When we think about what shaped our life trajectory, we often focus on the way our parents raised us. But what about our siblings? What role do they play in who we become?

My guest today makes the case that siblings may be just as influential as parents in impacting how we turn out.

Her name is Susan Dominus, and she’s a journalist and the author of The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan and I start our conversation by unpacking the broader question of what drives human development more — nature or nurture. We then dig into how siblings shape us, from the impact of birth order to how rivalry can raise our ambitions and alter our life paths. Along the way, we also explore the influence parents do have on their kids — and why it may not be as strong as we often think.

Connect With Susan Dominus

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few months ago, psychologist Jean Twenge released 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. Twenge has spent decades studying generational shifts in behavior (check out the podcast we did with her about differences between generations), and her message with this book is simple: today’s kids are growing up in a world of constant connection — smartphones, social media, gaming — and it’s not going well for them. For nearly a decade, she’s been sounding the alarm about what increased time on screens is doing to kids. Depression, anxiety, and sleep issues have all climbed, while dating, hanging out with friends, and even driving have decreased as screen time has gone up.

Her book offers a practical roadmap for parents on how to raise kids in today’s digital environment. What I like about her advice is that it’s realistic. She doesn’t pretend that we can go back to 1988 when kids just had access to a television and a landline. She shows parents how they can help their kids use technology without it using them.

Below are rules inspired by Twenge’s book, along with how Kate and I have tried to apply them in our own home.

1. You’re in Charge

Twenge’s first rule is the foundation for all the others: parents — not kids, not peers, not tech companies — set the terms for how technology enters the home. Don’t default to giving your kid a screen just because everyone else is.

Our kids have been using iPads since they were little, but we’ve always set clear boundaries and rules regarding what apps they could use, how long they could be on the devices, etc. We didn’t just hand them a screen and say, “Have at it!” From day one, we’ve made it clear that using a device is a privilege, not a right. When you start from that assumption, the rest follows naturally.

2. Delay Smartphones and Social Media

If Twenge had her way, no kid would get a smartphone before mid-high school. Her research shows that the later a child gets one, the better their mental health tends to be.

Our son Gus is a high school freshman and still doesn’t have a smartphone. It hasn’t been a big issue. We tell him, “You’ll get one when we can see a demonstrable need for it.” So far, we haven’t. When he starts driving, that’ll probably change. Until then, he can message friends on his iPad (which stays at home), and if he needs to call us, there are still these things called landline phones at school.

We also delay social media. Our 12-year-old daughter Scout doesn’t have any accounts, and Gus just has a teen account on Instagram.

For more advice on when to give your kid a smartphone, check out our article where we asked tech experts for their take on the right age to take this step.

3. Create Tech-Free Zones and Times

According to Twenge, boundaries aren’t just about how much tech your kids use but where and when they use it. Bedrooms, mealtimes, and family gatherings should be screen-free.

We’ve stuck to that pretty closely. No devices in bedrooms. No devices at the dinner table. One screen at a time — no using your iPad while you’re also watching television by yourself or we’re watching a movie as a family. Devices live in shared spaces, and can only be used in designated time windows. Once those windows expire, that’s it. Predictability kills potential arguments.

4. Use Parental Controls and Clear Rules

Twenge argues that monitoring your kids’ tech use isn’t snooping. It’s appropriate oversight.

We use Apple’s Family Sharing tools, which let us approve app downloads, set screen time limits, and view activity reports. My kids can only iMessage approved contacts. When they want to add someone else to their contacts, we have a conversation: “Tell me about this kid. How do you know her? What’s she like?”

But as I discussed on the podcast with family tech expert Emily Cherkin, you can’t rely solely on a device’s built-in parental control apps to keep your kids safe. There are things you can do to get around those, and they’re not fail-proof. That’s why we do random check-ins with our kids where we sit with them and look through their iPad to see what they’ve been doing online — the sites they’ve been visiting, the YouTube channels they’ve been watching, the kids they’ve been messaging.

If we see something that breaks our family’s rules about what’s an appropriate use of the iPad, the consequence is straightforward: use of the device is rescinded for a period. No yelling, no debate.

Once our kids get their own smartphones, we’ll continue to know their passwords. We’ll tell them, “We won’t ever read your texts — unless your behavior gives us a reason to.”

5. Encourage Real-World Freedom and Independence

One of Twenge’s key points is that real-world play builds confidence in ways digital life never can. So while you’re telling your kids to get off the iPad, encourage them to get out into the real world, touch grass, and be independent.

We’ve been doing that with Gus and Scout during the summers. We’ll occasionally just kick them out of the house and say, “Don’t come back inside for a few hours.” What do they do? They go on long treks through suburbia, maybe walking to Maverick to get a snack, then to PetSmart to look at hamsters. They’ve learned to handle themselves by being by themselves.

6. Talk About Online Behavior, Risk, and Self-Control

Twenge urges parents to talk about the internet the way previous generations talked about cars. Like cars, the internet is useful and fun, but dangerous if misused.

We’ve had countless conversations with our kids about digital self-control. “Don’t text anything you wouldn’t want someone to screenshot.” “Don’t assume messages disappear.”

When we see stories about scams or sextortion, we talk about them with our kids. I’ll show them an article about a teen caught in a phishing scheme or a news clip about a social media challenge gone wrong. I’m not trying to scare them; I’m just trying to make the risks of being online concrete.

7. Model Good Tech Habits

Kids learn tech behavior from their parents. If you’re glued to your phone, they’ll be glued to theirs.

This rule . . . I’m not always very good at this rule. My job lives online, which makes this tricky. I’m constantly checking my email for work. So I’ve had to set non-negotiable rules for myself: no phone at dinner; no scrolling during family time; no sneaking peeks at my phone while my kids are trying to talk to me. Gus and Scout know I struggle with it, and that’s actually helpful. They’ll call me out when I’m sliding, and they can see how dopey you look when you’re staring at a black rectangle.

8. Recognize That Time Is Limited

Twenge’s research shows that screen time doesn’t just eat hours — it replaces them. Every hour online is an hour not spent sleeping, reading, playing, or developing real-world skills.

The solution isn’t simply to take screens away; it’s to fill that space with something better — sports, reading, hobbies, music — anything that creates real memories. Twenge asks a good question: What will your kid remember doing? They won’t remember scrolling YouTube, but they will remember hitting a game-winning shot, building a fort, or laughing with friends until they couldn’t breathe.

Make sure, as you reduce screen time in your kid’s life, that you encourage them to fill it with something positive.

9. Be Consistent and Clear About Consequences

Rules are only as good as their follow-through.

Our kids know the tech rules and what happens when they break them. There’s no negotiation and no “just this once.” Parent like a video game.

10. Stay Flexible but Firm

Twenge ends with balance. Rules are important, but rigidity backfires.

We loosen up on things like long drives — screens are fine in moderation. But even then, they have to oscillate between spending an hour on screens and then two hours off. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s balance. When your daughter is home sick from school? Well, she can play Roblox more than usual.

There’s no escaping the digital world our kids inhabit. But we can shape how they move through it. What I like about Twenge’s 10 Rules is that it’s not an anti-tech manifesto. It’s a reasonable and realistic guide to helping your kids thrive in this digital world.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you’re a busy dad, the first day of school can sneak up on you.

One day you’re taking your family on a road trip through the American West, and then — BAM!— it’s the night before the first day of school, and your kids are still going to bed at midnight and you and your wife just realized that all the kids have different school start times, and you haven’t coordinated rides yet.

Kate and I have been sending our kids off to their first day of school after summer vacation for over a decade now. We’ve learned some things along the way to make the transition from vacation mode to school mode a bit smoother. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

Have a Back-to-School Marriage Meeting Two Weeks Before School Starts

We’re big proponents of the weekly marriage meeting. A couple of weeks before school starts, Kate and I will have a longer marriage meeting that’s dedicated to getting us both on the same page for back to school.

In the “To-Dos” section of your marriage meeting, discuss the following:

• Drop-off and pick-up schedules
• Back-to-school forms that need filling out
• School supplies and clothes shopping
• New upcoming bedtimes
• Extracurricular activities that kids need to sign up for
• Calendar sync-up
  • Add all known school events: back-to-school night, parent-teacher conferences, etc.
  • Map out sports practices, music lessons, tutoring, and activity overlaps
• Homework routines for kids
• Any concerns about your kid and the school year ahead

After you discuss this stuff as a couple, have a family meeting where you sync up with your kids and make sure everyone is on the same page regarding schedules and expectations.

Get the School Sleep Schedule Back on Track

When it comes to shifting from a feral, let-it-all-hang-out summer sleep/wake schedule to a structured school-year sleep/wake schedule, there are two philosophies.

You either work to move your kids’ schedules back before school starts so by the time the first day rolls around, they’re on the school schedule, or you don’t do any adjusting and just rip the band-aid off when the alarm clock starts blaring on the first day of the semester.

There is merit to both approaches: one is gentler on the body and mind. The other maximizes the fun summer vibes.

I take something of a moderate tack, having my kids start to push their bedtimes back before school, but not going all the way to the school-year bedtime until school actually begins.

You probably know this already, but kids generally don’t do well with abrupt transitions. Neither do adults, really — we just have more socially acceptable ways to melt down.

So a week before school starts, we gradually move our kids’ bedtimes earlier by around 15 minutes a night until they’re about an hour off from their school-year bedtime. We let them go to bed at that later-than-usual time the night before school starts, since they’re not going to be able to fall asleep earlier. They’ll be a bit more tired on the first day, but that helps them fall asleep at their new school-year bedtime the next night.

Create a Get-Out-the-Door Checklist for Your Kids

One of the recurring friction points we experienced with our kids when they were younger was that they’d forget items they needed to bring to school: snack, water bottle, homework folder. That sort of thing. Because they were six, they’d sometimes have a meltdown in the car about this right when we were dropping them off.

To prevent those 8 AM crashouts from occurring, we wrote a morning checklist on our kitchen whiteboard that our kids had to go through before we got in the car:

• Eat breakfast
• Brush teeth
• Homework folder signed and in backpack
• Snack in backpack
• Water bottle

Meltdowns averted.

When your kids get older, nudge them to create their own morning routines.

Establish a Confidence-Inspiring Back-to-School Ritual

Kids can get a little nervous as they contemplate embarking on the uncertain adventure that is the year to come. So establish a ritual that helps them feel more grounded as they go back to school.

We like to talk to our kids about any concerns they have and what their goals are for the year. Then I say a father’s blessing (a prayer) over them. Create a ritual that works for your family.

There’s a lot going on during back-to-school season. With a bit of planning and gradual, proactive ramp-up efforts, you can create a smoother transition for everyone in the family.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally.

The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational.

But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness.

Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting
• AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management
• AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap

Connect With Nate Klemp

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

These days, you hear more and more about parents and adult children being estranged from each other. Some individuals have even decided to go “no contact” with their parents; they don’t want anything to do with their mom and/or dad at all.

To understand what’s behind this phenomenon, today I talk to Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who’s spent 40 years counseling families and the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. Joshua

goes beyond the typical one-sided narratives around parent-child estrangement that tell the story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents, to unpack the larger cultural context for why these tensions have arisen. We discuss how society has moved from upholding a honor-thy-father-and-mother sense of obligation to prioritizing individuality and optionality, and why despite the fact that we’re more child-focused and psychologically aware than ever, familial estrangements are on the rise. We get into the common reasons for estrangement, the role that expanding ideas of what constitutes abuse and trauma and an adult child’s therapist can play in it, and how much parents can really be blamed for how their kids turn out. And we get into what parents who are estranged from their children can do to reconcile with them. Even if you’re not personally estranged from a family member, the discussion of the underlying dynamics influencing all our modern relationships is a fascinating one.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #788: The Dangers of “Concept Creep”
• AoM Podcast #873: The Myths of Trauma

Connect With Joshua Coleman

• Joshua’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. These days, you hear more and more about parents and adult children being estranged from each other. Some individuals have even decided to go no contact with their parents. They don’t want anything to do with their mom and/or dad at all. To understand what’s behind this phenomenon today I talked to Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who spent 40 years counseling families, and the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.

Joshua goes beyond the typical one-sided narratives around parent-child estrangement that tell the story of parents you’ve got what they deserve, or overly entitled adult children who randomly we blame their parents, to impact the larger cultural context for why these tensions have arisen. We discuss how society is moved from upholding an honor thy father and mother sense of obligation to prioritizing individuality and optionality, and why despite the fact we’re more child-focused and psychologically aware than ever, familial estrangements are on the rise. We get into the common reasons for estrangement, the role that expanding ideas of what constant abuse and trauma and adult child’s therapist can play in it, and how much parents can really be blamed for how their kids turn out. And we get into what parents who are estranged from their children can do to reconcile with them. Even if you’re not personally estranged from a family member, the discussion of the underlying dynamics influencing all our modern relationships is a fascinating one. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/estrangement.

Alright, Dr. Joshua Coleman, welcome to the show.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So, you are a psychologist who specializes in working with parents and adult children who have become estranged from each other, and you were in a book about that called the Rules of Estrangement. We’ll start with the definitions first. What is parent-child estrangement?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: People define it in different ways. The way that I think about it is when there’s been a complete or near complete cut-off between the two. So, there’s little to no contact, maybe there’s the occasional birthday greeting, or Mother’s or Father’s Day greeting, but otherwise there is essentially no relationship.

Brett McKay: Does estrangement have to be explicit, like does either the parent or the child have to say, “I’m done with you. I don’t want anything to do with you,” or can it just be like a silent distancing?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Sometimes it works that way. I’ve had a lot of parents in my practice where all of a sudden the adult child isn’t responding to phone, text, emails, now they’re cut off from social media, sometimes they move and don’t tell the parent. So. That’s probably not the majority of cases, but those cases certainly exist.

Brett McKay: They ghost their parents, is what they’re doing.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Exactly. They ghost the parent, that’s right.

Brett McKay: It seems like more and more adult children are becoming estranged from their parents. It seems like every other week I see an article about this somewhere or something on social media about it. Is this a new phenomenon or is the media just covering it more so we just hear about it more, ’cause you see it on the news or your Instagram feed?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, I think the extent of it is new. I think we have to assume that there’s always been strained, distant, or even non-existent relationships between parents and adult children, but I don’t think it’s nearly the numbers that we’re seeing today. A recent study by Rin Reczek in Ohio state and her colleagues found that some 26% of fathers are estranged from an adult child. That same study found that 6% of mothers, but other studies show between 10% and 15% of mothers. I don’t think that those figures have always been the case. One of the problems from a research perspective is that we didn’t really… We don’t have a beginning, a start date to look at estranged with the way that we do other things, say, divorce, for example. But if we just use divorce, for example, as a start date, it’s clear that divorce is a really common pathway to estrangement. In my survey of 1,600 estranged parents that I conducted through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, we found that 70% of parents who were estranged were divorced from the other biological parent and didn’t become estranged until after the divorce.

So we know that if we just use divorce as a starting point, I would assume that there weren’t nearly the numbers of estrangement that there were once we started making divorce a more common part of our culture. Similarly, if you look at non-marital childbirth in the 1960s, only 5% of children were born outside of marriage. Today, it’s more like 40%, and those families are very high risk for estrangement, particularly for fathers. So just using those as data points, I think those are significant. But then you add on to it this identitarian moment that we’re at currently, where one’s identity has become much more in the foreground, where the moral framework that kind of animated families for millennia, honor thy mother and thy father, respect thy elders, families forever, really in the past century has given way to this much more personal growth, self-esteem, pursuit of happiness framework, where relationships are much more constituted on what the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, calls “pure relationships”, meaning that the relationships that are purely constituted on the basis of whether or not the relationship is in line with my ideals for happiness and growth and the like.

And if they’re not, then not only can I cut out a parent or family member, I should do it. In some ways, it’s an act of existential cowardice not to do that. And I think that that’s historically new. Social media is absolutely an amplifier. Rising rates of individualism is an amplifier. So there’s a lot of things that I believe are fanning the flames to this.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The sections in the book where you kind of explore what’s driving the increase in estrangement, that was really interesting because you basically bring to the foreground things that have been happening in the background and how it’s affecting families. And so that shift that you talk about from the framework of honor thy father and thy mother, sort of the idea of filial duty, that doesn’t really exist anymore. It seems like the relationship between parents and children is something different.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. And particularly in Western societies. I think that that is probably not nearly as much the case in, say, South and East Asian countries, and large, probably the majority of areas in the Middle East. Soo I think that it’s mostly a western phenomenon. I don’t know if you’ve read Joseph Hinrich’s excellent book, The WEIRDest People in the World, where we’re is an acronym for a western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies. And one of the things that he found is that in those societies, people are just much more oriented towards their own happiness and identity and personal expression, and much less oriented towards relationships, and that’s just not the case in large parts of the world. So we don’t have good statistics about estrangement rates in other countries, but in my interviews with people in other countries, I find that it’s far less common.

Brett McKay: And it seems like to the expectation of the parent-child relationship, it’s more like a romantic or a friendship relationship where it’s a voluntary thing. Each party has to work for it and it has to fit for both parties.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. And it’s exactly right, that it’s kind of predicated on the same principles as Giddens pure relationship, that if it’s not in line with my ideals for happiness and personal growth and mental health, then not only can I jettison that relationship, but I should do it, and to not do it as an act of self-neglect.

Brett McKay: And one of the points you make throughout the book is that it used to be the children had to earn their parents love and respect, but now it’s the opposite, the parent’s job is to earn their children’s love and respect, and they have to continue to do that throughout their children’s adult lives.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: That’s right. Well, nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with that parent beyond that adult child’s desire to have that relationship. So if the moral framework has shifted around families away from the parents are sort of owed a certain degree of gratitude and obligation and responsibility and respect, and it’s much more predicated on whether or not the relationship is in line with the adult child’s ideals and standards, that really disempowers the parent in terms of their ability to negotiate the relationship and greatly empowers the adult child. And this is partly a function of smaller family sizes, the role of therapy, that we used to think the difficulties in life would actually make children stronger, but over the 20th century, we began to develop the idea that children are fragile, that they’re vulnerable, that they require a kind of hothouse parenting in order to thrive and succeed.

And in the era of personal rights in the 1960s, children’s rights became very much in the foreground. So the era of children being seen and not heard gave way to children really being the center of family life. And today, I mean, I’m a boomer, and so when I was growing up, my stay-at-home mother spent less time with me than career mothers spend with their children today. So children had moved much more into the front and center of a family life, and that’s really increased their authority to sort of dictate the terms both when they’re young, living in the home, but also when they’re grown.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the paradoxes you point out in the book, is that we’re more child-focused and we’re also more psychologically aware than ever, like, everyone’s read the books on how to talk to your kid written by psychologists, they talk to their kids in a very therapeutic way, yet estrangement seem to be rising.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I think it’s similar as to the kind of high stable divorce rates, that we’re still at around 50% divorce rates. And on the one hand, the good news about parental-child relationships is that if you look at some of the large surveys, probably the majority of parents raising adult children or having relationships with adult children would say that they feel closer to them than they believe their parents felt to them at a similar age. So in many ways, this much more intensive, psychologically aware, conscientious form of parenting, I think has, in many ways, really increased the quality of relationships between parents and adult children. In the same way, that moral egalitarian psychologically intensive marriages and communication have made for better marriages. But both sides, both marriage and parent-adult child relationships, are based upon this much more kind of unstable quality which is that if it doesn’t feel good, you can leave, and not only can you leave, but you should leave. So it’s really the culture of both kinds of relationships that are based on, framed much less around the more moral old school ideals around family and much more around this identitarian personal happiness, personal growth, personal expression orientation.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like there’s plus and minuses to the shift.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: There are indeed, yeah. And it isn’t my position that nobody should or can never estranged themselves from a parent or any other destructive family member. I think in the same way that the legalization of divorce laws allowed people, women in particular, to be able to leave abusive marriages, I think that our cultural shift that’s more supportive of estrangement has allowed adult children who maybe in other cultures or at other times would have felt obligated to stay in contact with parents who are really destructive to their self-esteem or happiness, they’re allowed to separate from them. That’s the upside. And the downside is that it’s so easy to do it that in the same way that making divorce so easy to obtain means that a lot of people who probably could have and did in fact work their way through difficult issues when they were married, when they really couldn’t get a divorce or couldn’t easily get a divorce, they figured it out, similarly with adult children, to cut off parents that with more time and patience and effort, they might be able to work something through with a parent that they now can easily discard.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a big source of contention between parents and children is that parents and children, particularly older parents, like we are boomers, they’re both in two different worlds, like moral worlds, when it comes to parent-child relationships. Like the older parent might think, “Well, no, it’s old school, you honor thy father and thy mother, and you just gotta come see me even if you don’t want to, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” And then the kid’s like, “No, that’s not how it is,” and then the parent gets upset, and that’s the source of tension.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: No, that’s exactly right. And so much of my work is helping… ‘Cause it’s typically the parent that reaches out to me, ’cause it’s typically the parent is the one who’s been estranged. Parents don’t typically estranged their children, some do for religious reasons, or they disapprove of their child’s gender identity or sexuality or who they married, but that’s the vast minority. Typically, if an estrangement happens, it’s because the adult child has initiated it. And a lot of my work is helping parents kind of navigate the way that guilt no longer works, that ship has sailed, the way that you can sort of guilt trip your child into contact or making them…

Reminding them of all the things that you’ve done for them. And the other part and parcel of that, I know you had Nick Haslam on your show and he wrote, you know, I think, one of the most important articles to explain this moment or the notion of concept creep. And that is the idea of that in the past three decades… Well, he wrote the article, I think in 2016, but there’s been this enormous expansion over what we consider to be harmful, abusive, traumatizing, neglectful behavior. So younger generations have been kind of steeped in this framework, and whether it’s with their own therapist, or self-help, or podcasts, or Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers, ideas about who’s a borderline parent, who’s a narcissist, who’s a gaslighter, etcetera, why you should cut off your parent, the value in doing that…

Whereas older generations, Gen X and boomers, for example, were raised with a much more conservative view of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing, neglectful behavior. So what often happens is that younger generations are coming to their parents after as a result of being in therapy or some other influence and saying, “Well, you emotionally abused me,” or, “You neglected me,” or, “This was emotional incest,” or any of the other terms that are so popular. And parent’s response is often like, “What are you talking about? That wasn’t abuse, I would have killed to have a childhood like yours. That wasn’t abusive.” And then of course, as you can imagine, then they’re off to the races, then the adult child feels really misunderstood, they feel like they’ve got evidence based on their culture of information, whereas the parent feels completely disrespected and hurt and misunderstood based on their ideals of what good parenting looks like. So a lot of my work is often helping parents to see how much the ground has changed and really learning how to use the language that their children are using, so it’s not so incomprehensible to them.

