Mark Oppenheimer: Brad, are you saying you didn’t change any diapers?

Brad Wilcox: No, I can confidently say that I’ve changed more diapers than either of you, Mark, or Jess. I’m sure.

MO: You think you’ve changed more diapers than me?

BW: 100%. I can guarantee it. I’ve got nine kids.

MO: I forgot you had nine. Usually when I’m in these conversations, having five kids is the trump card.

Hey friends, this is Mark Oppenheimer and welcome back to Arc: The Podcast, affectionately known to millions the world over as Arc with Mark. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had an episode. I hope you are done wassailing and eating holiday leftovers and now you’re looking forward to Valentine’s Day. What better way to look forward to it than with a new episode of our podcast? We are the podcast of Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, the magazine of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, just housed at Washington University in St. Louis. And it’s a great pleasure to be affiliated with that magazine. I encourage you to go check us out at arcmag.org.

But for this week, I bring you a conversation I’m really, really pleased to have pulled together. It’s between two people who are really, really interested in the question of natalism, of birth rates, of who’s having children, how many children are they having? Why are they having children? Why are they refusing or declining or failing to have children?

One is Jessica Grose, who is a columnist for The New York Times, and she and I go way, way back. I would say, gosh, fifteen, maybe even twenty years ago now, back when Slate.com was a really good, spiky, contrarian web magazine. They invited me and Jessica to do a point counterpoint, a pro con on the questions of whether Jews should have Christmas trees in the house. And I took the con. I said, “Jews should not have Christmas trees.” And she took the pro, said it’s fine for Jews to have Christmas trees. It was fun. It was serious, but also irreverent, I think. And I don’t know, I’d encourage you to go check it out. Since that time, her star has only risen. She’s written a book about parenting. She’s written a novel and she has this very well-read column at the Times, an op-ed column and newsletter. And she’s just one of the central voices on parenting. She’s also weighed into the question of natalism, of the panic in some cases around falling birth rates, especially in the Western world.

And she’s a little bit more sanguine about it than my other guest, Brad Wilcox, who’s a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. And he runs an institute there that is clearly on the side of thinking about how policy can help raise birth rates, get us back to replacement level or above replacement level. The United States is not so far off, but some countries, as he will note in the conversation you’re about to hear, like Finland, Italy, South Korea most famously, are producing so few new babies that within two or three generations, they really will suffer a kind of demographic and probably cultural and civilizational collapse. And that’s real. The numbers don’t lie around that.

So I wanted to pull these two people together to talk about this issue that I take really seriously because I think that babies are good. And I do believe the research that, on average, people who become spouses and then parents are happier, more fulfilled, more thriving than people who don’t. I think something’s kind of wrong in how many people say they want to have children, but don’t feel that they’re able to for financial reasons or familial reasons. And I take really seriously Brad’s critique around that, but I also take seriously Jessica Grose’s pushback. So that they both were willing to come together into a conversation around that was exciting for me. So have a good listen. This is me talking in early January with Brad Wilcox of UVA and Jessica Grose of The New York Times.

Jessica, you wrote a column about eighteen months ago with the headline, “Stop Panicking About the Birth Rate.” Now, I realize writers don’t write the headlines. I’m not going to put you on the hook for that. Maybe you think a little panic is worthwhile. I don’t know, but I think that fairly sums up what you were saying. And I want to start there and just ask you why in this moment when a lot of people and not just op-ed writers, but a lot of people are at least concerned about the birth rate in the United States and elsewhere, why should we not panic?

Jessica Grose: Well, I think there’s two incredibly positive trends that we are not talking about when we talk about the birth rate having declined from its previous levels. Number one is the education of women, which you’re never going to get me to say that that’s bad. And number two is the real decline in teen pregnancy, just the absolute falling out of the basement of teen pregnancy. And so those are two incredible trends. And I think at least here in the United States, I mean, I think that the fundamentals have changed a little bit in the Trump presidency just because he’s cut off immigration so much and immigration really was booing our birth rate to some extent. I think we are not South Korea. We are not even Greece. We are not close to one, 1.3 rate of replacement. We’re still up near two, right? I am not yet panicked about Americans’ desire to have children.

I’m not yet panicked about the statistics I see. I mean, when you look at it, the group that has increased the number of children that they’ve had the most is women thirty-five to forty-four. So yes, we are delaying it and I’m not denying the fact that there are trade-offs to the fact that people are delaying pregnancies. And I think there is some naivete about biological clocks that I wish people would stop pushing, and I bet Brad and I agree about that. So I am not yet panicked about it. I think there’s some restructuring of the financials of society, the way that we think about our lifespan in terms of when we’re working and when we’re not working, and the idea that stepping back from work has to be permanent. I think there’s a lot of rethinking we can do around that rather than lose our minds about the fact that, again, women are being educated and teenagers aren’t having babies, two really good, big social changes of the past fifty years.

MO: Yes. I’m strongly in favor of both of those changes. Brad, do you want to… So far so good? Are we on the same page so far or do you want to inject even at this gentle early juncture, a little contrarianism about panic levels?

BW: I think everything that Jess has said is fine, but I think we have to sort of understand and appreciate that the decline in teen childbearing since 2009 has been offset as she kind of basically, I think sort of is hinting by increases in thirty-something births. But what she’s not acknowledging is that there’s just a huge decline in twenty-something births in America from 2009 to the present. And that decline in twenty-something births is sort of like driving this whole story where we are kind of hitting record lows in fertility mark, where our current fertility rate’s about 1.6 babies from on average. And I think that’s an important kind of number in part because it’s obviously below replacement, but also because it kind of falls below where most women would like to fall when it comes to sort of their ideal fertility. It’s a little bit more than two babies per on average.

So what we’re seeing right now is that women are not having the kids that they would like to have by their own reports. And so that’s the kind of like, I think, tension that both I and my colleague Lyman Stone have been pointing to as… It’s not about sort of like the pronatalists, like Lyman and I sort of like saying, “You must have babies.” It’s more like just kind of like acknowledging that right now at least we’re living in a world and it really is increasingly a world where women are not having the kids that they, at least in the abstract, say that they would like to have. So that’s part of, I think, the story. I mean, to think about how can we bridge the divide between aspirations and actual fertility for women, again, not just in the U.S., but really now across most of the world.

MO: Do we know, by the way, if that’s true of men as well? Are men not having the babies they want to have?

BW: That’s a great question. I haven’t seen a particular… Certainly in the U.S., I mean, as I’m sure Jess has seen, we’ve actually seen young men becoming more kind of parent friendly than young women. There was this obviously infamous or famous NBC poll in the fall that kind of pointed out that young men, especially Trump voting young men were more interested in parenthood than young women or especially young women who voted for Kamala Harris.

