going to run into serious problem.
236. 21:45The percentage is a lot lower. Brad: And different kids experience family instability differently.
237. 21:50There's a fascinating new study from my mentor at Princeton, Sara McLanahan, looking at genes
238. 21:54actually and father absence. And what she is finding is it looks like some boys have
239. 22:00a genetic risk for acting in an antisocial way, and it's those boys, not all boys, but
240. 22:07those boys who are more likely to be affected on that outcome when their dad is absent from
241. 22:12the home. So again... Christina: But boys with that gene and the father's in the home...
242. 22:16Brad: Yeah, but the complex of genes that are related to this. Christina: They can't...it's
243. 22:19hard to... Brad: So there's a way in which there may be an interaction between nature
244. 22:22and nurture here, so that some kids, again, are being affected more by, in this case,
245. 22:27fatherlessness than other kids. And so other kids are going to be pretty resilient in the
246. 22:30face of different family configurations.