Brett McKay: As I was reading through that section about the shift between duty-bound to more intentional relationships between parents and children, it forced me to reflect like, what kind of relationship I wanna have with my kids. And I think I’m sort of like the new school, like, I don’t feel like my kids owe me anything, they didn’t ask to be born. Even though I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and money into them, they’ve given me meaning, and joy, and purpose, so it seems like neither of us owe each other anything, we both… Maybe both owe each other equally. And when I think about my kids getting older, and leaving the house, I want them to come back because they want to, and not just out of obligation. ‘Cause I just feel like it wouldn’t feel good if it was begrudging and they were just visiting me because they felt like they had to.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, you might not feel that way if that was the only way you could ever see a child or grandchildren again.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: I mean, the people in my practice, the parents and grandparents in my practice are miserable. I did a retreat for estranged parents last year. There was 15 people in the room, and one of the mothers was talking about feeling suicidal, and I said, “By show of hands, if anybody else felt suicidal as a result of their estrangement,” and every single person raised their hands. Now, those were mostly mothers, I think dads tend to be better at compartmentalizing, but the amount of misery that these parents and grandparents are feeling, to me, I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for people to show up out of a sense of duty or obligation.

I mean, obviously, we’d all rather our children spend time with us because they love us or wanna spend time with us or they think that we’re so great, but I think if I have the choice between seeing my kids multiple times a year and they were kind of… I mean, assuming that they weren’t just miserable, acting miserably towards me while I was here, but if I felt like the only way I could get them to come would be out of some sense of duty and obligation, but they could have a reasonable time, they weren’t assholes about it, you know, [0:17:19.7] ____ then I would take that deal because it would be better than the absolute of [0:17:24.0] ____ of never seeing them again, which is the fate that’s facing so many parents and grandparents today. So I actually do think that adult children owe their parents something. They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the parent, neither would they have children if there’s grandchildren involved.

Now, does that mean that they have to accept abusive behavior. No. Does that mean they have to be as available to the parent as that parent wants them to be, or that the parent can just communicate as crappily as they want to and be difficult or demanding or whatever? Absolutely not. The parent still has to do their part, they have to show up in this 21st century way. They still have to be somewhat conscientious about how they impact of their child, they have to be open to getting feedback about the way that their parenting may have impact on their child. So I think both sides owe, at the very least, they owe each other due diligence. So an adult child owes the parent the opportunity to work through their issues and to give them the time to do that, to do family therapy, to give them a pathway towards doing that, to see that the parent really did do the best they could raising their child as a result of their own genetics or socio-economic class, or their uncharted traumas or experiences, or who they were married to, and then a certain degree of compassion should be brought to bear from both sides. At the same time, parents have to do a lot of work towards taking responsibility and showing empathy towards their children for how they impacted them. They can’t just say, “Hey, I did the best that I could. Too bad.” The parents still has to really be self-reflective and take responsibility, and meet this moment where they do have to be much more psychological.

Brett McKay: In your work, what are the most common issues that cause parent child estrangement?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Sure. I mean, if you look at the adult child’s perspective, what they will say is, emotional abuse is probably the biggest complaint, values, differences, sometimes physical abuse. And that is certainly one pathway. And I do see that in my practice, but it isn’t the only pathway. Other pathways are divorce, as I mentioned earlier. That’s probably the single most common pathway to estrangement, particularly for fathers. Divorce can cause one parent to alienate the other parent with a child. It may bring in new people that the child has to compete with for emotional or material resources. It could cause the child to not like the new half siblings or step siblings. In a highly individualistic culture like ours, it could cause the child, young or old to see the parents more as individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses unless there’s a family unit that they’re a part of, that’s huge.

When the adult child marries, that can be a trigger point. If the person that the adult child marries doesn’t like the parent or parents and says, “Choose them or me, you can’t have both.” That’s oddly not that uncommon. Mental illness on the part of the parent or addictive issues on the part of the parent, certainly, but also mental illness or addictive issues on the part of the adult child. Therapy, bad therapy or therapists who assume that every symptom that an adult child has comes from bad parenting and they support or encourage an estrangement. And finally, because parents have been investing much more in the past four decades or so, in particular, some adult children don’t know any other way to feel separate from the parent than to cut them off. In some ways, they’ve gotten too much of a good thing.

So, I mean, since I’m a boomer, I mean parents in my parents’ generation probably erred more on the side of being sort of neglectful in a certain way, dads in particular. But parents of my generation and every generation since, I think, if they erred on either side, it was towards being more intrusive, more enmeshed with their children. People have given up on their social, you know, my mother used to play Mahjong with the girls every week, and my dad was at the Y playing squash all weekend or golfing, and none of them worried about us feeling neglected. And that has largely changed, where children have really become front and center and people have given up on time with other people or other interests.

And again, it’s largely a net, again, but it also means that some kids just get too much of the parent, particularly in the age of cell phone use, where there’s kind of no escape. I think a certain percentage of estranges would never happen if the kid could just have had the experience that so many of us had where we move away and maybe we write our a parents two weeks later, maybe we call them collect once in a while. Whereas for my generation of parents and every generation since, you could just reach your child from any point in the world. And I think that can just be somewhat intrusive for some kids.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This kid feels suffocated, and in order to create some boundaries, they’re just like, I gotta cut you off completely.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, exactly. That’s true. I mean, boundaries is the single most common word I see in every letter from an estranged child. “You need to respect my boundaries.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. Going back to that idea of abuse, you say abuse, whether it’s physical abuse or emotional abuse, that’s a legitimate reason to cut off your parents. But as you mentioned with Nick Haslam’s work, what constitutes abuse has changed, like, it’s expanded. So, things maybe 30 years ago wouldn’t have been considered abuse, now it’s considered abuse and a reason for cutoff.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Abuse and trauma. I mean, trauma I think is grossly misused and misunderstood. I mean, the research on trauma by people like, George Bonanno at Columbia or Joel Paris at University of Toronto shows that traumatic experience doesn’t necessarily have the lifelong implications and deformation that we’re sort of made to feel like it has. Not to make light of it, but 25% of people may have lifelong issues as a result of traumatic experiences, but 75% won’t. And I think our culture does a poor job distinguishing between distress and trauma or conflict and abuse. And I think all of those get kind of blended together, which on the one hand I wouldn’t care, except that so many young adults are sort of using that as a reason to estrange the parent saying, “Well, you traumatized me when I was young, and therefore I don’t owe you a relationship.”

And so, the good news again about that is that it sort of provides people with a way to talk about painful experiences and have a social legitimacy in talking about them, that they might not have had in other generations. But the bad news is that yes, it has been so grossly expanded that things that shouldn’t really fall under that rubric get called that. And then with the wrong therapist or the wrong set of information, that person is on the way to cutting off a parent who was very good. I mean, the sociologist Eva Illouz says that today our lives are plotted backwards. What’s a dysfunctional family? It’s a family where your needs weren’t met. How do you know that your needs weren’t met? By looking at your present condition. And I like that quote because so many young adults are coming into therapy or into adulthood and thinking, “Well, I’ve got depression or anxiety or other serious psychological issues. I need to sort of reverse engineer this and look at my childhood and figure out where the traumas were, so I can understand that.”

And a certain percentage of them likely weren’t traumatized, but another percentage aren’t gonna be. I mean, if we look at the research just on cohort effects, the research of Jean Twenge or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that just the fact that you’re a Gen Z, that you’re born between 1995 and 2012 roughly, means you’re at far greater risk for depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, anxiety. And it’s not ’cause parents have suddenly become worse parents that are traumatizing their kids left and right. It’s because of the cohort, it’s because of what’s happening generationally with cell phones and social media and the like. So, I think that parents are wrongly, aggressively blamed in our culture. I think my field does a lot of harm in that regard and sort of assuming that every adult psychopathology has a problematic, traumatizing parent at its helm.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

Yeah. That idea that you try to make sense of your life backwards. So if your life is messed up and you kind of, “Okay, I’m gonna go to the past and like figure out what happened. Well, it was the way I was parented.”

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.

Brett McKay: I’ve seen this instance in families where one kid, adult kid’s like, “Well, my life is terrible and it’s because the way our parents raised us as kids.”

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.

Brett McKay: Then they have a sibling who was raised by the same parents largely the same way, and their life is great. And they feel like, “Well, I thought the way our parents raised us was awesome.” [laughter] So, there’s a lot of subjectivity in how people remember their childhood or how they attribute their state in life now to their parents.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Absolutely. And also what their experience was. I mean, one of my things I say to parents is you have to have embraced the separate reality’s nature of family life, that you could credibly feel like you did a good job raising your child and your child could credibly feel like they wish you had done something different. I mean, even if people are growing up in the same family, they may have very, very different experiences based on birth order, who temperamentally they’re more alike between the parents, what was going on in the home at the age that it happened to them.

So, constitutionally, somebody’s born with an incredibly sensitive temperament, they’re gonna experience parental irritability or maybe lack of availability, even if it’s within normal limits as far more influential and problematic than say a kid who’s born with a much more robust temperament. So, kids who are growing up in the same home may have very different experiences of the parents more based on the kind of temperaments that they’re born with, than the parents being so different in how they respond.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean that could, I can see that that, so temperament’s kind of like personality, right?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.

Brett McKay: I mean, I could see the case where a kid’s personality, sort of inborn temperament, kind of rubs the parent the wrong way and like the parent tries to do their best to work with it. But you know, some kids are just annoying, but people don’t wanna say that. And so [laughter], you know the…

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s true.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And so the parent, you know, the kid’s annoying and then the parent responds kind of like, “Ah, Jesus, this kid’s annoying.” And then the kid picks up on that. It’s like, “Oh, my dad thinks I’m annoying,” and then becomes estranged as an adult.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, right. And that, it is true. And we look at what researchers called the child to parent effects. It’s like what kind of behaviors induce what from parents? So, we know that, say for example, if a kid has ADD, attention deficit disorder, they’re just harder to parent because they’re harder to organize, they’re more distractible. It’s harder just to keep them on track. So, they may be just much more irritating to raise from the parent’s perspective. And the parent may express more of that irritability and the child may later in life say, “Well, you were always so critical of me growing up.” And the child realistically may not really even be aware of the challenges that they brought temperamentally into the situation. And then they feel that the parent really failed them because they didn’t really provide them with the sort of more ideal kind of parenting that they feel like they needed, wanted or deserved. And then, if a parent responds with, “Well, it’s ’cause you were so difficult then they’re just greenlit to the…

Brett McKay: Oh yeah.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Towards the path of estrangement. And that’s sort of, is another important aspect of this is that if you grow up and you have severe mental problems, that let’s say that they’re not parentally induced, it’s still tempting for people to blame the parent because it’s such a powerful way of directing the shame away from the self. I mean, it’s a powerful story, right? It’s a very appealing way to feel like, “I could have been different than where I’m at now,” if you’re feeling like you’re not very happy with where you are now. It sort of allows you to preserve a sense of oneself is ideal or, you know, of limitless potential if you were given the right set of circumstances.

So, it’s a way of saying, “Well, if you had parented me differently, my life would be so much better.” And clearly sometimes that’s the case, but it’s not always the case. And that’s also another point of concern for parents who believe and objectively seem like they did a really good job and their child still turned out to have significant psychological issues, either because of genetic vulnerabilities, or socioeconomic class, or random bad luck. I mean, there’s so many different influences of adult outcome that have very little to do with parenting that we as a society, again, are way too focused on parents and not on all these other influences.

Brett McKay: You mentioned therapists can play a role in estrangement. Tell me about that.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, I think in over attributing causality to childhood experiences and assuming that… That’s what worries me about Gen Z, we’re having all these psychological issues getting into therapy, is that if a therapist isn’t more sophisticated about all the various pathways to adult psycho… To depression, anxiety, et cetera, then if there kind of a one note symphony of everything is due to parental childhood traumas and family dysfunction, then that really just increases the likelihood of an estrangement because then they might say, “Well, you feel triggered when you’re around your parent and this is why, because of these experiences maybe be it’d better for you not to be around them, ’cause we don’t want you to be triggered by them.” And so I just think that too many therapists today are too quick to blame parents, and partly, ’cause of what we were saying earlier, that it can feel sort of empowering to the person who otherwise is gonna blame themselves.

If a therapist says, “Well it’s not your fault, it’s your your parents’ fault that you have these issues,” that can be kind of relieving. And I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t end up cutting off parents who, in many cases, are quite workable and wanna do the right thing, and in many ways were very, very dedicated. So, no, I think therapists and many people in my field are doing an enormous disservice to younger adult, or to adults in general to the extent that they’re blaming parents for these issues. It’s not to say that that never occurs. Of course, there are traumatizing parents, absolutely. But not at the levels that they get blamed to be.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And something else you talk about is when an adult child goes to a therapist and maybe they start carping about their parent, like the therapist only hears the kid’s side of the story. They typically, they don’t have the parent’s. So like sometimes a not good therapist, a bad therapist will start diagnosing the not present parents. “Whoa, it sounds like your parent’s a narcissist and you need to stay away from them.” Like, you can’t diagnose someone you haven’t talked to. And so that’s not good.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. Well, you shouldn’t, and and not only that, but diagnosis also provides a kind of moral framework to reject people. It’s sort of like, well, I mean, I’ve seen letters from adult children where they say, “Well, my therapist said that my mother’s a narcissist, and therefore family therapy wouldn’t work.” And that we have become kind of the new high priest that tell people who to be close to, who not to be close to, who’s problematic. We really have replaced religious leaders in our culture in terms of this sort of moral position we put in ourselves, into in terms of who it’s okay to be close to, and what should be considered even abusive behaviors, boundary crossing, what’s gaslighting, all of that. We have too much authority in our society to make these kind of determinations.

And most therapists won’t interview the parent and they shouldn’t be giving a diagnosis if they haven’t actually met the parent. I mean, somebody might sound like a narcissist, but the way somebody presents in therapy and what they tell the therapist isn’t necessarily going to be completely accurate. Which is why when I’m working with a parent, I will always see if I can talk to the adult child, ’cause I wanna get their perspective. I’ll ask for correspondence from the parent and the adult child. Sometimes parents will say, “Well, my kid’s impossible, and they’re a narcissist.” And I’ll see the correspondence and I’ll think, actually your kid is really trying very hard here, and your responses to them are really problematic. So families are systems. If you’re only just looking at one part of it, you’re really not in that good of a position to know… I mean, at least when it comes to something so consequential as cutting off a family member. I mean, we can have opinions, but if you’re wading into something as consequential and serious as encouraging an estrangement, you better know what the hell you’re advising because you have an incredibly sad, lonely, broken parent or grandparent on the other end that has to also be factored into your analysis.

Brett McKay: Are women or men more likely to cut off a parent?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: There aren’t huge differences, but in general, men are. That probably has to do with the sociological concept of kin keeping, that women tend to be more mindful of family relationships and be more motivated to keep track of them, and the like. So statistically, it’s somewhat more likely that a son would than a daughter would, but the numbers aren’t huge.

Brett McKay: Something else you talk about that can contribute to men becoming estranged from their parents more than women are ideas around manhood itself. Can you talk to us about that?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I particularly see this in, if a daughter-in-law doesn’t like the parents, then the son can take the position of it’s what I call performative masculinity. So, I work with a lot of families where the son was close to the parents prior to getting married, then the son marries somebody who’s somewhat troubled and basically says, “Choose them or me.” And the son engages by confronting the parents and saying, “You can’t talk to my wife that way,” or, “This is my family now,” or, “I need to protect my family,” or, “They’re my new priority. You are not.” So, it does all become kind of entangled with this idea of masculinity, which can make the dynamic that much more tricky to unravel.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And also you just see the sort of the cultural change of the relationship between particularly, sons and moms. So, you talk about this, if you go back to civil war times, you’d see these letters from civil war soldiers talking about, “My mom’s my best gal, and I love you so much.” Almost like love letters.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.

Brett McKay: And then a shift happened where it was like, “No, if you do that, you’re a mollycoddle. You’re a mama’s boy. So you gotta put some distance between you and mom.” And so now men were like, “Well, I don’t want to be too close to my parents because then that’s kind of, or particularly to my mother, ’cause that’s kind of weird.”

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s considered to be like, being a mama’s boy is a real epithet. It’s not considered an act of strength and value. It’s considered like if you’re really close to your mother, then somehow that makes you weak. Like, you’re hiding behind her aprons or something. And you’re right, historically that wasn’t always the case, that the idea that you’re close to your mother or wanna be close to her was considered sort of a strength in earlier periods. So, it really wasn’t until kind of the early 20th century and there became more of a concern about masculinity and, that, so that all began to change with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the likes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then so yeah, a wife can use that if she doesn’t like her mother-in-law or father-in-law, she can use that as kind of like a screw to turn and be like, “You need to stay away from them,” and the husband’s like, “No, I don’t want to, I wanna have a relationship with my mom,” it’s like, “Well, you’re just a mama’s boy.”

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I think it’s very easy to humiliate and shame men around their masculinity. So I think if a wife was motivated to get her husband to either confront his parents or stop talking to them she says, “Well, you’re a mama’s boy,” or, “You’re weak,” or, “We’re your new family now and you need to prioritize us,” or, “I don’t like how your parents talk to me. You need to stand up to them more. How come you’re not standing up to them more?” for many men, that would be a very hard message to resist. I mean, some could, but many couldn’t.

Brett McKay: When you work with parents and adult children who are estranged, who gets hit hardest? Like, I mean, is it harder on the child or the parent?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: I think it’s harder on the parent. I mean, for the adult child, there may be enormous upsides to the estrangement. They can feel like they’re pushing back against authority figures or destructive figures. They’re protecting themselves from more abuse. They’re standing up for themselves. They’re protecting their mental health. So it’s all can be tied to a very powerful narrative of individuation and separation and self-protection and mental health, personal growth, et cetera. So there’s enormous upside for the adult child. For the parent, there’s no upside. It’s all pain, sadness, loss, guilt, anger, regret. So that also influences who’s going to be doing the outreach. I mean, sometimes parents will say to me, “Well, how come… They can reach out to me?” And I’m like, “Well, are they reaching out to you? I mean, yeah, they can reach out to you, but it looks like if anybody’s gonna make a move in anybody’s direction, it’s gonna have to be you because your child wouldn’t be estranged unless they felt like it was had some value to them.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. This is the dynamic in any troubled relationship. It’s the person who doesn’t wanna be in the relationship, they actually, they have the power.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: That’s true. Absolutely. So the person who really wants it more has to be willing to take the initiative. And that’s typically the parent.