MO: Are they more interested in changing diapers and doing dishes as well or just in calling themselves dads? And we don’t know, right?

BW: I think that’s part of the debate question.

MO: Right. Jess, is that a fair way to rephrase it that there is… I mean, should we be concerned if there’s a gap between aspirations for family size and the reality on the ground?

JG: Well, one, I’m always a little skeptical about the ideal family metric because I can use myself in as an example. When my husband and I got married, I wanted three kids. I was positive I wanted three kids. He came from a family of three. I always wanted a bigger family. We had time, we had kids early for Brooklyn, and then I had really miserable pregnancies, hyperemesis, really sick, hospitalization level sick, and I just couldn’t put my body through it again. And so that made the decision. I could have for sure, but I just didn’t want to. And so I think there’s a lot of space between just the blank, sterile, this is my ideal. And then the reality of how people make decisions about going from one kid to two or two kid to three. So I’m not disputing that that is what they say, but I think that there’s a lot of nuance and specificity behind why there might be a gap between the numbers that don’t have to do with societal forces necessarily.

MO: Right. What is it they say in Brooklyn, like age thirty is a teen pregnancy if you’re pregnant at thirty or something.

JG: I was twenty-nine. My friends couldn’t believe it. They were just like, what’s happening?

MO: Is that really… Okay. So I live in New Haven, which sometimes I feel like when I talk to my friends in Park Slope or whatever, it’s like I’m reporting from rural Alabama. Things are so different here. I mean, I always say I live in Normieville, not like Farmer’s Market-ville, though there’s a farmer’s market on our street. I mean, one can exaggerate the differences. I would say I live on a street that’s probably voted 95% for Biden, for Harris. It’s a 95% blue voting street, if not 99%, and yet the norms are so radically different. The norms around how do you talk to your kids about gender, the norms around do people cohabitate without marriages? And I would say we are more like a lot of America and we are not in a kind of blue state bubble in the same way. Nobody would say that to a twenty-nine-year-old where I live.

Is that true? People think that was young to have a kid?

JG: I think it’s very culturally mediated. I mean, Brooklyn is enormous and has a million different kinds of cultures. I would say in liberal coastal elite circles, certainly it was unusual. And I think it’s largely because of the cost of living in New York City.

MO: Because people’s incomes … I don’t mean to fixate on this, but I’m going to, because people’s incomes go up so much by the time they’re thirty-four?

JG: No, because they make their peace with either the fact that they are going to be raising kids in a two bedroom apartment or they move to the suburbs. They’ve come to terms with, “I can’t afford this as much as I might love it here, but it is, I can’t buy a home.” That is what is preventing so much of it. And we didn’t feel that that we needed … We didn’t own a home when we started having kids, we didn’t feel. But we also got together, I think, younger than most of our friends. I think, again, the whole trajectory happens later. We started dating when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-four, so we had had time and we did live together before marriage.

MO: Yeah. Well, and I should say everyone I know almost lived together before marriage. I just don’t know as many people, I think, as you probably do, who just never married or who lived together for ten years before marriage, for example.

JG: Yeah. And it’s also sort of self-selecting too, because I think if you are pretty sure you don’t want to have kids, you’re staying in New York City. So there’s some edge cases too of people who thought they would never have kids, didn’t want kids, and then at the last minute had a kid. So I think it’s just a whole different group of people with different desires and different ways that they stack up their priorities.

MO: So okay, let’s pull back from the discussion about the sort of polling and the demographics and the gap between the ideal and the real. And let’s all be preachy for a moment. I think the question I mean to ask or that I should have started with is not whether we should panic based on the numbers, but whether we should panic based on our own individual visions of the good. So it’s easy to say, okay, America’s not Greece or Italy yet, right? And I want to get a response from each of you on this, but what if it were, right? Okay, so let’s say we were doing this poll in Italy or South Korea. Would you be willing to make normative claims that birth rates that low are a bad thing or is it just like, well, society would be much smaller? Why? Okay, so why?

JG: Because I think that it would reflect that people are hopeless a little bit about the future because having kids, getting married and having kids, is saying, “I believe that the future has the potential to be good and I think that the future has the potential to be better than it is than I lived.” And because we now have much more choice in whether we have children, if so many people are not able to couple, are not able to project a future in which they think children can have a good life, that’s pretty dire. And I think you see that in South Korea. Again, I try to read as much as I can about this. Obviously I report on it. That seems to be the sort of epicenter of really negative feelings about the potential of work and life there. And so I would think that that was a signal that there was something really bitter at the center that was going on in culture.

MO: Would you describe it the same way, Brad, your feelings about extremely low natalism?

BW: Sure. I mean, obviously I think there’s also kind of an economic point here, right? And that is that both Italy and South Korea are kind of headed on a trajectory where they’re going to experience a measure of economic and fiscal collapse, just because they don’t have enough prime aged adults in the pipeline to kind of sustain the economies of those two countries or their public spending. So there is kind of, I think, a demographic reality that we’re not always kind of, I think, fully cognizant of it sort of rolling out in East Asia and parts of Europe as well. So that’s sort of part of the story.

But beyond the economic, I think, argument, it’s just, I think, tragic to imagine a life where you don’t have the benefit of raising kids, of being a father, being a mother, experiencing new life, seeing your kids learn to walk to … I had my twelve-year-old son showing me a map that he had done for school last night, this morning at breakfast.The story that I tell is I was driving my younger kids to school one morning and I was texting my wife, and we’re in our early fifties at this point, something, pedestrian voice to text. At the end of the text, there’s this little phrase, “I love you, I love you, I love you. ” And my wife, Danielle, knew, and I’m ashamed to admit this, this was from her youngest son, Nicholas, who was at that point nine, not from her husband. But I’m just saying, here she is, a fifty-something woman beginning her day at work and getting this little text that says, “I love you, I love you, I love you. ”

And I think this is kind of what’s being lost is that … And Jess, in terms of just a big part of the story here is not that people are choosing to go from say three to two or even two to one. It’s just a lot of, especially young adults today in the U.S. and across the globe now we’re projecting now are never going to get married, are never going to have kids. We’re projecting that about at least one in four year adults today in their twenties will never have kids. And that’s a record share kind of heading into life without the benefit of kids. So I’m just saying, I think the tragedy is like, you just don’t have this sort of experience of having little kids, school age kids, and then young adults who love you in this way that’s just hard to completely put words around, but is certainly, I think, tremendously meaningful and important for those of us who have had the benefit of being parents. Yeah.