Brett McKay: How does it affect grandchildren?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: I think it’s terrible for grandchildren. I mean, particularly for those who are… A lot of the cases that I work with, a grandparent who’s very involved, even by the now estranged adult child’s own reckoning, they were decent grandparents, and that they’re really a casualty of the parent, adult child relationship. I mean, certainly some grandparents get cut off because the adult child doesn’t like how they grandparent. But I don’t think it’s the majority. It certainly isn’t the majority of the cases that I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a ton of these cases, typically they’re a casualty. And the way that the adult child often explains it is by saying, “Well, if it’s not good for me and my mental health and it’s not good for my children,” and that’s just not right. I mean, obviously if contact with your parent is so disabling to you that, you know, you absolutely can’t parent, then probably means you need to be spending more time in therapy if they still have that kind of an influence on you.

But you should be able to have conflict with your parent and keep your child’s grandparents in their lives if they’re good grandparents. ‘Cause a lot of parents will say to me, “I could maybe tolerate the estrangement from my child, what I find so intolerable emotionally is not being able to have time with my grandchild who I was so close to. What could they possibly be thinking? Do they think that I abandoned them?” And the grandparent-grandchild relationship is a very unique relationship that offers enormous benefits to both generations. There’s enormous value to grandchildren to having a good close living relationship with their grandparents. And there’s incredible value to grandparents. So this idea that if it’s not good for me, it’s not good for my kids, it sort of reminds me what some people when I used to do a lot of couples therapy would say, “Well, if I’m not happy in my marriage, then my children aren’t happy.” And it depends on how you’re expressing your unhappiness. A lot of people are able to contain their unhappiness in a certain way where it doesn’t have a deleterious effect on their children. Their children much rather they stay together than get divorced. So I think in our culture, we really overemphasize the importance of our own happiness in terms of the way that it radiates and out and affects other people in the family, children in particular.

Brett McKay: You advise the parents who wanna reconcile with their adult child to write an amends letter. What is that?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: An amends letter is getting on the same page as the adult child. It’s putting aside all defensiveness and criticism and blame and obligation and duty and guilt, and really trying to come at it from the perspective that the adult child is doing something that they feel is really important for them to do and has a lot of meaning to them. And so I always tell parents to start the letter with, “I know you wouldn’t have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” Now, from the parents’ perspective, they don’t necessarily feel like it’s the healthiest thing for them to do, but if their adult child wouldn’t be doing it unless they did. So saying that is kind of a way of saying, “Look, I am desirous of entering into your world, having a much deeper understanding.”

If there are things that the parents are aware of that really were problematic about their parenting, they should say it in a very straightforward way. “Yes, I could see how that was really hurtful to you, or I could see how that was traumatizing to you, and I’m really sorry, and I’m willing to work on that in my own therapy or therapy together. You know, or I could see why that might make it feel unsafe to spend time with me or triggering to you or distant, or why you might be mad at me.” I mean, it’s just a really deep dive of empathy into the child’s experience because nothing is gonna happen unless the parent is able to do that. And if they don’t know and parents don’t always know, then they should say something like, “It’s clear that I have significant blind spots as a parent or person, that I don’t have a better understanding, or that I didn’t know that that felt emotionally abusive or hurtful or traumatizing to you. But it’s something that I would like to learn more about and deepen my understanding and learn how to do better in the future.”

Brett McKay: That could be a hard pill to swallow.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Oh, it’s a very hard pill to swallow.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading that, that you have to like write, “I know that you wouldn’t have come off contact unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” I’m like, I don’t know if I could ever like sincerely say that, especially if I saw my kid was just doing something destructive with their life.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, yeah, you’re saying that “unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do,” I mean, normally an apology shouldn’t have “you felt like”, ’cause that sounds like an avoidance, but you’re, again, you’re just sort of trying to get into the child’s state of mind and outside of yours. No, these letters are not easy for parents to write, but they’re also kind of therapeutic for parents to write because we all make mistakes as parents. So being able to… Maybe we don’t feel like we deserve an estrangement as a result of it but we all make mistakes. So being able to kind of get it out on paper and expose yourself to it and come to some degree of acceptance over that, I mean, not only is it, I think, the best tool towards a potential reconciliation, but I think it’s also good for the parents’ mental health as well. You know, they talk about the step of make a fearless and searching moral inventory of your character flaw. So I think that can be really useful for parents as well.

Brett McKay: Okay. So it’s just you, it’s all about empathy. It’s just trying to show that, like, “I want to understand where you’re coming from,” and this may require you to put yourself in therapy speak. You might not be comfortable with that, but you have to see, okay, I understand where you’re coming from, with this. I mean, can you say I disagree? Like, “I don’t see it that way,” and still display empathy.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: I wouldn’t do that in an amends letter. Maybe if you’re into therapy and you’re like in the 10th session or something, there’s a place to do that. But really the advice is predicated on this principle that we were talking about earlier, about the way that family life has changed and it’s a way to telegraph to the adult child, “Look, I’m willing to navigate our relationship and negotiate it from the, this much more 21st century principle that relationships are based on the principles of mental health and personal growth and happiness. And that’s why the parent has to frame it in that kind of language. That’s the way they have to say, “You wouldn’t do this unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” That word is really kind of intentionally coded not in a manipulative way, but just kind of like that’s the basis that the relationship is based upon.

So yeah, it’s all about showing empathy because empathy is the one thing that’s gonna invite the adult child, first of all, to feel cared about, like, the parent’s really grappling with something. Most adult children know that these letters aren’t easy to write and they respect it. Now, that’s not to say that they always work, ’cause there’s really nothing I can say to any parent that I can say, “Oh, you know what, if you just do this, it’s your child’s definitely coming back to you.” There’s a lot of reasons why an adult child might not come back or might not be ready to come back anyway. They may be too negatively influenced by who they’re married to. Their therapist may be telling them it’s a bad idea. They may be too brainwashed by the other parent after divorce. They may still be too hurt or mad at you for things that did happen in the past and they’re just not ready yet to accept an apology. They may need to feel separate from you and aren’t really ready to move off of that position. So there’s… The tools that I recommend are based on a probabilistic model. Probably if you do this, there’s a better chance of a reconciliation than not. But there’s almost nothing in human behavior that we can ever say with certainty, “Yeah, you know what, just do this and your kid will come back into your door tomorrow.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. And again, the amends letter isn’t gonna be the thing that solves it. This is just like the opening bid to a conversation that might take, could take years.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: It could. If it’s well received, it shouldn’t take years because if the parent is sincere in the desire to learn more and to take responsibility and understand why their behavior impacted their child in the way that they did, then both people are able to communicate honestly and openly about it, then it shouldn’t take years. But to your earlier point, that doesn’t mean that the parent necessarily is gonna be able to disagree with the child’s perceptions or say, “Well, think about it, from my perspective, at least not early on.” First of the adult child really needs to feel, seen, heard, cared about and understood. Otherwise, the parent’s voice is just gonna be too big. If they say, “Well, I don’t see it that way,” or, “You’re wrong about that,” or, “That never happened,” that’s just going to shut the door down. And the goal is to open the door and keep it open long enough for some kind of fresh air to go between the rooms.

Brett McKay: And a reminder, going back to what we said if you’re a parent who has an estranged adult child and you know, you feel the words getting stuck in your throat as you try to be like, “I understand… ” ’cause you don’t believe it, you have to re… Just going back to the idea like if you want a relationship with your kids, like it’s up to you to make the first step. Like the kid, it’s probably fine. They got their own family. There’s more upside for them for not having a relationship with you. So they’re in control. So you gotta kind of be the one to make the opening bid.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s about humility, not humiliation. I mean, these letters can feel humiliating to the parent, but you know, from my perspective, you’re just taking the high road as a parent. We are the parent. It is true what you were saying earlier, our children didn’t ask to be born. And so it is incumbent on us to take the high road and take responsibility. And if we don’t really understand, to try to work hard to understand. It doesn’t mean you have to agree that you were a terrible, selfish, awful person. It’s more that you’re trying to more deeply understand why your child has the belief or perceptions or memories about you that they do and not get into the right or wrong of it. It’s like couples communication. You know, if you get into the right and wrong of it with your spouse or romantic partner, you’re probably not gonna get very far. But if you seek to understand what they’re saying and show empathy and take responsibility for the kernel, if not the bushel, of truth and their complaints or perceptions, then you’re in a much better position.

Brett McKay: When should a parent or a child give up trying to mend the relationship?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, for parents, what I typically tell parents is, assuming your child is an adult, that they should write one really good amends letter and then maybe do a follow up six to eight weeks later and just see if the adult child got the letter and had reactions. If they get nothing back, then I typically tell parents not to do anything for maybe a year or so because sometimes adult children just really need the time and the space to come back to the parent. And once you’ve written an amends letter, you’re sort of showing and announcing that you’re open to changing and to being more empathic and to seeing it from their perspective. But you should stop right away if any of the following are happening. One is you’re getting the police called on you, or every you’re getting letters or gifts sent back, returned to sender, restraining orders.

And if any of those things happen, you should just stop right now because it means that things are just way too inflamed to try. And then you can try again in a year maybe, to just give your child, your adult child that. For the adult child, I think that adult children should do a certain period of due diligence where they carefully tell their parent what their complaints are. If you come to your parent and say, “Well, I’ve learned in therapy that you’re a narcissist or you’re a borderline,” you’re not gonna get anywhere that way. If your goal is really to have your parent understand you’re better off talking about what you did like or value about them as parents or people, it’s kind of the compliment sandwich. You know, you wanna start out with something [laughter] to just soften the blow because for all parents hearing the ways that they failed their children is really deeply humiliating and scary.

And so if you can say, “I’m telling you this because I wanna have a closer relationship with you, but I need the following to happen and here’s what I need to have happen. If you’d like to do family therapy with me, I would welcome that. Or these are the things I’d like you to work on in your therapy. I hope you’re willing to do that.” And then don’t assume that you’re gonna have one conversation about it. I mean, it may take a while ’cause it’s a big ask, but it’s typically worthwhile for both people if these things can be worked through rather than just ended.

Brett McKay: I’ve seen instances where parents are estranged from their adult child and they they really want that relationship with their kid, but then the kid uses the estrangement kind of as a bludgeon over the parent’s head, where they kind of use it as a weapon almost. And the parent will just keep taking it. They just, they want to have some version of their kid in their life, even if it is just being told that you’re an awful parent and I hate you. They feel like they can’t give up on their kid. So I imagine too, like the parent who’s wanting to reconcile, they have to take care of themselves as well through this process. Yeah.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. Yeah. I know it’s true that, I mean, particularly if a kid is mentally ill, then they’re much more likely to be disrespectful and abusive to the parent, and parents whose kids are mentally ill, if they’re not in contact, that’s torturous for the parent because they’re worried about them. Not only do they have the estrangement, but they’re worried about where they are, whether they’re suicidal or whether they’re on the street or living in a car, or whether they’ll ever hear from them again. But if they’re in contact but abusive, that’s tormenting as well because they want the contact, but they have to sort of drink from this poison well in order to have the contact. It isn’t my position that anybody should tolerate somebody being disrespectful to them. So I think that parents can certainly try to set limits on the adult child’s abusive or disrespectful behavior, but it’s typically if somebody is more troubled, it’s a matter of love and limits. Love because it really ultimately isn’t their fault that they have the mental illness, or whatever it is that’s causing them to behave that way, but limits because some people, children or parents can be really destructive in how they interact with the other, and that has to be dealt with.

Brett McKay: Last question. Parental estrangement is part of a larger trend of just cutting people off in your life, toxic people, you gotta cut out the toxic people from your life. But is there a downside to leaning too much into this approach to relationships? I mean, are there benefits to learning how to deal with difficult people in your life?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, there’s enormous benefit to it. You know, in cognitive behavior therapy, what we teach is that you wanna be sort of go toward the things that cause you stress and anxiety. And what I often see in the letters from adult children is, “Well I’ve worked hard to get to where I am today psychologically, and if I see you or talk to you, that’s gonna undo my years of how hard I’ve worked on myself.” You know? And my feeling is like, well, it really shouldn’t, you should be able to, if you’ve worked on these issues for years, you should be able to at least start to engage your parent. I mean, obviously if they’re completely unrepentant and they’re abusive and they yell at you and they shame you and humiliate you every time you see them, then, you know, I get it. I couldn’t ethically support an adult child continuing to get into the ring with a parent who’s just gonna bloody them psychologically every time they’re together.

But I don’t think that those constitute the majority of these kinds of dynamics. So I think there’s enormous value. I mean, there’s no other path towards getting more resilient than to sort of face ourselves with the people who are difficult in our lives. And typically the people in our families may be the most difficult because there’s just this whole reservoir of memories of hurt and disappointment and conflict. But I, it sort of goes back to our earlier question of what do we owe each other as generations? And I think that there is real value in just being engaged with people that you have this history with, and working on things and working to improve them, or then learning if they can improve, learning how to tolerate the parts of them that are more difficult. And also taking responsibility for your own, the ways that you may be difficult, whether you’re the parent or the adult child and learning from that.

Brett McKay: Well, Joshua, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Sure. They can go to my website, www.drjoshuacoleman.com. I do webinars every Tuesday night for estranged parents and a free Q&A every other Monday at 11:30 AM Pacific. And they can get my book there as well on the website o, r you know, at bookstores and etcetera.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Joshua Coleman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, thank you. It was.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Joshua Coleman. He’s the author of the book Rules of Estrangement. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, drjoshuacoleman.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/estrangement where you’ll find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure you check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you’ve done this already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give to give a review of the podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In a famous study done a couple of decades ago, researchers wanted to see whether the “proximity and salience of a food” influenced how much of it was consumed. Jars were filled with candy and placed in an office. Some of them were put directly on workers’ desks; others were placed six feet away from them. Some of the containers were opaque; others were transparent. When the study’s results were tallied, it was found that people reached into the jars more often when the candy was visible, and especially when the jars were close at hand.

It seems as though the more often you’re presented with an option, the more you think about it, and the more you think about an option, the more likely you are to exercise it.

This dynamic likely extends beyond food consumption. Maybe even to marriage.

When the sociologist Brad Wilcox came on the podcast to talk about the extensive research he’s done on marriage, he discussed some of the habits and qualities shared by the happiest and most thriving couples. One of them, he said, is a strong commitment that manifests itself in “not putting the D word in a conversation when you’re having an argument or there’s some problem in your marriage.” Thriving couples don’t think of divorce as an option.

In his book Get Married, Wilcox notes that “In the State of Our Unions Survey, husbands and wives who reported that ‘marriage is for life—unless there is abuse or adultery’ were more likely to say that they were significantly satisfied (‘very happy’) in their marriages, compared to those husbands and wives who said that ‘Marriage is for as long as you feel fulfilled.’”

Wilcox notes that these results may be correlative rather than causal, “given that men and women in happier marriages may be more likely to embrace an ethic of martial permanence due to the higher quality of their marriages.” But he cites other research that has found similar results when couples are not only asked about the state of their marriage at the moment but are tracked over time.

When a couple’s expectation is that marriage is forever, it influences how they interact, especially when inevitable tensions arise. As Wilcox noted on the podcast, “Most couples have problems at some point in their marriage, and I think couples who just keep divorce out of the picture are more readily able to handle those challenges and overcome them.”

The more often the option of divorce is raised during arguments, the more salient it becomes, increasing the likelihood that the option may one day be exercised. And raising the specter of divorce simply makes the interaction more fraught. It prompts questions like: “Are we incompatible?” “Is this unraveling?” “Can we go on?” If there’s an escape hatch lurking in the background, a feeling that this whole thing could potentially be temporary, then there’s less of an impulse to dig in and solve the problem at hand.

If, on the other hand, a couple never puts the divorce option on the table, while their arguments may get heated, there are no stakes; the couple may grapple in intense ways, but the fight doesn’t feel existentially threatening. Because each spouse knows that they’re committed to making the marriage last, it creates a sense of security and prompts the partners towards a problem-solving approach. They think, “Ok, this is hard, but we’re going to have to figure it out.”

Couples sometimes say that their irreconcilable differences made divorce the only option. But their differences may have become irreconcilable because divorce was made an option.

There isn’t something magical or superstitious in making divorce “the thing that shall not be named,” as in the idiom, “Speak of the wolf and he is at your door.” Not raising divorce as an option won’t guarantee an enduring and happy marriage. But when the practice is indicative of one’s underlying stance towards the relationship, a rock-solid commitment to making your marriage last, it’s something that helps give you the best possible shot at doing just that.

For more insights on the qualities of thriving marriages, listen to this podcast episode with Brad Wilcox:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In a family, a lot of the dynamics around devices and screens are reactive in nature. Kids bug for their own smartphones, parents worry they’ll be left out without one, and without weighing the pros and cons, give in to their kids’ requests. Parents let children have a ton of screen time because it lets the parents do what they want; then, they reach a moment where they feel disturbed about how much time their kids are on screens, berate their children for this habit, which they’ve facilitated, and vow that things are going to abruptly turn around.

Rather than basing your policies about kids and screens on mood, fear, and impulse, it would be better to do so based on reason and reflection. Emily Cherkin has some ideas on how to get there. Emily is a former teacher, a screentime consultant who helps parents and educators balance the role of devices in kids’ lives, and the author of The Screentime Solution: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family. Today on the show, Emily unpacks the state of screentime amongst kids today, how the “displacement hypothesis” explains how its impact extends beyond a decline in mental health, and why parents give their kids smartphones even when they’re not sure it’s good for them. We then turn to how families can become more tech intentional, and how that starts with parents taking a look at their own behavior. We discuss why putting parental controls on devices isn’t the ultimate solution, why a better one is based on your relationship with your kids, why you need to live your digital life out loud, and some considerations to think through before getting your kid their first smartphone.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #300: How to Raise Free Range Kids With Lenore Skenazy
• AoM Article: What’s the Right Age to Get a Kid Their First Smartphone? 3 Tech Thinkers Weigh In
• AoM Article: The Best Internet Filter for Kids
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• The Light Phone
• AoM Article: 10 Rules for Raising Thriving Kids in a High-Tech World

Connect With Emily Cherkin

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood.

But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom.

Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls “mother-enmeshed men” and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom. Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one, and he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom.

Connect With Ken Adams

• Overcoming Enmeshment website 

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood. But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom. Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls mother-enmeshed men, and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom.

Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one. And he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life, and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom.

All right. Ken Adams, welcome to the show.

Dr. Ken Adams: Thank you. Nice to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you’re a therapist, and for your career, you’ve spent a lot of time working with men who you call them mother-enmeshed men. And you wrote a book about this called When He’s Married to Mom. Give us a thumbnail sketch, and we’ll get into this deeper in our conversation. But what is a mother-enmeshed man?

Dr. Ken Adams: So enmeshment is a word people use to describe too much entanglement between what is called, in this case, mother and son, although it could be between daughter and mother and father and daughter and so forth. Too much entanglement where the needs of the parent or the needs of one individual supersedes the other, and that there’s a demand for loyalty based on guilty obligation that is used to leverage.

Love is transactional, so the enmeshed individual organizes their self around the parent and absorbs their feelings and needs as if it’s their own. And then when they try to get off into adulthood, particularly romance, they’re having a lot of trouble. So enmeshment refers as too much dependency, too much involvement, too much shared brain. I mean, certainly we all have dependencies, right? Emotional dependency is not pathological, but too much of it at the cost of your own autonomy and your own emancipation is very costly. These individuals struggle immensely in romance.

And I get emails all the time, daily from spouses and partners of these guys who say, you know, I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been in the backseat of this marriage or this relationship. I’ve had enough. He’s over at his mother’s house every day, or he blames me for everything and protects his family and so on and so forth. So the evidence that these enmeshment dynamics impact romance is just overwhelming.

Brett McKay: When did you first start noticing enmeshed men in your practice?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, you know, so let me take you back a little further. I was working, when I first started my professional practice, I was working with kids and I was doing a lot of family system therapy and the family system therapists talk about enmeshment. And what they noticed is that a lot of these kids who had psychosomatic disorders and other issues really were symptomatic of the family enmeshed system.

And so, you know, I began to take a look at that when I was working at a Children’s Hospital in Detroit. We were seeing school-phobic kids. And I said to my supervisor, these kids aren’t afraid of school. They can’t leave their mothers. He goes, how did you know that? I said, well, that’s a whole story there. So I really began to notice it early in my career with children and families. And then I moved into working with adults who were raised in alcoholic families, adult children of alcoholics.

And I began to see adults who were over-involved with their mothers, adult men who were also sexually compulsive. And so I remember working with a man who was sexually compulsive, picking up sex workers. And he would do this when he was living, he would live with his mother part time during the week and then other part of the week, due to employment reasons, he was at his own place. And so he said, well, what should I do to stop the compulsive sexual behavior? And so I instinctively said, well, move out from your mother’s home. I sort of, just sort of intuitively knew that was the move. And sure enough, he did that.