MO: I mean, Jessica, you actually wrote something that goes right to this. You said, like every major life experience, parenting has always inspired the whole range of emotions and suggests that mothers and fathers are in some different human category with a richer emotional repertoire isn’t really helpful. And you were talking about strategies that’ll get people to have kids or that won’t. And you were saying, suggesting that you’re missing out on something doesn’t work. And when I read that as I was rereading all your work over the past couple days, or not all your work, but a lot of your relevant work, I thought on the one hand, that’s probably true from a policy point of view, though Brad, who thinks a lot about fixes for these things and you both think about what might work policy wise, maybe cultural suasion does work. I don’t know. And maybe there’s, I don’t know how you’d test that.
I don’t know what the evidence would be.

On the other hand, even if it’s true that suggesting that mothers and fathers don’t have as rich an emotional repertoire, even if that’s a failed strategy, it might also be true. And one of the things that concerns me about this whole debate is that, I think there’s a lot of dishonesty on both sides or there’s a lot of things. I always say there’s things we tell our spouse when we’re lying next to them at night and we’re really talking spouse to spouse that we don’t say in public. And so all of us who write for a public audience know this. And I feel like my wife and I constantly look at each other and say, “Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking to not have children?” We constantly see people who are choosing not to have children and think they have no idea what they’re missing out on.

That is a central fact of my existence. Don’t we all agree to our parents on some fundamental level? You don’t.

JG: All three of us are in good marriages. I don’t know anything about your children.

MO: They’re perfect. Mine are perfect.

JG: I have children who have provided greater meaning to my life. I have done so much reporting and talking to people over my career who do not feel that way. Your implied promise of what parenthood will bring is not universal. There is an incredibly disturbing article in the cut today in New York Magazines the cut about siblings who sexually abuse each other and the middle class decent parents who are just at a complete loss. It’s a horrifying story. It was hard to finish. I am not suggesting that that is the typical experience, but there is a rainbow of experiences that parents and spouses and humans … So I can’t with good faith say the way that you, the three of us who all have good experiences are experiencing it is universal and the promise of what is happening.

And again, it’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re over-indexing on negativity, but I can’t universalize my own experience because I know too much about horrible things that happen and parents who never wanted to be parents and are neglectful, abusive, it happens. And the children who survive from that, that happens too. And so that’s always why I’m wary of making these sorts of universal recommendations about anything because as you’ve read, I wrote a column last summer about the beautiful experience of going to my husband’s grandmother’s memorial service and the family, the generations of family, and how that being part of this very big family, my family is not very big for Jewish diaspora reasons mostly. It brings so much to my life and to the lives of my children. So I’m always very comfortable expressing those sentiments from my personal life, but those are the reasons why I never feel comfortable universalizing what we all share.

BW: So this, I think, Mark, this is a great, I think, kind of example where Jess and I disagree, right? So I mean, I certainly want to acknowledge that there is a lot of pain and pathos out there in any number of family situations and family forms, right? And that there’s, I mean, just unimaginable horrors that take place in our country every day and every moment, right? But from my kind of perspective, the sort of average story is one where people typically generally benefit from getting married and generally benefit from having children. And of course, the other average story to note here is that we’re seeing what I call a kind of closing of the American heart unfold in recent years, where fewer and fewer young adults are kind of finding their way to the altar, to marriage, and also fewer and fewer, not just teens, but twenty-somethings especially are having kids.

There’s rising childlessness projected as well. And so I think there’s just kind of a lot of the, in the sense of just the average young adults who in a different era would have been kind of helped along by the culture and by the economy to go ahead and get married and have kids, not fantastic marriages, but not horrible marriages, not fantastic parent experiences, but not horrible parent experiences. A lot of those sort of, in a sense, normally young adults are for a variety of reasons, I think, being pushed out of the marriage track and the parent attract. And I can say that this is linked empirically to declines in happiness in the United States, recent Chicago study to this effect in terms of just the marriage story. So the fact that fewer Americans are getting married is, among other things, one of the reasons why more and more Americans are failing at the pursuit of happiness.

And we’re also seeing too that the parenthood sort of happiness premium is growing as well. And this is really growing since 2010, and I attribute that just to the impact of the digital revolution, the way in which adults who are not getting married and not having kids today, I think are more likely to be isolated. And they’re also more likely to be kind of going down digital rabbit holes that end up diminishing their wellbeing. So anyways, the point I’m making simply is I think on average, the fact that more and more young adults find themselves in situations where they’re not getting married and not having kids is problematic, both for many of them and at the societal level as well.

JG: So I agree with like half of what you said and I disagree with half of it. So number one, I don’t think happiness is a good metric for anything ever. I wrote a whole piece about how happiness tracking is sort of useless and empirically pretty weak. And actually what inspired me to write that piece in the first place is that I had spent months seeing both sides of that statistic cited saying, single women are the happiest. No, no, no. Married women are the happiest. And I think on an individual level, it’s a nonsense metric. It’s just not how we should measure the flourishing, which I know is another sort of buzzword in sociology and all of this measurement. I don’t think it’s the most important aspect of flourishing. So let’s put that aside about who’s happy or not for a minute. I do agree with you.

I don’t think it’s good that people are off the marriage track. I think marriage in general is positive and making new family bonds is positive. I think having children is positive and that people should do it if they want to do it. I do think that social media is the biggest problem here in terms of isolation, in terms of comparative comparing and despairing and that being a barrier in dating and matching up and thinking about what a good relationship is. I mean, I have certifiable internet brainworms because of what I do for a living and I see Gen Z posting about things that are red flags and I’m just like, no one would have ever dated me in my twenties if this was the list of red flags. I mean, it’s just bananas and dehumanizing, honestly. And so I think that that’s the tragedy to me.

MO: Not to put you on the spot, but like as somebody who’s not seeing these memes, do you have just at your fingertips, like what’s a crazy red flag that’s not a red flag?

JG: I mean, I’ve just seen so many that it’s like a lot of it is around sort of specific kinds of communication, didn’t respond to your text in like the shortest amount of time or behaved weirdly on one date, like didn’t do something. It’s just a very sort of cold way of thinking about other people and giving them very little grace to be human, to mess up, to say the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing and not … And having all of these sorts of weird boundaries that I’m just, again, it’s standing in the way I think of so … And not just with romantic relationships, with a lot of genuine human connection that isn’t based on a set of weird and ever shifting rules.

MO: I’ll be back in just a minute with the rest of my interview with Jessica Grose and Brad Wilcox. In the meantime, I want to encourage you to go to arcmag.org and read the articles that we’ve been running. I think our content has been absolutely terrific. I’m so pleased with the people who are contributing to the magazine and there are just some really interesting articles up there, everything from an article about the foreign policy under the new Pope Leo, to a forgotten poetry master who died in poverty in New York City, to just all sorts of stuff about religious life and culture in the United States, and apparently in the Vatican as well.