And to my surprise, his sexual compulsivity dramatically decreased. So I began to put together at that time, the link between enmeshment and sexuality, which was missing in the literature on family systems. So you don’t need to be sexually, physically violated to have your sexuality hijacked. So if you’ve got a parent who has dominated you, say mother over son, and has turned you into her boyfriend, surrogate husband, caretaker, you’re in trouble because your sexuality can’t unfold naturally and purely. So that’s when I first began to notice it. I first began to notice the link between enmeshment and sexual compulsivity. I wrote my first professional article at that time based on that case, and everything went from there. So that was the beginning. And that was in 1991 or earlier when I first published that article. So I’ve been working with adult men who have been enmeshed ever since then.

Brett McKay: What’s interesting, I think there might be a tendency for people to think that this mother enmeshment is a modern phenomenon. But something I’ve noticed, I’ve read a lot of biographies from my work of famous great men from history, a lot of them had unhealthy relationships with their mothers. Three of them come to mind. Lou Gehrig had an incredibly super close relationship with his mom during spring training. Most players brought their girlfriends or wives. He’d bring his mom and then she would criticize and sabotage his relationships with women. He didn’t get married until he was 30, which was pretty late for that time.

Dr. Ken Adams: That age, that time, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then even after he got married, there’s just a ton of tension between his mother and his wife because Lou Gehrig just felt this intense attachment to his mother.

Dr. Ken Adams: And loyalty, no doubt.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Houdini was another one. He let his mother pick out his clothes. Even as an adult man, he would rest his head on her bosom to hear her heartbeat because he found it soothing. And then when his mother died, he wanted to die too. And he actually started trying to contact her through seances. And then another one was General MacArthur, another guy unusually close to his mother. When he was at West Point, his mother moved into a hotel near West Point so she could be by him. So those are some examples. But I was always surprised to see these men you think would have independence, but they had this often weird, kind of unhealthy relationship with their mom.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I didn’t know about all three of those, but I think we’d find the evidence of the pathology in their romances if we interviewed their partners. They’d have a lot to say about the competition with mother and her unwillingness to let go and his unwillingness and their unwillingness to let go of mother. That’s something that we’ve learned over the years is that we used to assume it was the parent holding on and we had to help the men eradicate themselves from the trap, and find a new way to communicate. But then we realized some of these guys don’t want to leave that golden boy position.

It’s been an elevated position. Sometimes the mother will use the son in competition against the father. The father’s a brute or an alcoholic. I’ll love my son more than you. I’ll elevate him to boyfriend status and I’ll show you a thing or two. I’ll neuter the old man with my son. But in doing so, neuters both the men in terms of their ineffectiveness. And so we definitely see some competitiveness there when the mother turns the son into the boyfriend or the husband.

Brett McKay: How do you know if you’re a mother-enmeshed man? What are some of the characteristics? Overall, it’s sort of an unhealthy closeness with a mother, but what are some other characteristics?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think that you find yourself feeling tethered. That’s entrapped and unable to have any separateness and driven by guilt and worry and having to be on call for your mother’s woes to the point where you find yourself angry, frustrated. You’re preoccupied with your mother’s needs.

You likely reject, distance yourself, detach, disengage from your romantic partner and/or project onto her or him, you know, anger that really belongs to the mother. So ultimately, it’s a set of characteristics in which I feel guilty, obligated, angry, frustrated, trapped around having to caretake. She’s the only person I have or have had, and my wife just needs to understand. And she’s the problem, not my mother. So that’s the core identifier that we see in, you know, probably eight out of 10 referrals that come into our workshop often come in under that umbrella. The other sort of set of characteristics we see is that because these boys have been elevated by their mothers into the golden boy status, that comes with a certain degree of confidence, right? Almost omnipotence in the way they think of themselves.

So they can develop some success in their lives. So the guys you just mentioned, all of them had degrees of high success. So in the effort to please mother, I can become very successful. So I’ve had lots of guys with tremendous success who endlessly try to please their family and their mother, in the meantime, not having much of a romantic life. So the other place that we see the sort of identifier is they really don’t live a life of passion and purpose around what they really want in spite of their success. In other words, particularly in terms of relationships and romance, life seems to organize around me. They may pick the wrong, they may pick somebody like their mother to marry, right?

Because they’re not really free to choose and pick someone like their mother in the wrong way where the partner may have negative characteristics. So they seem to have a passivity, a disempowerment. Sometimes we even go so far as to say feeling neutered when it comes to romance, which is a strong word, but we use it descriptively rather than judgmentally. You can’t be your mother’s good boy and a man, you’ve got to choose. And so they live in sort of an ambivalent state, you know? And so oftentimes they can’t make up their minds which restaurant to go to. Where do you want to go? I don’t care. Where do you want to go, right? The relationship to needs, feelings has been interfered with by having to organize around the first love affair I’ve had. I mean, you know, parents love their children, children fall in love with their parents. It’s a wonderful thing. But the parent must let go. It is their assignment to let go.

It is not the adult child’s responsibility to cushion the blow of the emancipation. And ultimately, these men will compromise. We call it troublesome compromising in the workshop. They’ll put one foot in and try to placate mother, try to placate the wife, try to placate the kids, try to placate friends. In the meantime, nobody’s happy, most importantly themselves. So placating, ambivalence, difficulty with commitment, living in this dark space of I don’t know what I want, so I’m just going to keep working at what I know I can do, whether it’s being a magician or a ball player, right? I can do that, but I can’t really figure anything else out like what restaurant to go to.

So I’d be curious about these guys if you were to have them take the screening we have on our website, whether they pick things that would indicate that they don’t do well with identifying their own personal needs. So that’s a big issue. And living in guilt and projecting a lot of guilt onto other relationships. So they pick up the dinner tab more times than they should of their families. They, feel obligated and guilty to caretake and take care of other people as well. So transferring that sort of guilty, loyal subjugation to others also is a telltale sign.

Brett McKay: So they can carry that over, that guilt from their mother to other relationships as well. Could be their employer.

Dr. Ken Adams: Oh, it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So we’ll get guys who their mothers have passed away, and they’ll join the workshop. And what you’ll find is they have transferred the whole dynamic to their partner. And they can’t figure out how to stand up for themselves or whether what they’re doing is giving in. And they wind up being in extremes.

They either subjugate themselves to their partner’s needs, or they get angry and rejecting. They don’t have a way to discern how to be in relationship because their mother has taught them, you’re obligated to me. I want you to absorb my feelings, my needs. So there’s a lot of conflict when it comes to intimacy for these men. So having to learn to differentiate their inner sanctum where their mother still lives is really the key.

Brett McKay: Is this related to this idea you talk about in the book, the disloyalty bind?

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Exactly. If I give to my wife, then I’m being disloyal to my mother. Yes. So I’m torn between that I tend to organize the way I think about things in these dimensions of loyalty, where someone else might just say, well, that’s not a big deal.

I don’t have to gauge my decision based on emotional loyalties. It’s just a decision to be made. And sometimes people will be disappointed. So yeah, the disloyalty bind is that I really can’t move in my own direction because I’ll leave my mother behind. One of the things that we have learned and we have been teaching in the workshops is that what we’ve noticed is that the men don’t want to disappoint anybody. They want to figure out a way to get mom to co-sign their emancipation. So they’re, I’m chuckling.

It’s not funny. I’m not making fun of these men, but it’s just so ironic. So they’ll arrange a therapy session with mother and they’ll try to sort of say, look, mom, I need to be my own man. I need you to understand and not call me five times a day. And what happens is, is that therapy session turns into a marital counseling session. And these men have worse problems afterwards because they’re seeking their mother’s co-assignment. The truth is, is that emancipation always means someone’s disappointed.

There’s no way around that. My son is 22. He’s moving across the country. He’s in New York now. We’re in Michigan. He’s moving to LA. I’m going to miss him. You know, it’s my job to make the adjustment. It’s not his job to disrupt his unfolding. So in emancipation, somebody always is getting disappointed. And the parents’ last, I’ve always said this, parents’ last spiritual assignment in parenting, which is really hard to do, I’m doing it right now, is they have to take the loss. It’s their job to take the loss. It’s not the adult child’s job to cushion the blow. Now, we hope your adult children return, but here’s the irony.

And if you look at the family’s therapy system literature, the more you let go of your children, the more they want to circle back around. The more you hold on, the less they want to be with you. So we try to remind the adult enmeshed man that he has to be willing to disappoint. Otherwise, he’s going to live in that disloyalty bind and try to balance out his loyalties to everybody, which never is successful, frankly.

Brett McKay: So in the book, you provide some questions that people can ask themselves to figure out if they’re mother enmeshed or not. So yeah, if you feel obligated or guilty about taking care of your mom’s problems, if you feel like your mother is perfect or is a martyr, but it goes beyond that. If you put other people’s needs above yours all the time, if you feel guilty when pursuing your own wants or needs, that might be a sign that you are mother enmeshed because you’re taking that relationship you had with your parent as a child and projecting it on your other relationships.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.

Brett McKay: You mentioned earlier that sometimes you’ve seen patients or clients you’ve worked with, their enmeshment can display itself in passivity. I think it’s probably the more common one. You’re just a doormat because you’re just ambivalent about your decisions because you don’t really have a sense of self. So you’re just like, whatever you want to do. But then also you talk about how it can manifest itself in hyper-aggressiveness. Have you seen what causes a mother-enmeshed man to tip towards passivity or hyper-aggressiveness?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. So let’s start with the latter. The sort of hyper-aggressiveness we might want to sort of put under the umbrella of a more self-centered, narcissistic, what we might say is a counter phobic response. I don’t want to risk ever getting caught up in anybody else’s needs. So the hell with you. I’ll just focus on myself. Right? And so what we see in those backgrounds, not uncommonly is that one of the parents, it could be the mother, is also in addition to being dependent on her son, she’s very self-centered and narcissistic. She needs him to be an extension of her. So that sort of precedes his own aggressive narcissism where then he gets involved with a romantic partner and it’s all about him because he can’t tolerate the risk that he’s going to get subjugated underneath another dependency. So usually there’s a little mix or a lot of mix of narcissism from the parent that will drive that. We see that in over-sexualization, these sort of counter phobic, I’ll just have a lot of women, right?

I’ll have sex with a lot of women, prove that nobody can control my sexuality when in fact mother has been controlling it. The more passive response is more typical, although you might see a mix. And often there, the child has been very burdened with responsibilities and caretaking. So the caretaking dynamic.

My mother’s depression. My brother and sisters, I had to take care of them. My father was an alcoholic. I had to fight with him. So usually the more passive enmeshed man has had a burden, excessive responsibility. So by the time he gets into his youth, young adulthood, as you said, there’s no self. My self is strictly organized around how I can take care of you. So when I search out a romantic partner, I search out somebody who has problems who I can take care of. So, nobody’s home inside of those men, sadly. Which is a little dramatic to say, but that’s just a way to say it. I mean, they have some sense of self, but many of them feel very neutered, very passive, disempowered, because I’ve been so weighted down by the problems of my mother and family that I don’t even have it in me to protest for myself. So best just to just give in. Right? It becomes its own trauma response, it becomes its own coping reaction just to say yes when I mean no. I don’t even know how I can say no so I’ll just say yes and agree with you and let’s get this over with.

Brett McKay: And you talk about, like, sometimes it can be a mixture of both the passive and aggressive.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yes.

Brett McKay: So, sometimes you’ve had clients and patients who are like, I’m just gonna be passive. I’ll just do whatever my wife says, whatever my mother says. But then I might have like a secret porn addiction or something.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Precisely. Yeah. So, it is not uncommon. Probably I’d say 60% of the guys coming into… So I’ve had this workshop going, oh, since 2013. So 11 years now. See close to about a thousand men and women from all across the globe. So it’s been an interesting journey to watch them. And so they have kind of what you’re saying here for sure.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it could also manifest itself, I think you talked about this in the book. It could be like a gambling addiction, like a secret gambling. It’s like, I got this one area of my life where no one tells me what to do.

Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. It could be food too.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: Sex is, I meant to say that sex is common about 60% because sexuality is in the erotic template, if you will. And when I say erotic, I don’t just mean sexual, I mean romantic, falling in love. The whole gamut of what drives our pursuit of partners, right? Is that it’s burdened. I have to take along my mother or my caretaking feelings or my guilt. So I’m not really free. But if I go over here and gamble or use porn or pick up sex workers or have an affair or overeat, no one’s gonna tell me. ‘Cause it’s, I’m not emotionally obligated to them. So I’m free sexually. So sometimes we see this splitting, we call it, sexually, where I begin to shut down with my committed partner, because my committed partner begins to feel too much like my mother. And through no fault of the partner, oftentimes it has more to do with the projection from the man. So what’s the best offense against an intrusive mother who wants to turn you into her husband or boyfriend? Is shut yourself down sexually. So sexuality gets shut down, but then it goes out the back door.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So a man who is a pleaser, who otherwise doesn’t feel like he can act for himself, he might get into something like porn or gambling to feel like he’s rebelling, to feel like, yeah, I’m my own man. I can do what I want, even though he is not able to break free. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So this whole enmeshment it happens in childhood. So what goes on in childhood that a mother would want to enmesh with her son?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s… In most cases it’s a more innocent unfolding where frankly the parent is also trapped. They’re not unfolding their true selves. All of a sudden their needs become completely dependent upon their son. In most cases, although we do have some parents, some adult children who report their parents as cruel or deliberate, but in many cases it’s really more unconscious in which maybe there’s an unhappiness with the marriage or the relationship, or there’s maybe single parenting. Although most of the people we see come from families in which aren’t single parents. As a parent, you probably know this. I mean, your kids adore you, right? Until they get to be adolescents and they have problems with you. But they adore you and it’s a love that has no match. And so it’s easy for a needy parent who’s beginning to feel empty or lonely in her marital bond or her friendship community, to begin to overuse that adoration from her child and begin to depend on it. And so you might have slowly over time increased dependency in which now what do you mean you’re going to a dance? No, you shouldn’t. Pretty soon he’s talking about having a crush at somebody at school and she’s all of a sudden shaming him for something that he’s just feeling innocent about.

So she may find herself in the trap of dependency of enmeshment through no conscious decision to do so, but kind of a slow holding onto that which can’t be matched. Again, children love their parents in ways that just can’t be matched. I think that’s just normal. So I think that’s what happens mostly. But we also have a percentage, I don’t really have a number for you that I’ve heard over time. I mean, it’s more than 5%. It’s probably not 50%. So I’m placing between, probably close to 25% of the parents we hear reported about who are deliberate, they particularly get more deliberate over time. Although you’ll see some of it in childhood. No, I don’t want you playing football. No, I want you here at home. Be careful out there.

So there’s an excessive hold and carefulness that begin to wrap around the child we see in early, which is why I saw these kids, these school phobic kids at 5 and 6 years of age, right? Is they had already been caught in the web of their mother’s worry and they couldn’t leave. Most of the time, the children who are most prone to getting caught in this are the kids who have the highest degree of empathy and sensitivity. So it’s not gonna be the kid in the family who is more able to say, buzz off, I don’t wanna deal with that. Right? They have a little more feistiness in their temperament.

These are typically the kids who are nice boys, nice girls, sweet boys, sweet girls, loving, caring. The parent’s job is not to over solicit that. So what happens is, is that if you’re dealing with a marital bond that’s problematic and your partner is not being particularly solicitous about how you’re doing, and you’ve got this wonderful sensitive boy who says, mommy, I’ll never leave you. I mean, she just latches onto that, right? So the easy-tempered, sensitive sweet boy is often targeted. And so it’s this increased bonding over time that begins this mutual dependency that is, by the time we see these guys, it’s really hard to unravel although it’s possible.

Brett McKay: As I was reading your book, this idea of enmeshment and it’s caused by maybe the mother having a bad relationship with her husband. So she’s trying to create a, like a pseudo husband relationship with her son. It reminded me of from Bowen Family Systems theory, the idea of triangulation.

Dr. Ken Adams: Right.

Brett McKay: Right. So it’s like, there’s a tension in between a dyad between the husband and wife. And so to alleviate that tension, mother looks to son to sort of dissipate that.

Dr. Ken Adams: And may use him, using that language of triangulation, may use him as, weaponize him against the father. And then you have two attachment failures for the son. He’s got an involvement with the mother that feeds the mother, but not him. And then he has a distant, competitive, if not angry relationship with the father. The father begins to feel jealousy towards the boy. And so then he gets some hate and the mother wins in that battle. Which is really sad to watch.

Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. You can see like mom turns son against dad. She tells her son…

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Your dad isn’t this, and he doesn’t do that. And the son starts thinking, yeah, my dad is a bum.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. I remember a story I heard once, you may be familiar with the now passed poet Robert Bly, who did a lot of men’s work over the years, and which is where I first got a little bit of my introduction to looking at men’s issues a little differently than what I had learned in graduate school and so forth. And so I remember him telling a story about, and this was a secondhand story, so I don’t know the real details, but he told the story of a man who surprised his father, flew across the country, surprised his father with a visit, knocked on his father’s door and said to him, I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I might be angry with you, I might have issues with you, but they’re not my mother’s.

Oftentimes we see these adult men who have been enmeshed with their mothers carry a layer of rejection and anger towards the father that’s not theirs. And that’s another piece of differentiating. Is to say, No, I’m not carrying my mother’s anger. That’s her job. Which might be as straightforward as having a boundary when she calls and says, Your father once again fell asleep in front of the tv rather than going out on our date or going to bed with me. He’s gotta say, Look, I don’t want to hear that anymore. We’re done with that. There has to be a clear, fairly rigid boundary around that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay: So we’ve kind of mentioned some of the problems that these mother-enmeshed men can experience in their adult life. I guess the primary one you see, it affects the relationship with their romantic partners. It could be their girlfriend or wives. What have you seen are the most common complaints in the relationships of mother-enmeshed men?

Dr. Ken Adams: From the men themselves or from their partners?

Brett McKay: Either, it could be both.

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, the… Let’s start with the men. Well, no, let’s go reverse. So the pro… Most of the time when we get complaints from the partners and what the men will report is that their partners are frustrated with their less than co-equal status in the marital bond or the relationship bond. And so that the mother has taken priority all… Where the son will call the mother and discuss vacation plans or financial plans or have a secret bank account. I mean, I can’t tell you the stories I’ve heard. They just kind of… It still kind of blows my mind when I really see it. And then I realize, oh, we’re really talking about a specific issue here that needs clarifying. So the women, mostly the women and or we’ve had some gay men who have had similar, very similar dynamics of partners, the same. They’ll complain about not having a voice, not having a vote, and having to live with losses over the course of their relationship.

Sometimes the parents, the grandparents will then usurp the spouse and become the parental figure to the children, criticizing the man’s wife or partner. So usually the spouses have had enough, I’m tired of this, I can’t live with this anymore. So that’s a common complaint of… And where they have felt overt hostility sometimes from the competitive mother-in-law. The man will initially complain that his wife doesn’t understand. It’ll be his initial complaint.

I’m laughing ’cause it’s not funny, but it’s always, it’s fascinating to me to see how frequently that occurs. She just won’t understand. I just, I’m not being disloyal to her, but I have to take care of my mother. My mother didn’t have anybody growing up. My father left when I was 10. So I’m the whole world to my mother. She just has to understand. So the first complaint by the man is that he wants his wife to accept more loss, but he’s not calling it that way. He wants his wife “to understand.” So he’ll report initially a conflict with his partner. Following that will be a fair degree of frustration with the mother and that he finds himself shutting down with his partner, with his romantic partner, and a sexual complaint. So sexuality is, again, in about 60% of the cases, a problematic issue. So the men will also report not being able to feel sexual, be sexual and/or I’m excessively acting out or acting out outside of my marital or relationship contract with other sexual partners or porn. So that’ll be a common report of complaint too. So sometimes the couple will be fighting about mother and the betrayal by the mother or what the partner will talk about. And then they’ll also, right along with that, be talking about the betrayal by their sexual behavior. So when you get both of those, it’s really an intense conflict.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then you’ve also, you encounter men who haven’t been able to get into a romantic relationship or a long-term one because mom always gets in the way.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, yeah. So, it means we’ve got men. Not that being married is the representation of relational health, but we’ll use it as an example. So, some men haven’t made any commitments, they’ve had short, they’ve had transactional relationships and they’ve not been able to really open up their hearts to intimacy with a romantic partner because it feels too engulfing, too confining. And so I’ve learned to live my life alone. And while there might be advantages to that, it’s a very lonely experience. So we’ve definitely seen that.