Upcoming on the podcast, we’re finally going to get around to playing my interview with Kelsey Osgood, who’s written a great book about seven female religious converts, a super interesting topic that seems to be really hot right now. I just got in the mail a new book about the history of twentieth century conversion to Catholicism from Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, all of these literary and cultural figures who became Catholics in the early and mid-twentieth century. So I’m excited to read that. And I know there are other people working on books about this topic. We seem to be in a conversion moment, so I’m excited that Kelsey Osgood will be on one of my next episodes.

So head over to arcmag.org, make sure that you have subscribed to the podcast feed, and if you’re enjoying the podcast, recommend it to friends, make sure to rate it, make sure to like it, make sure to help the algorithmic overlords distribute the podcast to the people who would enjoy it most. And now back to my interview with Jessica Grose and Brad Wilcox.

I’m very interested in the benefit of the doubt that we give each other on communication strategies, right? So I think Brad has written and other people in the pro-family camp have written about how people on the left, or sort certainly in elite liberal coastal circles, they themselves will have these incredibly normy bourgeois pairings. They marry, they have children, they do all those things, but then they won’t preach it. They won’t talk about it. They don’t want to seem judgy. And then on the left, there’s a lot of accusations that the pro- family camp is acting in bad faith when they talk about natalism. In particular, that’s become a sort of horrible word for someone in progressive circles that really they want to control women. I’m not saying that you specifically have made this claim, Jess, but you’ll see the claim that in fact it’s not about economics, it’s not even about human flourishing, it’s about control and it’s about … And there’s a kind of straw man in the trad wife world.

They just want everyone to be on farms with trad wives. And I read this and I think I know a lot of people in both of these camps and these seem like unfair critiques to me. I think most people are speaking in good faith, at least as far as they see it themselves. I don’t think they’re consciously deceiving anyone about their motives most of the time. But it does raise the question of how we ought to communicate about this. It seems like we have some consensus that marriage and children are a good, that we think they’re a good and that we would be dishonest if we didn’t share with others that they’re good. But how do we do that then? If we don’t want to be preachy … And by the way, I would never suggest that everyone should have children.

But I also don’t feel … I feel about telling people that they might want to have children the same way I feel about telling them that they might want to try a romantic relationship or a job, which is not everyone is cut out for romantic relationships. Not everyone’s cut out for work. I mean, if you have other means that don’t want to work, I don’t think it’s my problem. But I think most people are happier when they work or when they’re partnered or when they have children. And those seem to me truths that I feel confident saying. How do we talk about this so that we don’t come across as either anti-family or wanting everyone to be tradwives or universalizing our own unusually good experience? What should public rhetoric around this look like that doesn’t boil down to either coercion on one hand or just kind of pure expressive individualism on the other?

JG: Well, I first want to say I’m a journalist. I’m not an activist. I’m a writer. So I’m not in the business of … I cover policy, I make arguments, but I don’t see my role in society as convincing people to do things in their own lives.

MO: But you’re opinion writer, Jess. You have an op-ed column.

JG: I’m an opinion writer. I have my opinion. I am looking for people to agree or disagree with what I’ve written.

MO: Okay, but presumably you want more to agree than disagree.

JG: But it’s more, I’m expressing based on what I’ve read and what I think, I don’t see that as necessarily the role that is speaking truth as I see it. Okay? So I just want to say that-

MO: I’d say the same about myself. Fair enough. Yep.

JG: Seeing truth as I see it. But that said, I think it’s really different what I say to people that I know in real life and I know who they are and what their experience is and who they’re dating and then what I’m saying for an audience where I don’t know who the reader is. And I think if we want to convince people we need to do more in our actual day-to-day lives of talking and expressing and shaping. And when I interview people who really don’t want to get married and really don’t want to have kids, most of them do not say it is because the so- and-so influencer or I read whatever. They say, “My mother was miserable. My mother was miserable. She was a terrible mother. I don’t want to do that. ” They talk about sort of generations of unhappiness and whoa, and that they don’t have any examples in their actual life, not their virtual life of marriage and family that they would want to emulate.

That is the most typical explanation people have for me. And certainly there’s other things like people will say climate or they will say, “I just never wanted them. I just never had the desire.” Those are two. I would say those are … It’s the state of the world. I just never wanted to. I can’t explain it. It’s just instinctual, but the biggest is my family was really messed up and I’ve never seen a good model of people being happy doing this. And so I feel a lot of it has to come from the people surrounding you.

BW: I guess, I mean, where I would push back on this sort of argument, Jess, is just sort of there is a real ideological character to kind of the public discourse. So it’s one thing for you as a wife and mother to kind of talk to your friends about the value of maybe marriage and motherhood or family in a personal and honest way. And that’s great, right? But what I would like to see you do more of, and I haven’t obviously read every column that you’ve written, and your colleagues at the New York Times, is to kind of underline the ways in which on a variety … I mean, we could exclude happiness, right? We could talk about poverty. We could talk about suicide. We could talk about any number of important social outcomes. People who find themselves today married are more likely to be flourishing than their fellow Americans who are not married.

And to kind of help a lot of your peers and readers who lean left understand that these sort of core institutions when it comes to family … And we can debate about causality, but just descriptively, there’s just no question that married mothers and married fathers in America report, not just more happiness, but more meaning. They’re less likely to succumb to suicide. They’re in a better space financially than their fellow Americans who are not married and often not married with kids. So the problem that I have is that I think the left and cultural elites on the left, again, in their private lives, are often leading exemplary family lives, but in their public capacities as journalists, as school superintendents, as policymakers, as professors, as college deans, as C-suite executives don’t do anything to kind of articulate not just sort of the benefits and value of marriage, but also kind of like some of their hacks, their life hacks, if you will.

How is it that they found a good person in the early twenties, dated this person, got married to this person? How have they kind of forged a good family life? So I’m just saying that at UVA, for instance, just to kind of give you a more concrete example, all these smart, talented professors, deans, whatever, presidents who-

MO: Lots of presidents at UVA these days.

BW: In the last obviously seven months, we had lots of presidents, but they don’t often articulate … and so they’re talking to college students about education and career, right? They’re giving them all these different ideas about how you can forge a good career, but except in my sociology of family class and maybe one or two other classes around the university, narry a word, right? Narry a word about how do you forge a good romantic relationship? How do you forge a good marriage? What does it look like to experience motherhood and fatherhood? What are some of the sacrifices and the benefits of family life? So I’m just saying that there’s this sort of systematic just silence or even negativity around family, at least in terms of … Yes, there are exceptions, but I just think … And I can point to pop culture that would be more positive.

I’m just saying that there’s a lot of messaging that young adults get today and a lot of silences that they sort of navigate that I think discount the importance of focusing on love, marriage, or family.

JG: I don’t agree. I mean, I think that it’s just that things that have negative headlines or valence get more attention and get more pushback and get this sort of algorithmic interaction in a way that make them seem like there’s more of it when there isn’t. Because I think if you taught it up the number of columns I’ve written that or pieces that I have assigned, one of the biggest pieces that I ran in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic was a Mother’s Day series of short essays about the joys of motherhood and different things that people felt that they had gotten better at, felt better about because that were surprising to them when they became mothers. No one talks about that anymore. I don’t know. It was one of my favorite things I ever assigned, but I think that there is this tendency to focus on these culture war things and say, “Well, the left believes this and the right believes that.”

Well, I’ve seen tons of actually quite right-leaning women talk about the joys of their work. I think that it is much more complicated and less politically specific than a lot of people kind of make it out to be. Again, to me, social media has been incredibly corrosive for this conversation, people’s reading comprehension. I mean, one thing, and sometimes I regret calling my book screaming on the inside, because the reason it was supposed to be cheeky, it is a cheeky title. It is saying, “People have never listened to women.” So they are screaming on the inside, saying these things that they have said for hundreds of years. The entire last half of the book is solutions. It is saying how much these women love being mothers. They want to be mothers. There are politicians on both sides of the aisle working to improve things, but nobody actually reads books.

They just read the headline and say like, “Oh, that has a negative valence, so this is a negative take.” And I did not anticipate that because I thought it was cheeky and people would receive it as I’m making a joke, that is not how it was received. It was received like you’re miserable. And so I think there’s a lot of, to use Mark’s phrase, bad faith assumptions on all sides and it’s not helpful. And I think I ask anyone who is on the conservative side of pro-family discourse. I’ve had many, many private conversations with them. I’m happy to talk to anybody and find areas of alignment and just see what they think. I’m curious, but I don’t-

BW: I mean, I think you’re making fair points, but I think we have to understand and appreciate you that there is an ideological divide in the real world when it comes now to who’s actually having kids. And so we looked at the GSS, for instance, at the Institute for Family Studies, back in the 1980s, there was only a five percentage gap between conservative and liberal young women aged twenty-five to thirty-five who’d had kids. Basically, no gap in the 1980s, between the share of women who’d had kids and hadn’t had kids. But the gap grows in recent years, especially since the 2010s. I think that’s important in terms of just the social media piece you were touching on, Jess, to the point where there’s a thirty-one percentage point gap between conservative women and liberal men in terms of who’s had children. This is a huge divide now-

MO: Wait, so what do you mean? You mean if you look at what, say age thirty, have you had a child, conservative women are 30% more?

BW: About two thirds of conservative and liberal women back in the eighties had had kids. Okay. So the majority of both liberal and conservative women had kids back in the 1980s in this twenty-five to thirty-five year old space, whereas today only 40% of liberal women have had kids and fully 71% of conservative women have had kids. There’s a huge gap.

MO: Let’s pause on that. Wait, sorry, Jess. What were you going to say?

JG: First of all, they cut off that data at thirty-five. So because liberal women tend to wait longer to have children, I think while I agree there is a difference between liberal and conservative women and the number of children they’re having, the percentage who are having children, it is not that dramatic when you look at fully completed fertility, which ends around forty-five. And two, again, because we can only track women well, where are the men? What are the men doing? Is it that liberal men don’t want children? I don’t know. Is it that there has been sort of this polarization of belief among young people? Again, I’m an old lady now. I’ll be forty-four in a month. I agree with you that something negative is going on. It is around social media. I wish I was influential enough where me telling people publicly on TikTok or whatever about my good experience would mean anything at all to them. I think it is a variety of things happening.

MO: Okay. So this is my question or not my last question. And I have a lot that I want to talk about where I zoom in on some things that concern me on the right, Brad, in a second. But if there’s a meaningful gap at all, it’s coming from somewhere. We’ve established it probably isn’t coming from Times op-ed columnists by themselves. I mean, I guess I’d ask each of you, I hear you’re saying social media, obviously loneliness, nobody knows the answer, but where do you think it’s coming from? I mean, I guess I’d ask Jess and then Brad, why? Why are liberal … It sounds like liberal women have stopped having children to some extent. Probably conservative women have stabilized and the gap is because liberal women are having somewhat fewer, I’m guessing. But why? Why would that be the case?

JG: Okay. Well, my explanation, which is based on reporting and vibes and thoughts, number one, I think if you want to be child free by choice, you’re not going to be conservative. So that whole population is just liberal now, right? So that’s going to bring the numbers down. Number two, I do think that there are higher expectations of egalitarian behavior for women, for men and women and how men are going to behave in relationships. And I don’t know that the actual way people behave with each other has caught up. Number three, what we already discussed about how all these red flags and people are just not giving each other grace, they’re getting past the sort of early stages of courtship. I do think porn is probably somewhere lurking in here, which I think-

MO: Republican men are just as likely.

JG: Yeah, but there’s so much more pressure in conservative circles to get married for women and they’ll put up with more, frankly. So I would say it’s like all of that. And I don’t know what is the most compelling part of it. I think it is like most big social changes is multifactorial, but yeah, those would be my big things.

MO: Okay. So Brad, in a nutshell, how would you differ in your analysis maybe of why that gap has, to some extent, exists?

BW: Yeah. I mean, I do think what we’ve seen play out is that in more religious especially, but even more kind of conservative cultural spaces, I mean, the Daily Y would be an example of this. There’s just a lot more positive messaging around marriage and family. And I think in more progressive spaces, it’s a lot more silence. There’s a lot more silence, there’s a lot more ambivalence, there’s a lot more negativity around marriage of family. And that kind of, I think helps to kind of set the tone. And these things are often, I think, especially just given sort of the gaps I’m seeing in people’s behavior since 2010, are kind of accentuated by the algorithms. But I think there’s also, as I said, there is a kind of an institutional problem here where a lot of our core educational institutions, high schools, colleges, universities are not doing anything to kind of really, I think, help prepare young adults, encourage them towards marriage and family.

And so in a cultural context where there’s a lot of negative messaging around relationships, the opposite sex, and then also too, I think one other kind of problem with social media is that it tends to, I think, kind of give people unrealistic expectations about lifestyle in terms of eating out, travel, things like that. And Jessica, you were kind of skeptical, I think, to some extent that this is all about people wanting to go to Italy. And I appreciate that, but I’m just saying I think there is a way in which social media does kind of increase a certain kind of consumerism and hedonism that are also pushing fertility down and family information down in ways that, for a variety of reasons, I think end up being more consequential for people on the left than for those on the right.