And we’ve seen too, interestingly enough, as these men emancipate from their mothers and families, and when we say emancipation, we don’t mean cutting off a family. We mean, look, I’m a man and I need you to treat me as that. And if you don’t, it’s gonna be hard for me to circle back and visit with you. So I need to operate differently with you and I need a different response from you. The more the man can do that, the more available he is to his romantic partner in his own sexuality. As these men embody themselves and say, No, no, I’m gonna put a stake in the ground. It’s just as my space. Nobody gets in without my permission. And most importantly, you mother. As he does that without raging or grabbing the mother by the lapels, you don’t need to confront your mother or your family to do this. It’s an internal shift. I now become more available erotically, romantically to my partner.

Brett McKay: Something you mentioned earlier is that enmeshed men can get into relationship with someone who’s like their mother. Is that common and do they tend to repeat the relationship patterns that they had with their moms with their romantic partner?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, so there’s a acronym called three Ps, pick, project or provoke, meaning we recreate the past through picking someone just like our parent, we provoke them or we project onto them. I’m not sure I can give you the percentages, but yes, sometimes we see that a mother-enmeshed man will pick a partner who is over controlling, over dominant, over intrusive, and there can be a familiarity in that the man gets caught up in a bond with a woman who is like the mother. And unfortunately, he may have to divorce both of them if there’s no changes. Divorce in the sort of differently, I’m using divorce in sort of a general sense here, but separate out, I don’t know what that would mean with the woman. Sometimes the man will project onto the woman feelings of engulfment that aren’t there. Then she’ll say, what are you talking about? I didn’t need you to do that. You don’t need to keep pleasing me. I just wanted to know what dinner you wanted to go to, right? So sometimes it’s a projection and his job is to pull that back so that he can be in relationship with the woman that’s independent of the ghost of the mother. And then other times the man will provoke the woman to be like the mother.

So I’ll betray you sexually, I’ll have an affair and then you’ll become controlling. See, you’re just like my mother, but I’m responsible for that. So I would urge the men to look at the three Ps, pick, provoke and project, and figure out where the line is. It’s not easy to do. All three could be operative in the same relationship.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then we’ve also talked about this mother enmeshment can affect your career too, ’cause you project that desire, need, unhealthy need to please onto your employer. So it might cause you to stick with a job that’s just awful. ‘Cause you’re like, Well, I gotta be loyal to my boss, or I just, I gotta do this just sort of out of obligation.

Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Or I find myself sort of even at a deeper level in a career or a job or a path in which my mother wanted me in, but I never wanted. And so now I’m struggling. And we’ve had guys change horses in the middle of the stream as part of their emancipation, change careers, fascinatingly enough.

Brett McKay: And so yeah, the response to this, so let’s say if you are a mother-enmeshed man, the idea is you have to unmesh and you’ve been calling it emancipation. And I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about children cutting off parents. My parents are toxic, I need to cut them off completely. And cutting off is different from emancipation, so what’s the difference and why do you think this whole cutoff idea, it could be healthy in some situations, but maybe it’s not the most healthy thing to do either?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s acknowledge that certainly there are people that we shouldn’t have in our lives because they’re abusive to us. Right?

Brett McKay: Right.

Dr. Ken Adams: And one of the strategies, and often if the person can’t change, the strategy is to get away from them. Right? And being a family member doesn’t permit you to be abusive. You don’t get a license to do that. So there is a percentage of people who need to look at, look, I can’t have you in my life if you keep doing this, but let’s set that group aside. I just wanna acknowledge that that can happen. But most of the guys coming into our workshop, and sometimes the spouse will try to demand it. Look, I want you to cut off your mother, but that’s not a solution. And because it’s really a phobic response. In other words, I’m so afraid that if I talk to my mother, I’ll get swallowed up by her worries. I’m just gonna cut her off. There’s nothing particularly empowering about that. It’s really phobic. So the man never really emancipates, he just stiff-arms the family, cuts ’em off and it gives him a pseudo sense of power. But then he is over here subjugating himself to his friend who wants to borrow a thousand dollars that he doesn’t have. And he says yes when he really can’t do it. He hasn’t really emancipated. So emancipation really is, look, I might need some separate time. I have new boundaries. No, you can’t talk about your loneliness with dad anymore. I’m out of that. You wanna talk about the weather or sports? We’re good. We’ll skip politics too these days.

But we’ll, we are not talking about your loneliness with dad, mom. And you say you love me, and so I need you to respect me. So we begin to have adult conversations because we are no longer held hostage by the fear of disappointing mommy, I’m now willing to be a disappointment to her. So emancipation is changing the role assignment that you’ve been burdened with. And it might have periods where you have more separateness, but it might be, We’re not coming to the holidays this year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever. We’re gonna be in Hawaii and your mother’s disappointed. And you saying, you know what? We’ll probably visit with you next year. You’re able to tolerate that disappointment. You don’t need to stiff-arm her and you don’t need to subjugate her.

Emancipation is, I’m my own man. My commitment is to myself, to my partner, to my kids, to my unfolding, and now you mother and father. Notice they’ve come down the list, so that’s really emancipation. So cutting somebody off, stiff-arming somebody is a temporary pseudo freedom in my experience. Although as I said, there are a certain population, and I’ll leave that to people to sort out where obviously not having contact if the parent’s cruel and sadistic, it’s trouble. You might need to have a more rigid boundary. So emancipation may have boundaries on a continuum, cutting off your family is a one trick pony, right?

It’s just stiff-arming. And what we see, I… So here’s what we see. We begun to see this with reporting from the adult. This is all reporting from the adult-enmeshed man. So we’re not getting the direct report from the parents. So it’s a little bit secondhand, of course. But what they’re reporting is initially the parents will resist, mom won’t be happy, but if she’s got any moxie of self to her, she will understand that she doesn’t wanna lose her son or her daughter. So she’ll, she or the father will learn to keep quiet. So there’s a resignation. My kid wants his own space, I don’t like it. I’ll shut my mouth. We hope they get at least that. It’s not ideal.

The second phase is that in time, parents begin to accept, Okay, I see now my son doesn’t want to cut me off, he just wants some space. I get it. I’m gonna go out and join a bridge club. I’m gonna get a better marriage going with my husband here, so I’ll do my own life. So ideally, we like to see parents move into acceptance. I don’t know how often that occurs. And then finally, the stage that we really look for, which we don’t get a lot of reports of, is that parents really come to terms with and celebrate and bless their children’s departure. And we say to the adult-enmeshed man, the adult man emancipating, Look, emancipation is not a negotiation.

You do not need your parents’ approval. Don’t seek it. It’s not necessary. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You deserve their blessing, but you might not get it and you don’t need it. You deserve it, but you may not get it. Don’t wait around for it. So that really is an emancipated man. I’m my own man.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like… This reminds me of, going back to family systems theory, this idea of differentiation. It’s being a self while still maintaining relationships with people.

Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Yeah. Differentiation is really the sort of the inner piece of the process. The first is boundaries, I can’t talk to you about dad anymore. The last stage is emancipating, I’m my own man. But the middle part, which is most difficult is this differentiation. Wait a minute, why am I picking up the bill all the time for 10 people?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: I don’t have to do that.

Brett McKay: So what does a healthy relationship look like with your mother? We’ve talked about like when an unhealthy relationship, like what would a good relationship with your mother look like as an adult?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think it shifts from sort of you’re my little boy is now you’re my adult man, son. And I have to sort of regard you as an adult. And so we have to renegotiate how we talk, what we talk about, how we visit. So we have more of a consulting friendship, and a love relationship, but not, You’re my little boy and I need you to do what I want. So we see a shift in the way both the parent and the adult child deal with each other where there’s a greater respect and tolerance for separateness. My son, he’s visiting this weekend, he was gonna show up the other day. He didn’t, he came a day late and he’s moving across the country, so we wanna get as much time as possible. So, both of my… I’m not a perfect parent. He’ll remind me of that. But, so both my wife’s response was, Great, we’ll see you when you get here. Right? As was mine. Versus, why can’t you make it here?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dr. Ken Adams: Just move that appointment aside. Laying on the guilt. So again, we’re not perfect parents. He reminds us of that. But that’s the difference. Is the adult parent now begins to disengage from a dependency that was once there. And they’re both agents, the mother and the son are free to move in and out of the connection lovingly without feeling guilt for their times of separateness. And they can circle back out of choice. And sure, there might be disappointment or missing, Oh, I miss you, I haven’t seen you in a while. Can we put something on the books? Versus, Don’t you think about me anymore? You’ve been spending too much time with your wife. So there’s the difference is that both the adult man and the mother are separate agents in the relationship and they come and go out of love and out of choice. Not out of guilt, demand or inappropriate loyalty.

Brett McKay: Anything dads can do to help their sons develop a healthy relationship with their mother and not get enmeshed?

Dr. Ken Adams: Well, one is, is to get in there and have a relationship with your son, independent of the mother so that he can learn to turn to you and the mother can witness that she doesn’t get to be top dog. Right? And you’re not doing it competitively. You’re just doing it lovingly. And I think too, to be solicitous of your partner and say, Let’s go out on dates and reconnect, rekindle the love affair that was there before you had kids, which most of us know is tough to do, but with the help of good marital therapists and counselors, you can do that. So you begin to put your energy towards your partner and you build a relationship with your son, independent of the mother. And if necessary, you create some challenges to your wife and say, Look, you can’t keep doing that. You’re gonna lose him. So you have to be a voice of reason there.

Brett McKay: Well, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, so you could go to the website overcomingenmeshment.com, all one word, overcomingenmeshment.com. I have lots of podcasts on there. Hopefully I’ll get yours on there if you’ll send me a link. It’s been great talking to you. We’ve got workshops, educational workshops for men. We have ’em for women who are enmeshed. What’s interesting is we did some interviewing for qualitative research, we interviewed men and women, and I did some of the interviewing with the women. I was shocked. The women were just like the men. They’ll report things like when they’re enmeshed with their mothers and fathers, my boyfriend wants too much of me, I’m gonna run the other way and start a new relationship. I thought, Oh my God, I’m talking to the, just like the men. We also have workshops for the partners and the spouses of these individuals who need help sort of getting their head back on straight and feeling valid and so forth. So the website will walk you through all that.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ken Adams, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, likewise, Brett. I appreciate your working with me and talking. It’s been a great conversation and I hope to get a link so I can upload it on my website too.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Kenneth Adams. He’s the author of the book, When He’s Married to Mom. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, overcomingenmeshment.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom. You can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think might get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Till next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The marriage rate has come down 65% since 1970. There are multiple factors behind this decrease, but one of them is what we might call the poor branding that surrounds marriage in the modern day. From all corners of our culture and from both ends of the ideological spectrum come messages that marriage is an outdated institution, that it hinders financial success and personal fulfillment, and that it’s even unimportant when it comes to raising kids.

My guest would say that these ideas about marriage are very wrong, and he doesn’t come at it from an emotionally-driven perspective, but from what’s born out by the data. Dr. Brad Wilcox is a sociologist who heads the nonpartisan National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which studies marriage and family life. He’s also the author of Get Married. Today on the show, Brad discusses the latest research on marriage and how it belies the common narratives around the institution. We dig into the popular myths around marriage, and how it not only boosts your finances, but predicts happiness in life better than any other factor. Brad also shares the five pillars of marriage that happy couples embrace.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Brad’s previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #278 — The Surprising Benefits of Marriage for Men
• The National Marriage Project at UVA
• AoM Article: The Case for Marriage
• Piece in the NYT by Brad: “To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career”
• Piece in the Atlantic by Brad: “The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage”
• Piece in the Atlantic co-authored by Brad: “Now Political Polarization Comes for Marriage Prospects”
• Brad’s articles at the Institute for Family Studies 
• AoM Podcast #946: Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids

Connect With Brad Wilcox

• Brad’s faculty page
• Brad on X
• Brad on LinkedIn

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast.

The marriage rate has come down 65% since 1970. There are multiple factors behind this decrease, but one of them is what we might call the poor branding that surrounds marriage in the modern day. From all corners of our culture, and from both ends of the ideological spectrum, come messages that marriage is an outdated institution, that it hinders financial success and personal fulfillment, that it’s even unimportant when it comes to raising kids.

My guest would say that these ideas about marriage are very wrong, and he doesn’t come at it from an emotionally-driven perspective, but from what’s borne out by the data. Dr. Brad Wilcox is a sociologist who heads the non-partisan National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which studies marriage and family life. He’s also the author of Get Married. Today on the show, Brad discusses the latest research on marriage and how it belies the common narratives around the institution. We dig into the popular myths around marriage and how it not only boosts your finances, but predicts happiness in life better than any other factor. Brad also shares the five pillars of marriage that happy couples embrace. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriage.

Alright. Brad Wilcox, welcome back to the show.

Brad Wilcox: Brett, it’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are a sociologist who spends a lot of time researching and writing about marriage, particularly the benefits of marriage and family life. You got a new book out called Get Married, and you start off the book saying that the impetus behind this book is to counter what you see as an anti-marriage narrative in popular culture. What are some examples of this narrative that you’re seeing?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, Brett, it’s actually funny, when I was finishing up the last-minute touches on the book, one article came across my Twitter screen. It was trending on Twitter. It was an article in Bloomberg that said women who stay single and don’t have kids are getting richer. And so the headline was giving the impression that steering clear of marriage and motherhood was the way to go for women financially, but also gave us lots of stories of single women who are childless, living their best life. And so I think both the financial story told in this story in Bloomberg and the emotional story being told were encouraging them to steer clear of marriage and motherhood, for a bunch of reasons. We’ve seen articles like The Case Against Marriage published in The Atlantic, articles like Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love published recently in The New York Times.

So these are just some of the examples that we see in the media, for instance, that give us what I would call a profoundly anti-nuptial or anti-marriage message. You think about the pop culture more generally and mainstream television shows and movies, I think what you often see in everything from that show Friends back in the day, to a lot of the Chicago series on NBC, is a kind of message that your 20s are your years to have fun and focus on career. And then maybe as you approach 30 or 35, you would begin to think about settling down and getting married and having kids. But there’s an implicit message, too, I think, in the pop culture and certain precincts in the elite culture that are encouraging young adults to just postpone marriage or forego marriage and focus instead on career and having fun in your free time. So that’s also, I think, part and parcel of what I’m worried about in terms of giving people the wrong idea.

Brett McKay: Well, you mentioned some of these articles in these magazines, they focused on women staying single and the benefits of that. But you’re also seeing the same sort of thing about men. Men shouldn’t get married.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so what’s striking here, I think, is when I began this project, I was thinking about being in conversation primarily with more elite voices on the left that tend to dominate a lot of mainstream media and academia and pop culture to some extent. But now, we’re getting this from the online right as well. And Pearl Davis is one figure that’s got a big following online. She has said that marriage is a death sentence for men. And then you have, of course, Andrew Tate is a very big voice in the manosphere who’s also arguing that marriage has no ROI, no return on investment, for men. He says, “The problem is, there is zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man.” And then he goes on to say, “It’s very common that women divorce their husbands.” So what the left has been telling us is that, really, marriage and motherhood can be a bad deal for women. We’re now hearing, though, from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum that marriage is a bad deal for guys. And of course, the common takeaway, sadly, I would say, for young adults is that, “Maybe I should just steer clear of opening my heart to love, to marriage, and family.”

Brett McKay: Yeah, and as a sociologist, you actually research what happens when people get married. We’re gonna talk about… Actually, there’s a lot of benefits when you get married and settle down. But one thing you talk about, what both of these strains of thought have in common, these anti-marriage, anti-family life, strains of thought, whether it’s coming from the left or the right, is that they both have what you call a Midas view of life. What do you mean by the Midas view of life?

Brad Wilcox: So Brett, I gotta give all credit to my wife. I was asking her, “How can I think about some kind of fable or story that would convey the way in which people can become too attached to work or money or whatever else?”, and she said, “What about the King Midas story?” And of course, it’s a great example. I’ve updated the Midas story for a public lecture on the book. But the idea here is that people are thinking that they should be searching for gold and trying to build their own brand. It’s about education, money, and above all, career. We’ve got a lot of data from Pew, especially, telling us that Americans, even parents, Brett, unfortunately are prioritizing for their children, education and career over marriage down the road. It’s just very short-sighted. I think they’re gonna be really regretting that emphasis when they’re 75 years old and there are no grandkids on the horizon.

So, we see that, but again, a lot of data from Pew that Americans think that money and education, especially work, are the way to go. So ax recent Pew study found that 71% of Americans thought that having a job or a career they can enjoy is the path to fulfillment. Only 23% said that being married was the way to go. So it just gives you a sense of this Midas mindset, where all the action is in work and money and building your own brand, and the sort of idea is that investing in marriage and family is the wrong path, and you should instead kind of be free. Free of all the encumbrances that come from settling down, putting a ring on it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the idea out there, both in the culture and in the media, is that marriage will hurt your financial life. That’s the message that’s out there. But that actually isn’t the case.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so that Bloomberg headline was just completely bananas and was [chuckle] so wrong. I mean, they were relying upon data of just… Taken from singles, they’ve had a study on singles, and somehow they got to this conclusion that summed up that marriage is a bad thing for women. What we actually see is that women who are married, and men, of course, too, are more likely to be flourishing financially. In fact, in their 50s, both women and men have about 10 times the assets heading towards retirement compared to their single peers. So, ironically, both Andrew Tate and Bloomberg should be discounted for folks who are worrying about financial security or prosperity. Because for the average American, the path to prosperity tends to run through marriage and not away from it. But my point, of course, is that there’s a lot more to life than money, and so what we see is that marriage, again, more than career, is a much stronger predictor of American’s happiness in ways that I think that a lot of people would be surprised by.

Brett McKay: So what’s the state of marriage today in America? Are people marrying less?

Brad Wilcox: So, yeah, so, I’ve got bad news in the report and good news. And the good news is kind of what I was just hinting at is that when it comes to loneliness, when it comes to meaning, when it comes to happiness, Americans who are married, both men and women, are markedly happier. They’re less lonely, they report more meaningful lives, especially if they have children in the picture when it comes to meaning. That’s part of the good news. But the bad news, Brett, is that we’ve seen the marriage rate come down by about 65% since 1970. And what that means practically for young adults today, like in their 20s, is we’re projecting that about one in three of them will never marry. And we’ve never been in this territory where so many Americans will be permanent bachelors and permanent bachelorettes. And that’s cause for concern for me, just because, again, what we see is that for ordinary Americans, typically, they’re just more likely to be thriving if they have a co-pilot to travel through life with.

Brett McKay: So one thing you talk about in the book is that while there’s been a big decrease in marriage overall, and for a lot of people, marriage isn’t thriving, your research has found that there are four groups where marriage is still thriving. What are those four groups?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, in terms of again, the good news, we do kind of see some groups in America today who are, generally speaking, flourishing in their marriages, who are more likely to get married, stay married often, and be happily married. And those four groups are Asian-Americans, religious Americans, I call them the faithful in the book, college-educated Americans, I call them strivers in the book, folks who kind of have more of that focus long-term, work, profession, career, et cetera. And then the fourth group is conservatives. And to be frank, Brett, I didn’t anticipate having conservatives as a separate category. I thought as we crunched numbers, I’d find that being Asian-American, being religious, being college-educated, that these three groups in their own ways would be kind of more likely to be married in America today, among other things. But I found, in crunching the numbers, that when you included ideology in the statistics, you still found that there’s a net effect, a unique effect, of being conservative, ideologically speaking, that boosted your odds of being married and also being happily married, even controlling for factors like religion.

So, that’s why I have four groups in the book. And each of those four groups, Brett, a majority of them, if you compare them to the alternative groups, are married. So for instance, a majority of college-educated Americans, 18 to 55, are married. Only a minority today of less-educated working-class and poor Americans are married. A majority of conservatives are married. Only a minority of moderates and liberals are married. Asian-Americans and the likes are typically majority married. And then Black and Hispanic Americans, only a minority of them are married.

Brett McKay: Okay. And then for the ideology aspect, how do you define what is conservative?

Brad Wilcox: So there’s just… On social surveys, like the general social survey, which we use a lot for this book project, people are just asked, “Are you very liberal? Liberal? Moderate? Conservative? Very conservative?” And we also had a question like that in a YouGov survey that we did for the book of up to about 2000 husbands and wives, where we just categorized people as liberal or conservative.

Brett McKay: Gotcha.

Brad Wilcox: And we found that conservatives are more likely, again, to be married and to be happily married compared to moderates and liberals. Now, what’s interesting about the ideology story there is it’s a little bit complicated. So, it turns out that very liberal Americans, and I did a piece in the New York Times on this a little while ago, are relatively happier, looking at women. So very liberal women are relatively happier than sort of ordinary wives in America, sort of in the liberal to moderate category. But conservative and very conservative women are even happier. So, what I call a J-curve in marital happiness when it comes to women’s marital happiness, and where, again, the very liberal women are a little bit happier than the norm, and then the conservative, American conservative women, are even happier. We see a similar trend, actually it’s fascinating, looking at new Gallup study that we published in Family Studies a few months ago, when it comes to teens reports of the quality of their parent-child relationship. So, teens in variable households are a little bit happier than the norm, And then teens in conservative, especially very conservative, homes, are even happier.