MO: So this is interesting to me. I’m very intrigued. I mean, my own, just to put my cards on the table here, like I come from a family of four kids, my parents did not have a lot of money. My dad was a small town lawyer and then worked for a labor union. My mother was a social worker early on and then basically was a stay at home mom. And we lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was a very cheap place to live. Then as now, nobody wants to live. It’s been a long time since people have wanted to live in Springfield. Their seven bedroom, four-thousand-square-foot house, you could probably have for 280, maybe 310, just to give you a sense of like Springfield. So that’s how you have four kids in Springfield, right? But, and again, I’m just giving a bit of my own narrative here.

Part of what enables having four kids, in addition to a happy, stable marriage and cultural resources and no sense of precarity, they both knew that should anything go wrong, there was extended family and we were never going to be homeless. Part of what enables it is a … First of all, neither one of them was highly careerist and ambitious, and both of them were comfortable with a pretty high level of mess. And I mean mess, not just in terms of like the house wasn’t picked up, but also in terms of like, there were not lots of meals, home cooked meals on the table all the time. For my mother, part of feminism was ordering Domino’s pizza. It was like women don’t have to be perfect cooks. And actually, I think she has to some extent been shocked by a lot of my progressive peers, male and female who think that like cooking is some progressive value, that being a great chef is like the farmer’s market and the farm to table.

Feminism to her and her second wave feminist friends was ordering out without question. And so it was like, we were a family that was terribly bad at the domestic arts, right? We didn’t have a great house and there was not lots of home cooked me. I mean, my parents would bridle with this. It was a wonderful house. But I’m saying like I sometimes think that some people, and again, I’m not gain saying what you said, Jess, about your reporting with people who said, “Look, the reason is there was just no model of happy families.” I’m not saying that’s not real. I do think that on the left, there’s sometimes among some people I know, as on the right probably, is a sense that like of perfecting the lives and that kids can intrude on that. But I also think on the right, there’s just a kind of ranked capitalism.

I mean, the bigger problem if we’re talking about people delaying kids because they want the perfect, they want to have enough money and they want to have the trips is the sort of market humping of that money’s all. And that’s our president. I mean, that literally is the Republican Party is just about power and money and greed. And like, why would you have kids if you couldn’t afford a Trump style lifestyle? So I guess I feel like when I talk to people who come at this, and I understand that we’re reporters here, I think all of us believe and try to put the facts ahead of whatever agenda we might have or ideologies we might have. But I do feel when I’m talking to people who come at this from slightly different communities, there’s a kind of denialism on both sides of like how much stuff and money is played up now versus say in 1974 when I was born.

I mean, the unwillingness of people to live in a starter home, which I mean, my house is two thousand square feet, like they don’t make two-thousand-square-foot houses anymore because nobody would buy them. People need a big mansion.

JG: I do think a lot of people say affordability is such a huge thing. And I do think social media is part of that, but mom-fluencing. All of the parent influencers seem to have tons of children in unlimited space and beautiful, beautiful, perfect homes. But even in a sort of more mundane way, I have personally been shocked at how much some of my friends spend on things like travel sports. That is bananas to me. And I think a lot of … And so we’re not even just talking about the expense of childcare, which in and of itself is out of control. And that is a major thing that people-

MO: I think you’ve written it’s more than mortgage, right? Haven’t you written that it runs higher than a mortgage?

JG: That’s been true for fifteen years. It’s more than the cost of a year of state school. And so I think that is holding a lot of people back from having kids. And they think for a variety of reasons that are not untrue in our hyper capitalist society, even if women would want to take time away from work, they think that they cannot because it is not untrue that they will then have trouble ever returning to the workforce at the level that they were at or retiring. A huge under-reported story is how many widows live in poverty and how many elderly, older women live in poverty in large part because they were not part of the workforce and the way that our laws are written doesn’t allow them to benefit from social security in the same way. And so I think that there’s a lot for conservatives and liberals to agree on in terms of the way that we actually remunerate people having children.

So I definitely think that sort of … My dad was actually … I just had this conversation with my dad because he was talking about how when he was growing up, similar to you, he grew up in the suburbs of Maryland, now a very fancy suburb, but it wasn’t then. His dad worked for the World Bank. His mom stayed at home. They never ate out. They had one car. That was how he was raised. He only had one brother, so not as big a family, but I think they never upgraded. There wasn’t the idea of a starter home. It was just like they bought their home.

MO: That was a home. That was called a home. That was their home.

JG: Yeah. And they lived in it until my grandparents died, basically. And my mom’s parents were actually the same way, 2000 square foot home in the suburbs. My grandfather was a doctor, my grandmother didn’t work. That was it. And so I do think that there is something, again, about this compare and despair and what kids need. You don’t need to spend $10,000 a year on travel sports to be a good parent, but I do think people think they do.

MO: I think we just spent $600 on my son’s soccer enrollment. He’s seven because they make them now buy home and away uniforms. And I was like flabbergasted. Now, we are not a family that spends $10,000 on travel sports and none for all sorts of reasons. But I did cut a check for $600 for the away uniforms of a seven-year-old and I thought-

BW: That’s incredible.

MO: “What the hell? What the hell?” But Brad, I mean, I think I’ve emailed you about this in moments of peak where I’ve just been like, I don’t know how you vote, but if you’re not a Republican, you have many close friends who are. And the party is run by people who are the least obstemous, the least … I mean, the old Republican country club was aesthetic of you’re supposed to look like you don’t have anything has been completely trashed, I think, to the great detriment of our country. And frankly, the website your institute runs, it should be attacking Trump and his spendingness because it’s so anti-family and the fact he doesn’t raise his children and the fact he doesn’t seem to talk to his wife. If you think culture matters, isn’t the sort of current constitution of the Republican party simply a non-starter for … I mean, doesn’t that matter at least as much as network sitcoms?

BW: That’s a fair question, Mark. And I do think that the president is not a good example on the family front. There’s no question about that. And there’s-

MO: I mean, he’s a bad person on the family front, right? I mean, none of you will say it, but everyone’s certainly willing to call out liberals when they behave in anti-family ways. And he’s on what is third marriage. He’s maybe been faithful to this one as far as we know, but certainly not the first two. He does not seem to spend meaningful time with this kid.

JG: Stormy Daniels might beg to differ about his faithfulness in this marriage.

MO: I lose track. I defer to you. I honestly lose track. There’s no evidence he spends any meaningful time with his children except when they’re old enough to advise him. I mean, as reporters and scholars, we have the evidence to say he’s pretty much a disaster at it. Shouldn’t that have disqualified him from being the president if culture matters at all and we’re facing this crisis?

BW: I mean, certainly I would agree that the president is not a good example when it comes to family and that the Republican Party is a mixed bag on the family front. I mean, IFS, my institute, with my colleagues, has been concerned about the Trump administration’s approach to big tech and AI policy in particular as one example of that. So I don’t want to say that the Republican Party is by any stretch perfect on these issues. I think the challenge though is that there is-

MO: And again, I was trying to take it on your own terms, which is that culture matters, that discourse matters and-

BW: Right. No, you’re correct. And I mean, I think that Barack Obama was a better public example on the family front than Donald Trump. So that’s a fair, I think, point. I’m just saying, I think that the challenge for us who are conservative is just that there are a lot of issues where the Democratic Party has kind of pushed in, I would say more anti-family direction. And that we would disagree obviously about abortion, for instance, but even kind of like the trans issue was another kind of example of where there was a kind of push on the Democratic side to advance policies and ideas that made many of us on the right, very uncomfortable, concerned, et cetera, about kind of how the Democratic Party was affecting our school sports, our educational institutions on those kinds. So there are a variety of issues that sort of push us, I would say, into the Republican party, but not every issue by any means.

MO: Okay. So let me ask you both this. I mean, if we have some sort of general agreement that we want societies in which it’s more possible to have the amount of children we want, and for some people that will be some children, it’ll be a child or two or three or four, whatever, and that policies should support people in doing that. What kind of policies should we have? I mean, this is something that you’ve both written a lot about, and I’m curious what two or three policies … And the policy might be, if I gave you a chance to give me three, one of them could be, we need a culture shift on the editorial page of major newspapers. I don’t know how you get that, but if that’s as important as the third most important thing Congress could do, by all means say so.

But I’m curious, what would three things be that one could advocate for if this was something we wanted?

JG: The number one thing I always say, I’ve thought a lot about this is universal healthcare. I think the fact that our jobs are tethered to healthcare means that you can … Leaves no flexibility for upshift, downshift, leaves parents absolutely petrified of ever being out of work, both of them. And I think it could make young people feel like, “Okay, even if we both lose our jobs, we will not go bankrupt having a baby.” There have been so many stories about how complications from childbirth have sent people into bankruptcy fully. Even people who were Employed. And so I think it would just take so much pressure off so many different levels of the system for both parents and children and certainly young people launching into the world and getting jobs that maybe weren’t the best jobs, were hourly jobs that didn’t provide them health insurance. So to me, that actually, I know it is not actually directly related to family creation necessarily, but it is the number one thing that I think would really take a lot of pressure off a lot of different parts of the system.

MO: Before you go to two and three, if you have them, you wrote about how even with good insurance, you were hit with a bill when you were having your child of $800 or $8,000 that they wanted paid right away. They said, oh, it’ll be reimbursed.

JG: $8,000.

MO: $8,000. And as have we been hit with those with our children. And I was thinking to myself, if I were living paycheck to paycheck, if I didn’t have savings and credit where I could cover that, even if it was going to be reimbursed, that would absolutely be a reason not to have a second child or a third child. You would stop right there. You would say, “Well, what it would mean to have $8,000 that I can’t pay right now is several years worth of stress, devastating credit, et cetera.” That would be it. $8,000 to people who have no savings might as well be a million dollars to me. And so that was a very powerful point, I thought.

JG: Yeah, thank you. And two and three would be paid parental and sick leave. So this is anecdotal. I don’t have any support for this beyond so many people. Hearing from a lot of people who lived in Pennsylvania that when their paid leave came in, they had a third kid. And this was mostly for the dad to be able to take a couple weeks off from their job to help and just to feel like they could hit the ground running with another addition to their family. So I’m thinking specifically a friend of mine who lives in Philadelphia, her husband is a chef, and he said that a bunch of people who worked for him had a third kid the second it came in. They planned it around this leave coming in for them. And sick leave, again, so many people lose their jobs because they have a kid who … I don’t remember if I mentioned it to either of you.

Our kids have been back in … We’re recording this on the third day, kids are back in school from winter break. I got a call yesterday at 10:00 AM that my older child had had a fever. Got to go pick them up immediately. I have a flexible job. It’s fine. Who cares? I can take an hour. No one’s up my butt. It’s no big deal. So just again, it’s not just the ability to keep the job. It is the psychic stress that I think is so painful for people to know. I have to choose between picking my kid up with a fever and losing my job. And once you have one kid, you know how it is. So multiple kids. So those are my three. Health insurance, paid leave, sick leave.

MO: Brad, first of all, would you co-sign on those and then what would yours be?

BW: Well, I certainly think healthcare reform is part of the answer and figuring out some way to make sure that having babies is not financially devastating in ways that both Mark and Jess, you have touched on. I have different concerns with kind of a national healthcare approach, but trying to-

MO: I just had a thought. Sorry, I don’t mean to … I know we were coming up, we’re over an hour now, but why isn’t it a strong pro-family policy to ask for free universal paid maternity healthcare? Even if you didn’t want to be giving … Even if you’re afraid of giving fifty-five-year-olds access to national socialized healthcare for their deviated septums or whatever. I mean, I’m not saying I agree with that, but let’s say worst case scenario, all the night Obamacare nightmares, let’s say you believe them all. Why wouldn’t we want a totally free OB/GYN through postpartum, through six months? Because the only people are going to use it are people actually having babies. There’s no way-

JG: No, that is … I mean, you qualify for … You do get Medicare, Medicaid. You do get it. It does kick in, but so much happens beyond that.

MO: But I meant even for people who have other insurance … In other words, who aren’t on Medicare or Medicaid. You see what I’m saying? Why wouldn’t we just want to say, as a baby gift, all of your medical … Because even let’s say I have private insurance, but it doesn’t cover everything. It would be better if the government just said we were covering everything.

JG: Oh, you mean everything be completely free?

MO: Completely free. We just have free birthing centers, free OB/GYN care, free preparum, postpartum up to a certain…That whole thing is just socialized, just free because we want people to have babies if they want to have them. That would seem to me like … It would sort of call a lot of conservative free marketeers to the mat because it’s so … I mean, it would be a transfer to people having babies, but I actually think suspect a lot of them just don’t like anything government run and they have their reasons, but …

BW: So that’s the concern, right? So there are unintended consequences to making large sectors of our economy free. And so the question is the left wants to take a certain set of things and just to give them free to the general public. And those of us on the right would sort of say there are often ways in which that move ends up having unintended consequences that we couldn’t fully anticipate. But I would agree with both of you that would be nice to have some way of making sure that the costs of having kids are … And of course, Medicaid does cover a lot of them for lower income moms, but that we’re kind of basically handling that for more middle income families as well. Yes. I would like to see some kind of policy move on that square. But my three would be to increase the child tax credit to around $4,200, to do a lot on the housing front to reduce regulations that make it more expensive, particularly to make single family houses that are affordable for working middle class families.