And it’s just kind of surprising. And this Gallup study suggests that maybe the story there is that conservative parents tend to be a bit more authoritative, have clear roles and expectations and consequences for their kids, and that actually teens are more likely to thrive in a context where maybe there’s a clear curfew, maybe there are clearer consequences for getting your chores done or your homework done in conservative homes, and actually, those kinds of boundaries, as long as they’re coupled with an affectionate and engaged style, tend to work out well for kids.

Brett McKay: Can these demographics cross over? So for example, imagine you’re a college-educated or highly-educated, tend to be, I don’t know if the survey says or the research shows this, tend to be more liberal. Is that true?

Brad Wilcox: So yeah, there are cross-cutting… Yeah, that’s a great question. There are cross-cutting pressures here and then they’re overlapping. So I talked to a conservative, religious, Indian-American, well-educated guy for the book. So he would be checking all the boxes, and he and his wife are doing well, and they’ve got three kids who’ve done really well as well. So, there are examples like that. And then we also see a lot of the discussion around marriage is focused on sort of class and education. The assumption has been that college-educated Americans are more likely to be killing it when it comes to marriage. And my friend and colleague, Richard Reeves, he’s been at Brookings, he’s got a new group focusing on boys and men.

He’s kind of made the argument that college-educated Americans have these marriage-minded sort of norms and ideas, but they’re also more progressive on gender. And so that, for him, is the sweet spot. But what I actually find in my own research is that when you separate out the college-educated Americans who are conservative from those who are moderate and liberal, it’s the ones who are conservative who are most likely to be stably married and happily married. So it kind of calls into question some of Richard’s ideas about how this is all playing out. So, the bottom line is it’s sort of the most educated, most religious, and most conservative couples in America are the ones who are most likely to be stably married and happily married.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s similar to what Richard Reeves was saying. An argument that I’ve heard about marriage is that it all comes down to class and money, right? So, if you have lots of money and you’re upper to middle-class, you’re going to do fine. If you’re poor, you’re not going to do fine. What does your research show?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. So, I’m saying there’s both a cultural story and a class story. And so, I think like Richard and I would tell very similar stories, but kind of the general class story, and there’s just having more education and more money is one big reason why we are seeing that more educated Americans are much more likely to be getting married and staying married and to be reasonably happily married. But I think where my story diverges from the one that Richard Reeves would tell us is that culturally, what we’re seeing is that more religious and more conservative couples, Asian-American couples, are more likely to be getting married and staying married oftentimes and are happily married. And so I think what they have is oftentimes a deeper sense of commitment to marriage as an institution and to the norms of marriage, norms like fidelity and not using the D word when things are tough in your marriage, obviously, divorce.

And they’re also more likely to be surrounded by peers who value marriage as well. And we know that that’s a big predictor of succeeding in marriage, too. If you’re surrounded by people who value marriage and are living more what I call family-first lifestyles, that’s going to, other things being equal, increase your odds of success. So, again, the bottom line here is that both culture and class are important in understanding marriage today, and so folks who have both more income, more education, but also an appreciation for a lot of those classic norms and values around marriage are also more likely to be succeeding at marriage today.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you spend a lot of time in the book countering what you think are some of the myths that are keeping young people from marrying or not investing enough in their marriage. And one myth is what you call the “flying solo” myth. What is the flying solo myth?

Brad Wilcox: So there’s just kind of this idea that, again, being free of entanglements, encumbrances, family obligations, is the path to happiness. That we want to keep our options open, keep our choices before us. We want to focus on our 20s on just having a good time and really investing in our career. And I talked to a number of women and men for the book who were in their mid-30s basically, and regretting the fact that they had spent their 20s focusing more on just career and fun, and now, they’re unmarried. And these two women in the Rocky Mountain West and a man in the DC far suburbs are really unmoored in some important ways. They’re kind of struggling with loneliness and a sense of meaninglessness and just wishing that they had made different choices in their 20s. And I should say, okay, well, so what I found, I found two people in America who conform to my priors. Well, the important point to make here, actually, is that we’re seeing a decline in happiness in America. And this decline is concentrated among unmarried Americans. And the biggest factor driving the drop in happiness in America, according to a recent study from the University of Chicago, is the declining rate of marriage in America.

So, a simple way to say this is like less marriage equals more unhappiness for the country at large. And I think our younger adults should just be a lot more skeptical of the messages they’re getting about the importance of freedom and choice and building your own brand and steering clear of entanglements with the opposite sex, because the people that are able to actually get married and build decent marriages are just flourishing on so many more dimensions than their peers who are not.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And a point you make in the book is that the flying solo idea, it could be great if you have lots of money and you can travel the world. But for average Americans, probably not. You’re not going to be able to do all these things ’cause you don’t have access to money. So if you really want flourishing and happiness, your best bet would be to get married.

Brad Wilcox: Correct. Right, and I profiled a professional from, I think, New York city who was kind of like living the life as a single, 30-something, high-flying guy. And he was perfectly happy. But as you were saying, there are a lot of Americans who are not traveling the world, not making a lot of money, and not killing it at work. And without the benefit of a spouse and family, life can be pretty hard. But again, what’s interesting, too, about the guy that I profiled in the suburbs of Washington, DC is that he has graduate training. He has a good job. He owns his own home. He’s making six figures. And he basically says to me as I interviewed him, he says, “I’ve got degrees in my wall. I’ve got accomplishments and certificates, but it doesn’t mean anything in the end. I have to get up every day and look in the mirror and realize I’m alone. I have nobody.” Okay? So for this guy, the Midas mindset has not worked out. He’s in his mid-30s and he is not happy. He’s not a happy camper. Now, again, I know plenty of single folks who are doing great. But I’m just saying on average, single Americans are more likely to be struggling, and married Americans are more likely to be flourishing. And that average story, unfortunately, Brett, is not being told enough in the media and certainly on social media as well.

Brett McKay: So we mentioned earlier, kind of referenced it. Your research that you’ve done has shown that married people tend to have more money, they’re happier, they’re more fulfilled. Is this a matter of causation, or correlation? Does marriage make you happier, or do happier people or people who have those attributes that can lead to a flourishing life tend to get married more often?

Brad Wilcox: That’s, I think, really the killer question, right? And so, yeah, the smart critics of the kind of argument that I’m making in the academy and in the media would talk about what we call “selection effect,” where the kinds of people who are selecting into marriage are just different. They’re more educated, they’re more affluent, they’re more… They have better social skills. And so they would say, “Brad is confusing correlation with causation here.” Yes, many people are happier, they’re more affluent, that’s because they’re already happier and more affluent to begin with. So like Matt Brunick, for instance, a progressive, says married people are less impoverished, because people who are not impoverished are more likely to get married. He says with marriage, you have an institution that attracts and retains more economically secure and stable people, not an institution that creates them. So this is a great summary of the sort of selection perspective.

But what Matt is missing, though, is just there’s still a ton of research on the way in which marriage is institution that tends to transform our lives. It doesn’t just vacuum up the elites and just put them together. Now, there’s some of that obviously happening now, but we know, for instance, of a study in Minnesota looking at identical twins and paternal twins, guys, and the twins who got married earned about 26% more than their twins who did not get married. So giving us a clear sense, it’s probably something about marriage per se that is helping to make men, and we see other evidence in the score, too, when it comes to men and marriage and work, married men work harder, they work longer hours, they’re more strategic in their job search, they’re less likely to be fired. So these are all the kinds of things that would help us to understand why marriage per se can be transformational.

And then on the happiness front, there’s work done by the economist Sean Grover and John Holliwell and the control for happiness prior to marriage, and then tracked happiness after people got married and after other people did not get married, comparing them over time. And they still found, “A causal effect on happiness at all stages of the marriage from prenuptial bliss to marriages of long duration.” And they found the biggest happiness premium was in midlife, when people in the late 40s and 50s, and we often see adult happiness at its nadir. And again, why is it that marriage is happiness-inducing? I think the point is that we are, as Aristotle said, social animals. And so, money [0:23:12.5] ____ end up being less important for us than our friendships and our family relationships, which give us opportunities to connect with others, to be with and for others. And I think important enough, to really to care for others.

And for both women and men, I think it’s important not just to be cared for, but to have opportunities to care for others. It gives our lives… Certainly, I’ll speak personally for a second. Caring for my wife and children is the most meaningful thing that I get to do. So, I just think people are not factoring in the ways that marriage and family can be so generative on so many fronts for ordinary women and men.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, couldn’t you get the same benefits just by cohabitating, like companionship?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, great question. So I think if you do like just an immediate look at like people’s happiness, cohabiting and married, often not a big difference, right? But the problem is that cohabitation is much less committed. And so, what that means in practice is that couples who are cohabiting just don’t go the distance nearly as much as those who are married. So you have situations, like a former neighbor of mine, where she invested five years of her life, just like 28 to 33 and her cohabiting partner, and then he just… She kind of made it clear she wanted to get married and have kids. And he’s like, “Well, I’m not ready for that,” And so, he was gone. And [chuckle] that was pretty traumatic, because they hadn’t established that kind of joint level of commitment heading into the relationship. And so her happiness that she’d enjoyed for probably substantial share of that relationship disappeared and turned out to be fairly traumatic. And of course, divorce can happen, too, but I’m just saying that, on average, marriage is markedly more stable than cohabitation, and that’s one reason why I talk about getting married rather than getting together.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So just getting married, it adds more stakes to the relationship, I guess. You take it more serious.

Brad Wilcox: So when I’m talking about this to my students, ’cause I think the cohabitation piece is the most surprising thing that we talked about in my class at the University of Virginia, how marriage and cohabitation are different. I’m just thinking about the terms of entry, or how couples enter into these two different relationship states. When it comes to cohabitation, what you see is oftentimes, couples can’t even agree on the day when they begin cohabiting. Like you have one partner will kind of bring some things over for the weekend, maybe leave some clothes, a toothbrush, whatever. And then some more stuff like a week later, and then move in all their stuff a month later or whatever, two months later. But it’s never been… There wasn’t a discrete moment, where obviously, with a wedding, it’s pretty clear when it happens.

But more importantly, just imagine the social context that these two things are taking place in. So with cohabitation, you have… There’s no assembled multitude of friends and family in that apartment hallway. There’s no music playing in the background. There are no vows being exchanged. You bring your gear into your partner’s apartment for the first time or whatever, for the second or third time. By contrast with the wedding, obviously, everything is kind of scripted, it’s a ceremony, it’s ritualized. And human beings, we’re actually really… We tend to endow things with more meaning when we do them in a ritualized, communal context, and especially when we make public vows in a communal context. So, that just gives you some sense of how marriage and cohabitation are really different things.

Brett McKay: Okay, so flying solo, for most people, getting married is probably your best bet for happiness, fulfillment, and even economic stability. Another myth you explore that might be preventing people from investing too much in their marriage is the myth of family diversity. What do you mean by that?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. So, particularly in my academic world, there are a lot of folks who would argue that the family isn’t any way getting weaker or marriage isn’t declining; it’s just the family is changing, and that we should embrace family diversity, a wide range of family structures, and family approaches. And that marriage per se doesn’t really matter; what really matters for kids, when it comes to flourishing, is love, and also money. Basically, families have enough love in the household and who have decent income supply are gonna be doing just perfectly. For instance, there was an article in The Atlantic where there was a professor saying that, “All of our research points to the fact that it’s the quality of the relationship that matters and the handling of communication and conflict. And the number of people in the household is not really the key.” Or Philip Cohen, a professor at Maryland, said, “If people grow up with single mothers who have adequate income, they do fine on average. What we find is they do have a lot of challenges from the lack of resources, but family structure per se is not as big a factor.” So again, the idea here is that money matters, love matter, but marriage doesn’t matter per se.

And what these, I think, perspectives don’t really acknowledge is that yes, love matters, yes, money matters, but kids in intact married households are much more likely to be flourishing on any number of fronts. They’re about twice as likely to graduate from college compared to kids from non-intact families. Boys are about twice as likely to end up in prison or in jail compared to their peers from intact families, if they’re in a non-intact family. Girls and boys in non-intact families are 50% more likely to be sad as eighth graders.

So, that’s what the facts are, and I think one of the most striking things that I discovered in looking at this data with my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang, is that young men today are more likely to go to prison or jail than they ought to graduate from college, if they’re raised in a non-intact family. By contrast, what we see is that for boys who were raised in intact families, only 9% of them end up in prison or jail, and 38% of them are graduating from college. So, that was, for me, when it comes to kids, that was the like, “Wow.” For boys who don’t have the benefit of their unmarried parents, more likely to end up incarcerated, whereas for boys who are benefiting from both their married parents in the household, much more likely to attend and graduate from college.

Brett McKay: So you’re saying there’s a myth that’s out there that, well, it doesn’t really matter if we get married, or if we get divorced, or if there’s just a single parent in the picture. It’s not a big deal, kids will be fine. And what you’re saying is, well, maybe not.

Brad Wilcox: So yeah. And two things to be clear about. One is that I was raised by a single mom, and obviously, many kids go on to do just perfectly fine without the benefit of married parents. I can think of prominent examples like Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos, who, at least obviously professionally, have done extremely well. So I’m not saying that coming from a non-intact household is a death sentence. I’m just sort of saying that on average, kids are more likely to flourish when they have the benefit of their unmarried parents. And the other interesting piece about this is that the proponents of family diversity states about really what matters for kids is love and money. What they do not acknowledge, though, Brett, is that on average, kids who are being raised by intact married parents have access to more attention and affection from their married parents, and they have access to a heck of a lot more money than kids in other family situations. So, even on the love and money front, what we’re seeing is on average, of course, we know that there are dysfunctional intact married families out there, but on average, kids are more likely to get the love and money they need to flourish when they’re being raised by their own married parents.

Brett McKay: Well, in a point you make in the book, you point out there’s a hypocrisy you see. There’s people out there in academia and the media that say, “Well, it doesn’t matter what your family looks like, you just get divorced, whatever, the kids are gonna be fine, you’re gonna be fine.” But then you look at how those people are living their lives. They’re typically… They’re married and they’re living in an intact family.

Brad Wilcox: Yeah. I’ve got a piece coming out in The Atlantic soon talking about how our elites often talk left and walk right. And the story there basically is that I think it’s become kind of fashionable in a variety of ways to articulate your support for family diversity and to discount the importance of marriage, or even to attack it, in certain circles in academia and the media and other precincts of our culture. But it’s also, I think, a fact that prudentially, it makes sense to get married and stay married. And so, that ends up being the path that a lot of elites take, ’cause they recognize, on some level, that it’s the best thing for them and for their kids.

Brett McKay: So another thing that seems to be holding people back from getting married… This is a new one. So before, people weren’t getting married, they’d say, “Well, I’ll miss out on opportunities for my career, I need to make money, I wanna enjoy myself,” whatever. The one thing you’re seeing now, I’ve been seeing more reports of, is political polarization. What’s going on there?

Brad Wilcox: So, my colleague, Lyman Stone and I did a piece for The Atlantic talking about the growing number of young women who are moving left and the growing number of young men are moving right. Although there’s more women moving left than men moving right, but it’s creating a situation where there are many more liberal women than there are liberal men, and a bit more conservative men than there are conservative women. And that’s leading to a gap, where we would estimate about one in five young adults can’t marry someone or can’t date someone who is on the same page with them ideologically. So that’s a problem, because as I’m arguing in the book, marriage is generally a good thing for young adults and for the society at large. It’s this political polarization is one more factor making it harder for young adults to marry.

Brett McKay: Anything we can do about that?

Brad Wilcox: Well, I think one thing to do is just to recognize that what matters here for, I think, marital success is being on the same page, either religiously or in terms of some core commitments, including how you wanna do family and work. So if you meet someone who’s not on the same page as you politically but who shares basically either your faith or your broader worldview in terms of how you wanna do work and family, then I would say consider moving forward. But on the other hand, if you’re kind of not just politically at odds with one another but also have pretty different views on things like religion or on how you wanna… If you wanna have kids, how you wanna raise them, all that kind of stuff, those are really big warning signs. So I think you have distinguish between politics proper and then other things that would really bear on the warp and woof of organizing a family. And unfortunately, I have seen friends in my 20s who grew ideologically apart and then got divorced. So I’ve seen that play out in my own social circle.

Brett McKay: So something else you do in this book is you look at what families or couples that are having thriving marriages, thriving family life, do on a day-to-day basis to make them thriving. And you talk about, you mentioned earlier, they typically have a family-first approach to marriage. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?

Brad Wilcox: Yeah, so I argue that one of the challenges facing all of us, I think, in this culture today is that sometimes we can think about marriage as kind of like the soulmate thing. It’s like, “I’m gonna find this perfect match, we’re gonna have this intense romantic and maybe sexual connection, we’re gonna fit like this perfect… We’ll have a perfect fit. And she’s gonna understand me, I’m gonna understand her perfectly. And there’s gonna be very little friction and a lot of passion and fulfillment and happiness pretty much all the time.” That’s sort of like the soulmate idea, just in a nutshell. And yet, obviously, once you’re married and in relationship with someone, you discover that she’s not perfect and you’re not perfect. And it’s often extremely difficult to get along in some days or some weeks, some months, whatever.

And by contrast, I think people recognize, realize that marriage is about more than just an emotional connection, more than just a feeling. It’s about establishing a life together, a family together, having kids, if you can, raising kids together, being there for your kin, for your parents, your wife’s parents, doing things together as a family, going trips, going to the park, going to the basketball game, whatever it is that your family does, going hunting for some, going to the beach for others. All these kind of family things end up being also important. Financial security is also part and parcel of a family-first approach to marriage. And so people kind of have a richer view of the many different goods that marriage tends to facilitate or foster are kind of pursuing what I would call a more family-first or more institutional approach to marriage.

And that, of course, is more stable than just kind of one that based on feelings, the soulmate approach. And I think what people don’t realize is it’s often happier as well, because you’re able to appreciate that your spouse and your marriage and your family are about a number of different goods, not just an intense romantic connection. And so even if you’re not necessarily firing all cylinders on the romantic side, but at some point, in your marriage, you recognize, “Oh, my husband’s a great father,” or “Oh, my wife’s a great mother,” for instance, and that is a source of satisfaction for you and for your relationship. So what I find is there’s a slight edge to that the folks have this more family-first model enjoy in marital quality, and then also, they’re less likely to be thinking about divorce compared to folks who have more of a feelings-based, soulmate approach to married life.

Brett McKay: And you get nitty-gritty with this stuff, like how these couples navigate sex, parented responsibilities, chores. What does that look like?

Brad Wilcox: So, what I’m also arguing, too, is that the what I call the “masters of marriage” tend to be more likely to embrace what I call the five pillars of marriage. And these are five C’s. One is communion, a sense of communion, in their marriage. One is proper appreciation of the role of children in marriage, if they have kids. Third C is commitment. The fourth C is cash. The fifth C is community. And so, just to take for instance, the communion piece, what I find is the couples who have regular date nights, to try to maintain that sense of romance and that emotional connection, are more likely to be flourishing both in terms of marital happiness, but also in terms of sexual satisfaction. And not surprisingly, if you’d like to have a healthy sexual life, it’s important to keep the romance alive in your marriage, and so doing fun and different and regular date nights, which can be challenging when you’ve got kids, as my wife and I do, still is important. Try to figure out that piece, I would say.

But also, in terms of community, I talked to you about a way before-me approach to life, rather than a me-first approach. And one example I give is couples who have shared checking accounts are doing better both in terms of stability but also marital quality compared to couples who have separate accounts and more of that me-first approach to money. So that’s communion. Commitment is, among other things, prioritizing the well-being of your spouse and your family, and then also concretely being attentive to the importance of fidelity. So that means steering clear of attractive alternatives, both in the real world and now today in the virtual world, who might obviously distract your attention and your affections away from your spouse. And when it comes to divorce, not putting the D word in a conversation when you’re having an argument or there’s some problem in your marriage. Most couples have problems at some point in their marriage, and I think couples who just keep divorce off out of the picture are more readily able to handle those challenges and overcome them.

And then the community piece, basically, again, if you are surrounding yourself with people who are… Whether you’re secular or religious, but people who are like intentional about being good spouses and being good parents, you’re more likely to thrive. And yet, I do find that folks who are religious are more likely to be succeeding on that front. ‘Cause you find that couples who are going to church, especially together or temple or synagogue, whatever, are more likely to be spending time with their kids, to be capable of forgiving their spouse, to be maintaining surprisingly, I think, to some extent, a more vibrant sexual life than couples who are not part of a religious community.

Brett McKay: You do your research with the eye of suggesting public policy, and you have some public policy recommendations at the end of your book. But then I think it was a recent article or it might’ve been a tweet, you talked about how there’s research showing, and even in these Nordic countries that have very pro-family public policy, people still aren’t getting married and having kids. So, basically, public policy isn’t enough. You have to change the culture about marriage and family life. So how do you do that? That’s a tough hill to climb.

Brad Wilcox: So, I want to be clear here. I do think public policy is helpful, and I think we could do more to promote in our schools what’s called the success sequence, which, among other things, sucks at the value of marriage to our kids in high school, public high schools. I think we could get rid of the marriage penalty that ends up penalizing marriage for a lot of working-class families across America. I think we could have a more generous child tax credit that would help people who are particularly working in middle-class families who are kind of struggling financially to raise the next generation, kind of have an easier time with it. So there are some policies that I think would be helpful in terms of making marriage more financially and culturally appealing, attractive, and attainable, particularly against working-class and middle-class Americans. But I think, at the end of the day, we have to recognize and realize that unless the culture changes, we’re just going to see a continuing decline in marriage and fertility.

And the reason I say that is because we’re already seeing that in the Nordic countries, like for instance, Finland, where they have an incredible, suite collection of great family policies, childcare, and parental leave, and child allowances, arguably one of the best suite of family policies in the world, if you have a high degree of confidence in public policy to help families. And yet, in Finland, marriage and coupling and fertility are way down in recent years. And I think what’s happening in Finland is also happening here in the US, but just not as quite yet as pronounced. And that is it’s a combination, I think, of a couple of things. One is the Midas mindset, which you’ve talked about, focusing on education, work, and money more than other things, focus on having a good time, fun, staying free of encumbrances. Keeping more individualistic mindset among all the 20-somethings and even 30-somethings is part of the problem as well.

And then two, I think we’re seeing men losing ground, doing less well relative to the women in their lives in education and work and in other domains. And so I think women are just more skeptical about investing in a relationship, marriage, and having kids when the men in their lives don’t, from their perspective, meet the bar of what a spouse or a partner or parent should be up for. So, there’s more going on, but the point is that there’s just a series of cultural shifts that are unfolding across the developed world that are both devaluing family and the sacrifices that being a spouse and a parent require of us. And they’re elevating a more individualistic, a more live-for-the-moment ethos that, in the short term, can be attractive and appealing, but in the long term, spells not just demographic problems, but I think, more fundamentally, a very bleak and lonely and meaningless life. Not for everybody, of course, but for a growing share of people who are going to be kinless as they head into mid and late life.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, speaking of this culture around parenthood. So let’s say someone does get married. You’re seeing a lot of people who are getting married, it’s like, “We don’t want to have kids.” But in the surveys that you’ve done, do people give reasons for why they don’t want to have kids?

Brad Wilcox: Well, there are different theories about this, everything from the cost of parenthood to the environment to, I think probably more importantly, “I just want to like do my own thing.” And we’ve seen obviously DINK videos on TikTok where these couples who are actually married, but they enjoying sleeping in on Saturday morning, they say, and they’re enjoying traveling to Florida on a regular basis, they say, and they’re just saying that they’re living the life. It’s the life that they think that they have without children. And I’m just like, “Okay, let’s check back with you in 20 years or in 40 years and see how you’re doing,” because I just can’t even imagine, to be blunt, my life without my children. I mean, every night, I’ve got a teenage daughter, hunts me down and she’ll give me a hug or a kiss on the forehead. I mean, that’s just like, “Wow.” It’s a nice way to end the night.

And yes, kids are incredibly expensive and challenging and all that kind of stuff, but I mean, just the meaning, the joy, that kids can bring to your life is amazing. And I just feel sad for people who are deliberately closing their hearts to having children. But to be more empirical for a second, again, too, what’s interesting about the research is that we saw some evidence back before 2000 that parents were less happy than childless Americans. But today, it’s no longer true. I published a piece of Deseret News you may have seen just showing that given some newer survey data, parents, particularly married parents, are happier than childless Americans. And there’s no group of happier Americans aged 18 to 55, and that’s the sort of age focus of my book, than married mothers and married fathers compared to their peers who are single and/or childless.

So, that’s often lost in our public discussions and a lot of the social media commentary, that, for all of the hard things of being a mother and a father demand of us, we do see that, compared to their peers, it’s sort of like Churchill’s point, like, yeah, democracy is like… I’m paraphrasing, obviously, it’s flawed. But compared to the alternatives, it’s much better. I think the same thing is true of parenthood. Yeah, being a parent can be really hard and challenging and frustrating and hair-pulling-inducing, but compared to the alternative, I think it often ends up being pretty, pretty good.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and something that I don’t think has helped with this is that, in the popular culture, people just tend to talk about the negatives of being a parent. They just talk about the hair-pulling stuff when your kids are driving you bonkers, and they really don’t talk about the great stuff about being a parent. Being a dad is awesome. Whenever things in life feel flimsy and meaningless, my family is the thing that feels the most real to me.

Brad Wilcox: I agree.

Brett McKay: Well, Brad, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Brad Wilcox: So I’ve got a new website, bradwilcox.com. Familystudies.org is a good place to go as well. And the National Marriage Week is kind of rolling out from February 7th to 14th this year, and they’ve got a lot of resources for people looking for things about marriage and also tips to improve your marriage. There are plenty of obviously couples out there who are struggling, and so if you’re struggling, I would encourage you to go to the National Marriage Week’s website for some ideas about how you can strengthen your relationship as you head towards Valentine’s Day.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brad Wilcox, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Brad Wilcox: Thanks so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Brad Wilcox. He’s the author of the book Get Married. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/marriage where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic, including a link to another survey that just came out by Gallup that once again affirmed that married people are happier. We’ve also included a link to an article by one of Brad’s colleagues and former AOM podcast guest, Lyman Stone, on how the chance of divorce still doesn’t negate this happiness premium for men.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.com, where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get your read on the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture, like, for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce, people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming more secular because people leave religion in adulthood.

Are these ideas actually born out by the data?

Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out what’s going on in population, relationship, and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he’s discovered in his research and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually correlated with a higher chance of divorce, the effect that marrying later has on fertility, why the drop in the number of kids people are having isn’t only about cost but also about the rise in high intensity parenting, and how the increase in societal secularization can actually be traced to kids, not adults.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Related articles by Lyman Stone:
  • Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?
  • Why Canadian Women Aren’t Having the Children They Desire
  • For Fertility, Marriage Still Matters
  • What the Latest Current Population Survey Tells Us About the Future of Fertility
  • Secularization Begins at Home
• Study: Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association With Marital Dissolution
• Psychology Today: Are Couples That Live Together Before Marriage More Likely to Divorce?
• AoM Article: The Surprising Benefits of Marrying Young
• AoM Article: How to Test Your Relationship Without Moving In Together
• AoM Podcast #349: The Problem With Ambiguity in Relationships with Scott Stanley

Connect With Lyman Stone

• Lyman on Twitter

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture, like, for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce, people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming more secular because people leave religion in adulthood.

Are these ideas actually, born out by the data?

Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out what’s going on in population, relationship, and familial trends. We dig into some of the counterintuitive findings he’s discovered in his research and discuss the possible reasons that cohabitation is actually, correlated with a higher chance of divorce, the effect that marrying later has on fertility, why the drop in the number of kids people are having isn’t only about cost but also about the rise in high intensity parenting, and how the increase in societal secularization can actually, be traced to kids, not adults.

After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/familymyths.

All right. Lyman Stone, welcome to the show.

Lyman Stone: It’s good to be with you.

Brett McKay: So you are a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and you focus on demographic changes in family life. And a lot of your research has looked at a lot of popular ideas that we have about family life. And today I wanna talk about some of these ideas and maybe some of the counterintuitive findings you found with your research. One idea that’s out there is that before people get married, you should live with your potential spouse first so that you can know whether you’re compatible or not. So let’s talk about cohabitation. First, what’s the state of cohabitation in the United States today?

Lyman Stone: So lots of people cohabit. It’s very common. If you go back to the 1960s, marriages in the 1960s, only about 5% of them were to people who were cohabiting before marriage. Today, it’s over 70%, perhaps 75%. So there’s been a huge increase in cohabitation over the last few decades. Just really this extraordinary social transition that I think is taken for granted now but it’s snuck up and we’re like “Oh, wait. This happened. Now everyone cohabits, it seems like.” Again, three out of four marriages will have premarital cohabitation now. So that’s a huge change in just two generations.

Brett McKay:When demographers look at this rise do they attribute it to anything like societal changes, changes in religiosity, or what’s going on there?

Lyman Stone: Yeah, there’s tons of different… This is a very debated question. What caused all this? There’s a couple of things. One is… Actually, there’s a very nice paper that just came… The final version of it just came out recently. It’s called Collateralized Marriage. And they argue, I think fairly persuasively, that the legal benefits of marriage have declined over time. That is, it doesn’t give you the same guarantees it used to in the past. That is, it doesn’t protect you in the event of divorce. You have to pay… Men have to pay… Parents, but usually men have to pay child support, even if they weren’t married. The relative benefits to marriage have declined for men and women. People often talk about this as a decline for men, but, actually, the benefits for women have declined very dramatically as well, as this paper I mentioned shows pretty clearly. So as the benefits for formal marriage have declined, the thing is that a lot of the benefits of informal cohabitation have not declined. Living together is still convenient for sexual access and sharing rent and things like that. And furthermore, the taboos on premarital cohabitation or non-marital cohabitation have declined a lot.

So in some sense, it got cheaper to cohabit and the legal benefits and social benefits and protections of marriage declined. As a result, people still, they still won’t have convenient sexual access to one another, so cohabitation rose. But because marriage was no longer a contract that really offered a lot of benefits, particularly, for lower socioeconomic status people, marriage really declined quite a lot. Though, as you mentioned, that this trend really is very class-biased. Cohabitation rose the earliest and rose the most for lower socioeconomic status people. And higher socioeconomic status people are still less likely to cohabit and more likely to marry, and they’re more likely to marry directly with no prior cohabitation.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think they also… Upper class or middle class and above, whatever, however you want to break it down, less likely to divorce than working class. Well, so this idea, “Okay, well, you should live with somebody before you get married because we can figure out if we’re compatible.” What does the research say about that? Let’s say someone cohabitates and they decide to get married, will that cohabitation period improve the marriage?

Lyman Stone: No, it will increase their likelihood of divorce. The idea is called trial marriage. So it’s like a test run of a marriage. And the theory has been, yeah, that it’s going to enable better match quality. So look, we can check. We have these large data sets that I and others use with hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of women, I think, over the last several decades. And we can ask these questions. We can say, okay, if we compare women who did cohabit to women who didn’t, how do their divorce probabilities vary? And the answer is that if you cohabit you’re more likely to divorce. There is a divorce penalty, or you can call it a penalty, a divorce penalty associated with cohabitation. Essentially, this is a way of saying that what really happens with cohabitation is two things. First of all, who cohabits isn’t random. So if you’re cohabiting, it’s often because you’re not quite sure about the relationship yet. You wanna take a next step. You’re just not confident about marriage yet, which might speak to lower match quality to begin with, but secondly a lot of cohabitation just happens. People slide into it. It’s like they just… They’re just spending the night a lot and then somebody goes, “Maybe I’ll start moving more stuff over and then if and you still pay rent for a year or whatever… ”

Brett McKay: Yeah, Scott Stanley. Yeah, Scott Stanley talks about that.

Lyman Stone: And those things in particular… Decisions are very useful for people. Making clear decisions is associated with… Even making bad decisions, if you actually make it as a decision, you’re better off than doing it accidentally. You don’t wanna do things on autopilot in your life, just in general. You should exercise agency at every opportunity you can. And so the upshot of this is that there’s a lot of selection in cohabitation of people who might be lower match quality to begin with.

Brett McKay: And some other research I’ve read, and these are all just theories that social psychologists have put out there about why cohabitating has a divorce penalty, is that with cohabitation you can slide into the relationship and then you can slide out of it. And so if you do that before marriage it could prime you like, “Well, if I don’t like the relationship I can just get out of it.” Again, it’s a theory. I don’t know if you can prove it but that’s one thing I’ve read.

Lyman Stone: Yeah, it’s absolutely a possibility. It’s hard to test what’s going on inside people’s brains, but yeah it could create bad habits. Also, the expectation of cohabitation might change your search protocol, so to speak. So let’s say that you expect to marry directly, that is, with no cohabitation. Because you don’t get to do that test run you’re gonna look for other ways to investigate mate quality. You’re gonna try and find other ways to figure out if this is a good mate. And one of the big ways you would do that is investigating their family background. That you try and meet the family, meet them a lot, hang out with them a lot, learn about their background, because people’s family is a good proxy for them. Sorry if you don’t like your family, but the truth is statistically you’re gonna be a lot like them in your life.

So historically, that’s how marriage happened. Marriage generally involved a lot of family to family interaction. That’s the origin in the traditional marriage ceremony of, “If anyone has any reason why these two cannot be joined together, let them speak now or forever hold his peace.” That’s asking, you’ve got all the families together and you’re supposed to look around and be like, “Do you recognize anybody? Is this an incestuous marriage that they didn’t realize?” But look around, make sure nobody knows each other too well. So you used to do a lot of this family-level investigation. That doesn’t happen anymore. A lot of people their first time meeting their partner’s family will be after they move in together or something. So instead of investigating the social context and community that a partner might be in; their family, church, whatever, because we live more atomized social lives, we’re more detached from these institutions of community support and community engagement. Instead, we deepen the level of inspection of the individual themselves by getting them in our house and in our bed.

Brett McKay: Well, related to this idea of deepening your inspection of a partner, people are dating longer before getting married. They’re playing the field longer. And even when they do find someone they commit to, they date them longer before they get married. So as a result has there been a shift in the age of first marriage in the United States?

Lyman Stone: Yeah, there’s been a huge shift. So today, according to the census, the median age of first marriage for women is I think 28 and a half, and for men it’s 30 and a half. That’s way up from the low 20s, like 20, 21, 22 in the ’50s and ’60s. Now, that low value in the ’50s and ’60s was anomalous. If you go back to the 19th century or the early 20th century, typical marriage was in the mid 20s, 25, 26. So getting back to a median age of marriage of 21, I don’t know that that’s necessarily good or desirable. Those marriages did have high divorce rates, and dissatisfaction with the state of gender relations in America in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, gave rise to the world we inhabit today. So just trying to recreate the world that gave us the world we have today is… I don’t know. It seems like a losing bet.

But today, having men marrying at 31 instead of in the past at 25 or 26, we don’t have to get back to 21, but maybe we could get back to 25 or 26. That was 2007. That wasn’t a hellscape. That was not that long ago that we were at that level.

Brett McKay: What are the downsides of delaying marriage. From your research, what happens to a person’s lifecycle if they put off marriage later and later in life?

Lyman Stone: Well, it depends on what you want in life. Let’s say you’re a man and you want career success, marriage is a take it or leave it offer. Marriage doesn’t have big effects on men’s career trajectories. Maybe slightly positive. It’s not a big effect. So if what you value in life is career success, getting married later probably doesn’t hurt you. Maybe what you value in life is leisure, having lots of leisure time. Their marriage is an interesting thing to calculate, because on the one hand you might have another person that you sometimes have to take care of if she’s sick or out of work or something, but also in principle, she can take care of you if you’re sick or out of work. And leisure is nice, but also most people like to have leisure with others.

Marriage is a good, pretty fairly secure way of ensuring that you’ve got somebody that you really, really like to hang around you with all the fun things you wanna do in life. So there are multiplicative benefits to the hedonic value of leisure, if you’ve got somebody you really care about to share it with, and marriage could be a vehicle to lock that in. So if what you care about is leisure or marriage, it might be good. There’s some trade offs but it might be good. But if what you care about is making a lasting impact on the world, leaving something behind when you die, marriage is you really wanna get married young. Because the main thing you’re gonna leave behind is your genetic material, your children, and beyond that, your cultural material; the traditions, ideas, values, behaviors, practices that you pass on to your children. And delayed marriage dramatically alters your odds of having any given number of children.

The later you get married, the… It’s almost a perfect correlation. The later you marry, the fewer children you end up having. And that’s true across many countries, across time. Late marriage, less kids. So if you want to leave something behind when you die; legacy, something that will carry on the life projects that you value, the traditions of meaning and substance that you contributed to, which personally that’s what I want, then you don’t want to dilly dally on getting married, because getting married tends to give you the high security relationship where you and your wife can have a more productive negotiation about specialization. You can say, “Look, okay, one of us is going to step back from work for a few years to focus on this other thing in our family,” maybe it’s kids, maybe it’s something else, care of a relative, I don’t know, “because we really value that and we’re gonna cross-subsidize each other here.” So marriage insofar as it enables specialization can enable you to really advance your dyadic contribution to valued life projects.

Brett McKay: Well, speaking of kids there’s been a lot of articles I’ve seen in the news about people having fewer kids. What’s going on with the reason why people are having fewer children these days?

Lyman Stone: Yeah, fertility’s fallen a lot in the US but it depends on the time horizon. So if you go back to… The baby boom fertility was, I don’t know, three kids per woman or something. It was quite high. I don’t have it on hand but it was quite high. And then it declined to 1.7 in the ’70s. People were like, “Oh, fertility’s super low. Population decline.” But then we had Immigration Reform and we got a lot of immigrants and two things happened with those immigrants. One, we got a lot of immigrants and that increases population. And two, they were largely from Latin America. And at that time fertility rates in Latin America were quite high. When people migrate, they tend to replicate a lot of the cultural forms of their place of origin. Women moved to the US and they had babies particularly because the US’s birthright citizenship also creates a pretty favorable calculus for having children here if you’re a non-citizen.

So what happened is in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, fertility rose. Also, it wasn’t just Hispanic immigrant fertility, native-born fertility rose, non-Hispanic white fertility rose somewhat. So we got this kinda little fertility boom in the ’80s, ’90s and into the mid 2000s. But then in 2007 when our fertility rates were 2.07 or something so right at “replacement rate”, replacement rate is basically how many kids you need to have for society to replace itself assuming its current level of mortality, which in the US replacement rate is like 2.03, 2.04. Though it also technically depends on the sex ratio of children. So that’s a whole different thing. But regardless, fertility rates started falling since 2007 and they were at 2.07 in 2007, I think, or 2008. One of those. Today, there are like 1.66. So we’ve lost about 0.4 children per woman which is to say basically every other woman is missing a child versus her 2007 counterfactual fertility in the last 16 years or something.

The thing to understand about this is that there’s multiple different things going on here. Explaining fertility decline from the baby boom to the 1980s, you’re gonna have a different set of factors than the decline from 2007 to today. So from the baby boom to the 1980s, you could tell a story of women’s rights, women’s entrance into the workforce, no-fault divorce. I don’t know. There’s all these stories you could tell that are the stories people are used to hearing about fertility. Like contraception was big, yada yada. But those stories don’t really apply to the last 15 years. Yes, contraceptive use did rise some and particularly of long acting removable contraceptives, which is the most effective form, but abortion rates fell over a lot of that window. And furthermore, although unintended fertility fell over that period intended fertility also fell.

So what’s going on there? Why did intended fertility fall? That’s not a contraceptive story. This declined from 2007, it’s not we all got tons more prosperous. We didn’t just have some… This story of development in women’s liberation. Women aren’t, what, 20% more liberated now than they were in 2007. I don’t know what that would mean to say that. But the reality is we just have lower fertility without a big change in a lot of these conceptual big drivers of the 20th century decline.

So what caused it? I’ve argued that most of the decline is due to postponed marriage. But if you look at marital fertility rates, so fertility rates of married people, they really have not declined very much. Virtually the whole decline is among… Is just fewer people being married. So really looking at a change in entrance into marriage and this feeling among young people of preparedness for marriage. And so you really need to explore, “Okay, well why did that happen?” It’s a complicated question with a lot of different elements, but suffice to say the biggest component of the decline in fertility is lack of entrance into marriage.

Brett McKay: All right, so fewer people are getting married or they’re waiting too long to get married, so they don’t have kids.

Lyman Stone: Yeah. Exactly.

Brett McKay: So I know you said there’s a lot of factors going into why people are choosing to postpone marriage, but what are some of them? What have you found? You don’t have to get too into the weeds with this but I’m curious.