And then thirdly, to kind of do more either through public schools or some kind of public campaign or through the pages of the New York Times and many other outlets to kind of communicate to the general public the value of marriage and family life. So I do think this is a cultural challenge we’re facing in part. And what we’re seeing, of course, even in Northern Europe where they have incredibly good family policies, the fertility rate in Finland has fallen to 1.25 babies per month on average in Finland and to 1.43 babies in Sweden, hitting record lows again in Finland and Sweden when it comes to Fidelity. So I think part of the challenge is that even in places that have incredibly generous family policies like Sweden and Finland do, is there’s been a cultural shift unfolding, partly I think through the internet and through the spread of social media that has been accentuating more workist, more consumeristic, more individualistic, memes and themes that are not as friendly to … And even maybe sort of perhaps even in Northern Europe, ideas about the opposite sex and relationships that are not as conducive to falling in love, dating, marriage, and having family.

So the cultural piece has got to be part of where we head from here, just give what we’re seeing even in Northern Europe.

MO: So if we don’t want to end up in a world that is only Latter-day Saints, the Amish and Haredi Jews … Although by the way, I have nothing against any of those groups. I have some of my best friends are in two of those groups. I don’t know any Amish people. Let me take you out with this. What about … So I’m shocked at how few men take paternity leave, and I think it’s a problem for all of these things that we’re talking about. And this, by the way, is something, Brad, I would love to see your institute thinking about this if you haven’t. What about just cultural pressure on organizations, especially ones that think of themselves as pro- family, your Chick-fil-As, your Hobby Lobbies, to both have extended family leave, let’s say six months of it, really good, and maybe they do. I don’t know if they don’t.

And to require both parents to take it, maybe sequentially, so they’d get a full year of parent, but basically say,” We’re not letting you come back to the office, Mr. Senior Vice President, you just had a baby. You don’t get to come back. You must take this six months sometime in the next year because we know you won’t take it otherwise because men don’t take it in this culture and so forth and so on. “And that’s something, again, I don’t know that the government could impose that realistically, but culturally it would be hard to quarrel with, I would think, from the point of view of a pro- family agenda. And it’s something the private sector could do, and I’ve never heard anyone say it.

BW: So I think one area where we disagree, Mark and Jess, is I do think that there are meaningful sex differences in how women and men experience parenthood, especially parenting babies. And I’d rather just give parents a generous leave package and let them figure out how they’re going to divvy that up and not tell dads they have to spend three months at home and that it’s just the same-

JG: But I think you can acknowledge there are … Obviously, I believe there are gender and sex differences, but it’s about father. Don’t you want fathers to have a close relationship with their children, regardless of whether that’s a different relationship with the mother. And I think that you don’t … Unless you actually are doing it hands on with the baby, you don’t know how to care for that baby. You just simply don’t. So I don’t think that those ideas are necessarily in conflict with … You’re not saying stay home forever. You can continue to have the value that that is what those differences mean and still spend time in solo time in infancy with a baby.

BW: Of course I can. And of course dads can. I’m just sort of saying that from where I sit, I think having time with babies is great, but I do think that men tend to kind of engage in a more meaningful way as their kids get a bit older. And this is just one area where I think probably we have a philosophical disagreement about what we should expect of fathers. I think where we would kind of find common ground is that we do expect men, fathers to be deeply engaged in the lives of their kids, but sort of precisely how they’re going to kind of arrange that is going to differ from one family to the next. And I would fall in the more traditional camp in terms of how that relates, particularly to the care of babies.

JG: I thought that you were just telling us about how much men and women find meaning in their children. And so why would it be such a burden to spend that time, even if it is not what their role might be? You’re spending concerted time with an infant.

BW: I do think that both women and men do find tremendous meaning caring for their kids and that’s also caring for their infants. But I’m just also saying too, that I think in terms of the extent of care, particularly for infants and … Well, for infants, there is a meaningful sex difference there, I think.

MO: Brad, are you saying you didn’t change any diapers?

BW: No, I can confidently say that I’ve changed more diapers than either of you, Mark or Jess. I’m sure.

MO: You think you’ve changed more diapers than me?

BW: 100%. I can guarantee it. I’ve got nine kids.

MO: I forgot you had nine. Usually when I’m in these conversations, having five kids is the trump card.

BW: I’ve changed thousands of diapers in my day, but I’m just saying that I’m a conservative or more comfortable with some degree of specialization when it comes to who’s doing more, particularly for infants and toddlers. So that’s where we disagree.

MO: All right. All right. I thought that was where we were all going to come together. It was like, it’s mildly coercive in a way that both sort of liberals and conservatives sometimes like, but it’s market oriented, but it’s pro-family. I don’t know, but it’s feminist. Anyway, I tried. All right. Well, thank you both so much, Jessica Grose and Brad Wilcox. This was really fun. I really appreciate it. I hope you and your families and your broods are all thriving in this winter and we’ll do it again, I hope. Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to this interview. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts or comments, please write to me. I would love to hear what you have to say. In fact, if you have a letter to the editor and want to send it as a voice memo, we could include it in one of our next episodes.

I’m at mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s w-u-s-t-l dot e-d-u. That’s for Washington University in St. Louis.edu, but we like to say wustl.edu. So write to me mark.o@wustl.edu.

Of course, I want to get back in the swing of talking about upcoming world holidays. We are just near the end of Pongal, the Hindu four day harvest. It’s a Thanksgiving festival that honors the Sun God Surya in the Tamil Hindu traditions. We’re also in the period of Lohri, which is a Sikh and Punjabi cultural holiday. It’s also a harvest festival, popular specifically in Northern India. January 15 and 16 is Lailat al-Mi’raj, which commemorates the prophet Muhammad’s night journey and his ascension. World Religion Day is a Baha’i holiday that is celebrated also in January 18 and 19 this year. The Sikh holiday of Guru Gobind Singh is the birthday of the tenth Sikh Guru. Very important day for people in the Sikh communities. What else? Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shvat, which is one of the four New Years. It’s the New Year of the Trees is coming up at the end of the month and the first day of February and so on and so fourth.

Celebrity birthdays, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is having a birthday January 13. LL Cool J is January 14. January 16, the great Lin Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame. January 17, Michelle Obama, but also Jim Carrey. And where is Jim Carrey right now? I feel like we have an absence of Jim Carrey in our lives, given just how great he is. Steve Perry from Journey has his birthday on January 22. Oprah Winfrey, January 29, Harry Styles, whose “Watermelon Sugar” is perhaps the most controversial song between me and my children in that I think it’s genius and my kids do not. Arc Magazine had a birthday last fall. We’re about 18 months into this great experiment.

Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Thank you for reading us at arcmag.org. We are a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. I encourage you to check out more about the center at our website. The producer of this podcast and editor is David Sugarman. We also rely on intern help from Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther, and I’m so grateful for the support at the Danforth Center of Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, Mark Valerie, and all the others. Till next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer. Thanks for listening.