Lyman Stone: So when we think about these timing issues, number of children is something that people plausibly choose. They choose to have more or fewer, conditional on some other factors. But when you get married or when you do something is less a matter of choice, strangely enough. Because in principle a woman can just go and have children, assuming she’s fertile. Through IVF or sperm donors or just unprotected promiscuous sex. This can happen. But the timing is a bit more complicated for something like marriage because first of all, it takes two to tango, so you need somebody else to agree. But second of all, timing decisions are really, really strongly socially normed. So if you think about the life course. If I were to ask when should you graduate high school? Well, you’d probably say around 18 but why would you say around 18? Is it because we have some research that suggests that 18 is the optimal age to finish high school? No, we’d say, “Well, you just should because that’s when you usually do.” If you finish it at 16 because you dropped out that’s bad. If you finish it at 16 because you’re a super genius, I guess that’s maybe good. If you finish it at 20, that’s maybe better than not finishing it. But it’s not great. But ultimately all we’re really saying is the norm is to do it at 18. It’s not like we have great reasons to believe that this is the perfect age to end high school. So it’s just a norm.

Likewise if we say what age should you finish college? Well, most of us are gonna be like, “I don’t know. 22.” Why? Because 18 plus four. It’s not we have some deep methodical consideration of the optimal duration of college education. No. But a BA takes about four years. And if somebody was like, “Well, would you prefer to choose a three-year BA program?” It’s like, “Well, there aren’t many three-year BA programs. Maybe I’d choose it if I could but this isn’t a choice I really have.

And then if you think about, okay, people don’t usually wanna get married when they’re in school. It’s just they don’t. There’s a big spike in marriage the summer after graduation. And so as people spend more years in school, college, graduate, PhD, whatever, all those are rising, everything is pushed later. And as educated people have their norms pushed later, it also filters down to other people. We all inhabit a society and to some extent we share norms. And then there’s other things, because you’re much later in life when you are done with school and “ready for marriage”, you also have more adult habits formed. You’re not founding a life with someone else. You’re merging lives with somebody else. And so coordinating two fully fleshed out adult lives is a lot harder than coordinating two wet behind the ears young people who haven’t figured out life yet. You have the two-body problem. If you get married and graduate college together, figuring out where to move to get jobs is a lot easier than if you’re in your mid 20s and one of you, or late 20s and one of you gets a job offer somewhere, because you’re just more flexible early in life.

And so education, social norms, norms about how long you should date and be engaged. It used to be… Six months was a very reasonable length of engagement. But now people do two-year engagements. It’s insane. So these are just social norms about timing that emerge. And why do they emerge? We could get all into stuff about why they emerge and underlying economic factors, but at the end of the day, everything in our society is motivating towards extended adolescence. And if you wanna find an deep underlying factor of this, though, it both explains too much and too little. You could point to basically the fact that we’re becoming a human capital-intensive economy, where you get ahead by acquiring a lot of human capital for yourself, which means education, experience, skills.

And what that means is peak income comes later in life and income is a way that people signal mate fitness. And then beyond that, because we’re a human capital-intensive economy, people are more discriminatory in their mating. There’s been some shift in assortative mating, though this is somewhat debated, but I believe it. This suggests that people may be more aggressively trying to sort on the observable characteristics of their partner. Now, the joke is on us, because it turns out if you care about anything genetic, you really shouldn’t look at your partner’s genetic characteristics. You should look at their parent’s genetic character… Well, you should look at your partner, but you should look at their parents’ genetic characteristics and their cousins and stuff, ’cause that gives you a way better proxy for the latent traits of your partner than what they choose to reveal to you when they want to be in your pants.

So again, this is the second time I’ve done this pitch, but we should really bring back getting to know people’s families. But regardless, all these factors work together to push marriage and everything in life later. If you look at age of first home ownership, that’s later. Age of first anything is later. People are getting their driver’s license later in life than 20 years ago.

Brett McKay: Right. And then because they’re pushing marriage back so far might mean they don’t have the number of kids that they want. And that’s the interesting thing.

Lyman Stone: Exactly.

Brett McKay: You’ve done studies on this that people are having fewer kids. But then when you ask women how many kids they want, it’s actually, more. It’s quite a bit more than they’re having.

Yeah. Men and women a both say they want to have about 2.5 kids-ish. Depends on how you word the question. If you word the question instead you ask, “How many kids do you intend to have?” You’ll get answers around two, 2.1. But intentions aren’t really desires. Intentions are a compromise between desires and reality. If you ask any desire question, what people want, what they think would make them happiest, what their ideal is, yada yada, they give you between 2.2 and 2.7 as their answer on average. That’s true for men and women. There’s not much difference between the two on this particular question. And so, yeah, people want to have more kids and that’s been true for a while now. Fertility desires did fall in the 1950s and ’60s. People used to say they wanted about 3.5 kids. Now they want about 2.5. And that fall happened around the same time that fertility fell after the baby boom. And so yeah, people want about 2.5-ish, but they are going to have in the US currently about 1.6, 1.7, which means the average woman will have 0.8 fewer children than she wants. Which means if you take 10 women, that eight of them will be missing a child that they wanted to have.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show.

So we talked about the reason why that’s happening or one of the reasons why that’s happening is, well, people are pushing marriage back. So you might not have the time you need to have the kids you want or desire. But then also people talk about, “Well, maybe I want three kids, but kids are so expensive so I’m only gonna have two.” Is that a reason? Is the cost of raising a kid a reason that’s holding people back from having the kids they want?

Lyman Stone: Yeah, both in empirical studies and in surveys. In surveys, tons of people report child cost factors as reasons they’re not having more kids. And we have dozens of empirical studies showing that if you reduce the cost of having children, people have more children. Which that suggests that, yes, the cost of child rearing is a factor that’s reducing fertility. If we can find ways to reduce the cost of child rearing, we will have more babies. But that is not as simple as it sounds.

So think of it this way. Let’s say that we decide we wanna reduce the cost of child rearing and the way we do it is by making free childcare. Now childcare is free, everybody can have it. Well, now, because it’s free, everybody can have it, which means lots of people will have it, which means everybody will take it for granted that they should have it. The norm of what you need to have for people to feel like they have enough to have kids will rise. And that extra money that you have on hand… Well, actually, there won’t be that much ’cause it’ll be tax finance, your tax will go up. Whatever. Some people will have extra money on hand. Where will it go? Before they were spending it on childcare for their kid? Are they now not going to spend it on their kid? No. Children are a bottomless pit of money. You can always find something else to spend money on for your kids. This is ridiculous. The idea that giving people childcare means they’re gonna now just squire it away. No, they’re going to spend it on their kids. They’re just going to spend it on something else. Now, something else might be good, but the point is they’re gonna spend it on something else. The consumption norm will rise.

The point is you can just have children and raise them like the Amish, and it’s really cheap. But you don’t want to do that. And the reason we don’t want to do that is because people assess their wellbeing by comparison to others. And of course we do it this way. It’s totally reasonable that we would assess our wellbeing by comparing to others because we don’t have… It’s not in our brains we have some intrinsic measure that just knows that we are well off.

So in practice, yes, we define our happiness by comparison to others. That’s okay, to an extent. There’s an extreme version of that that’s not. But it’s reasonable to look around at others and be, “Okay, how am I doing?” And at the end of the day, if the norm for spending on children is so high that you have to forego a lot of goodies that your comparison group is not foregoing, you’re not gonna have kids. There’s a fascinating line of research that looks at fertility contagion, and they find that if you’re… The great study, this looked at workplaces, large offices with lots of workers, and they found that when a coworker who sits close to you has a baby, you become more likely to have a baby than when a coworker who sits on a different floor or farther away from you. There’s a bunch of studies looking at contagion showing that people’s fertility behavior is sensitive to the fertility behavior of others in their life. As they see other people having kids, they go, “Okay, maybe I will too.” And the reason is as other people start to give up some of those goodies to have kids and put money into kids, you don’t face the same relative losses, because now you can give it up, ’cause you’re ahead now so you can afford to give it up.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it sounds the absolute cost of raising a kid is holding people back from having more, but there’s also just… It’s a matter of how people think they’re faring compared to other people who maybe don’t have kids. So if society wants to encourage people to have more kids, maybe their fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level and they want to encourage people to have more kids, they need to work on both of those things.

Lyman Stone: Yeah. So cost factors matter, but the important thing to understand is that there’s a relative component to them, and it’s a component that’s intensely normative. And so that means to reduce the cost of child rearing and have more kids, yes, we should do things to financially support families. Yes, absolutely. We should. I want to be clear that that’s good. The research suggests that giving families more money does get you more babies, and the price tag on it is not that high compared to other things the government does. If all you care about… If you’re a super utilitarian man and you want to do quality-adjusted life years, the public cost per quality-adjusted life year added from pronatal policy, that is birth subsidies, it’s way cheaper than trying to increase quality-adjusted life years than expanding Medicare or Medicaid or something like that. Pronatal policy is cheap on utilitarian grounds, though. Whether you should trust utilitarian grounds is a debate.

But, although we should throw money at this, that’s not all we need to do. We also need to discipline consumption norms. Now, one way you could do this would just be to set off a large electromagnetic weapon near all of the Instagram servers, because what’s going on is it’s not a coincidence that fertility started falling after 2007 and never came back. It wasn’t just the recession. It was the advent of social media, I think. That created a supercharged comparison. And that’s why this decline has happened all over the world. It’s not just in the US. So basically everywhere that has a cell phone, fertility starts declining around this time. And so what we want to do is we want to find ways to nudge algorithms to show people more babies, less solo vacations to Tahiti.

And we need to be promoting parenting norms of… Well, I just heard a great example recently. Somebody was like, “When I was growing up, I always ate canned peaches.” They were like, “That was the fruit that my parents gave me, canned peaches.” Well, recently I was in the grocery store and I was in this section where it’s all fruit for kids and there weren’t canned peaches, they were not there. Instead, what fruit are parents giving their kids at the parks where I live? Berries. Blackberries, blueberries, strawberries. If you’re a middle class family at the park, you don’t get a preserved peach cup out. You get a thing of fresh raspberries and it’s four times as expensive.

And so the norm changed. So we really need… It’s hard to know what our government would have on this. Maybe there’s some, I’m open to that, but really it’s a cultural thing. We need to push back on this. We need to defend lazy parenting. Not negligent. I don’t want to go too far. But I’m very in favor of okay parents. I’ll admit I am an okay parent. I am not parent of the year. My wife is. But in general, I’m very… I think we should be much more favorable to middling parents and super high intense parents. We should socially stigmatize this. It’s just partly because also we know it doesn’t actually do much to help children. There’s a real benefit when you shift from negligent to middle third or 75th percentile of parental intensity. But the shift from 75th percentile to 99th is not helping kids very much. So we should really stigmatize this. Send your kids outside and close the door. Give them cheap fruit cups. We need to have clear norms that if you spend a lot of time and money on your kids, it’s taboo.

Brett McKay: Okay, I love this. This is really interesting. So people’s increased, we can call it desired consumption level has gone up as standard of living has gone up, and it’s a social contagion. You see everyone else is doing this. “I need to have that. Well, kids might put a hamper on that vacation, so I’m not going to have kids so I can go on the vacation.” But then also there is this idea of intensive parenting. You think, “Well, man, if I wanna be a good parent, I got to give the berries, I got to take them to the baseball coach and get them the Kumon tutor, and we’re gonna have all these fantastic parties inspired by Pinterest.” And because people see that, they’re like, “Yeah, it’s a lot of work. I’m just gonna have two kids instead of four kids because I can’t do that for four kids.”

Lyman Stone: Exactly. Yeah. This hyper-intensive parenting is a huge factor. And I should say, I run these surveys and agreement with statements related to high intensity parenting is associated with way, way lower fertility.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the high-intensity parenting is really interesting because you’d think those parenting norms won’t affect you, but they do affect you. I think all parenting norms affect you, and that can be used for good or for ill. Here’s an example that I’m seeing in my own life with my kids. So I got a son who’s in middle school, and a lot of his friends are starting to get cell phones. And so there’s this social pressure. My kid wants a cell phone. And if I don’t get him a cell phone, then he’ll be out of the loop with his friends. And so you have to band together with other parents and be like, “Hey, how about we all not let our kids get cell phones until high school?” It has to be this collective thing.

Lyman Stone: Exactly. Yeah. This is the thing, is that parenting is a collective project. And this is what we often don’t get in our atomized modern societies, that parents can’t do it themselves. They engage in combinations with other parents to do collective projects because a lot of parenting is very collective. Kids develop these norms among them based on what they allow, and you do want to find parents who do things similarly because, again, kids judge their own wellbeing by comparison just like we do. So we want to give them comparisons that don’t put us in a rough spot. You want your kid to be at a similar level of subjective consumption assessment as their peers. And so that means you really want to, yeah, create these collaborations.

Brett McKay: So I think the takeaway there, kids don’t have to be high intense… They don’t have to take a lot of time. Like you said, you can just be like, “All right, here’s the fruit cocktail, kid. You get your one cherry.” I haven’t had one of those. I don’t think my kids have ever had a fruit cocktail. I’m going to have to go get them a can of fruit cocktail and then have the birthday party at McDonald’s. You don’t need to go to the Jump Zone.

Lyman Stone: Yeah. Oh my gosh. My kids love McDonald’s so much. I think actually two of them may be at McDonald’s right now with my wife. I don’t want to make this sound like… We’re two dudes talking about this. It’s easy for this opposition to intensive parenting to sound like saying, “Oh, those crazy moms.” That’s not what I’m saying. Parenting, it does take time. There is a certain level of money that it does take. The work that parents do, particularly parents or primary caretakers do, is incredibly valuable and important. But what I wish we understood better as a society is that most of the value and importance of what parents do is explained by the shift from bottom percentile parental investment to 60th percentile parental investment. So not 85th to 99th percentile investment. What I wish we’d do a better job is really speaking value and appreciation into the average parent who’s done most of the work that needs to be doing and we would do less valorizing of the super parent who does 36 hours of homemade craft decorations for their two-year-old’s birthday party. And I’m like, “No, no. No.”

We made a cardboard cutout of… I think we bought a pinata and that was it. So I want to try and thread the needle of excessively intensive parenting, not good, makes all of us worse off.

Brett McKay: I work from home. And so I’m really involved in my kids’ lives. I’m taking them to school, picking them up from school. I’ve taken them to practices, taken them to activities. And because of that I’m always looking for ways. It’s just like, “Okay, what can we do to make this easier for everybody?” And that means saying no a lot. We’re not going to do traveling teams, we’re not going to go to this activity. And I always tell… I always do this thing when I’m trying to figure out what to do with my kids. I’m like, “Imagine it’s 1985. What would my mom tell me?” And I’d be like, “Well, okay, you can go do that. Go outside. Go shoot the basketball.” Just you’re fine. You don’t have to be holding their hand the entire time.

Let’s shift over to another topic. Because you’ve done some research on declining religiosity in the United States. And the common narrative on this subject is that people leave religion as adults because of the increasing secularization of society or because they became disillusioned with faith because of scandals in churches. But your research shows that the decline in religiosity starts when you’re a child and still living with your parents. Walk us through those findings.

Lyman Stone: Yeah. So I’m a religious guy. My wife and I are church workers as well. And so you hear this story a lot. “Oh, yeah, we had all of our good Christian kids and they went to college and those liberal professors contaminated them and they left the faith.” But as a sociologist, I was always a little skeptical of this because my impression had always been that the research suggested that religious ideas were socialized fairly young. And so recently I there was this book that came out, The Great Dechurching. It was really interesting. It’s an interesting read. I enjoyed it. But it made this really strong argument that there was a dechurching that happened basically to 20-somethings and to some extent 30-somethings. That they were religious kids and then they grew up and they stopped going to church because of all these different things that happened; science or change in life circumstances or whatever.

And just reading it, I was just very skeptical of this. So I put together all the data I could find on child religion. So usually when we do surveys, we survey adults because it’s easy to survey. Well, comparatively easy to survey adults. Kids, we don’t survey very much. Their contact info cannot be distributed as freely as adults legally. They’re just part of the survey. Very young kids can’t take surveys. They don’t have their own phones. They don’t have their own email address. How do you get kids… Although, increasingly, they do have phones and email addresses. But there are some surveys. Some of them are in schools. Some of them are really high-quality scientific research surveys that were able to get a bunch of kids.

And what I show is across three or four different surveys, all the evidence suggests by age 13, children are already way more secular than their parents are, they continue to secularize until maybe age 21, and there is virtually… There’s very little net loss of faith after age 21. Yes, there are people who leave the church after age 21, but there are also people who convert after age 21 and on net it approximately balances out. Whereas under age 21, and really particularly under age 18, you just have this really dramatic rise in secularization. I show this in cross-sectional data and in longitudinal data in multiple different sources, taken at different times, using different methods. And what I’m able to show is that child secularization has moved younger and has gotten more intense. So in 1993, about 12% of eighth graders said religion was not at all important to them. About 13% of 10th graders said religion was not at all important to them, and about 15% of 12th graders. So 12, 13, 15 from 8th, 10th to 12th grade. In 2005 or so, it was still about 13% for 8th and 10th graders, but it was about 17% for 12th graders. So 12th graders started secularized, but eighth and 10th graders did not. They stayed the way they were.

In 2013, about 15% of eighth graders were not at all religious, so it had risen a bit, but not a lot, 20% of 10th graders were not at all religious, and about 23% of 12th graders, which means 12th graders secularized a lot more, 10th graders secularized a lot more, and crucially, the gap between 10th and 8th graders grew a lot, which means secularization was happening in 9th and 10th grade.

And then if you look at today, or the most recent data, which is, I think, 2021, about 29% of 12th graders are not at all religious, about 27% of 10th graders, and about 23% or 24% of 8th graders, which means now tons of the secularization is happening before 8th grade. That’s really striking. To me that says that secularization of children is moving earlier and earlier and earlier. Why is that happening? Well, I think social media is a big part of that story. That kids now inhabit these totally adult unsupervised online spaces where they interact with much older people and where their life is more contaminated by these adult things. So I think that that’s one of the factors. But in general, I think this is just a case of American parents not trying very hard to pass on religion.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we oftentimes think that society is becoming less religious because adults undergo a faith deconstruction, faith crisis and then leave religion. But the data actually shows that faith loss largely happens in childhood. And that’s because the baby boomer, Gen X, millennial parents, they aren’t religious themselves. And then they’re not passing on religion to their kids.

Lyman Stone: Well, yeah, but no. I’m saying seeing even among religious parents are pretty lazy. There’s a nice book called Handing Down the Faith, I reviewed it a couple years back for Christianity Today, where they do this really comprehensive qualitative and quantitative study of religious parents in the US. And they show that most religious parents in the US believe what I would call the backlash myth. And the backlash myth is this. If you do too much overt explicit religious instruction in your house, your children will react against your religion and they’ll end up less religious than if you’d done nothing at all. This is the backlash myth. There’s no empirical support for this idea. This is totally wrong. Every shred of empirical evidence we have, including some that’s I think plausibly causal, suggests that the more effort that society, parents, schools, whatever, the more effort you put into passing on the faith to your children, the likelier they are to share your faith. It’s very straightforward. Try hard, get better results.

But parents don’t believe this. American parents deeply believe in the backlash myth. It’s hard to persuade them against it. They think that if they do something that their kids don’t like that their kids will hate everything they stand for. And this is just totally untrue. There’s no serious, high-quality research to support this model, and yet it’s widely believed. And the result of this is that American parents really forego a lot of their influence. They don’t do a lot of explicit teaching to their children about the faith at home. They don’t lead a lot of religious activities at home. They don’t lean on their kids to be involved in religious communities. People just assume that their kids are gonna absorb the religion. It doesn’t matter what environment they surround their kid with.

So yeah, religiosity is declining, not because adults are converting, for the most part, but because children are never absorbing their parents’ faith at considerable rates. And that’s largely because parents are not making great efforts to pass it on.

And I should say… I’ll say something in defense of American parents. And not just American parents. This is everywhere. 80 years ago, parents didn’t need to do that much because our society was so suffused with religion that parents could just do a bit to give some extra firepower and a relatively religious society would do most of the work socializing the child into the faith. That is no longer the case but parents haven’t caught up. They haven’t realized that they now have to substitute for all that stuff society used to be doing.

And this is a place where… I just said all this stuff against intensive parenting. And this is one place where I think we should be way more intense. Do less intensive parenting at making sure your kid has 57 different talents and goes to all these activities and you don’t need to monitor every moment of their play and stuff. But intentionally, concretely lead everyday religious activities in your household, every single day. The day should not pass where your child does not see you leading the family in practices of faith, if you want your religion to be passed on to your child.

Brett McKay: Well, Lyman, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Lyman Stone: You can follow me on Twitter @lymanstoneky, or you can always just find me at various places online, the Institute for Family Studies, and some other places.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you got some articles in the Atlantic. Correct?

Lyman Stone: Yeah, I’m all over the place.

Brett McKay: You’re all over the place. All right, well, Lyman Stone, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Lyman Stone: Good talking to you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Lyman Stone. He is a sociologist and demographer. You will find more information about his work on his Twitter or X site, whatever you want to call it, @lymanstoneky. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/familymyths, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think could get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continuous support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay; reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.