April 28, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:14:06
2960 The Truth About Single Moms
Single Mothers are talked about in glowing terms for their hard-work, determination and fortitude - but what is the truth about single moms? | Motherhood has evolved quite a bit over the last fifty years: more women are having their children later in life - or in less traditional ways: before and outside marriage. Single motherhood has become so incredibly common that it is projected that soon - half of all children will live with a single mom at some point before the age of eighteen. | What kind of impact does single motherhood have on society? What impact does single motherhood have on children? Are Fathers important - and what impact does growing up in a fatherless home have? What is the Truth About Single Moms? | Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/truth-about-single-moms | Transcript: http://www.fdrurl.com/single-moms-transcript
I'm the host of Freedom Aid Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
This is the truth about single moms.
Yes, it's time to get comfortable.
Grab your ovaries, pull up a cushion, because this is going to be lengthy, but I promise you, it's going to be fascinating, mind-blowing, and life-changing for you.
Full disclosure, I was raised by a single mother.
My parents divorced when I was an infant, and my father moved to Africa.
Africa, I grew up in England and Canada, and I have now been very happily married for 13 years, I've been a stay-at-home dad, because nothing succeeds like potential overcompensation.
So I sort of viewed it from both sides of the lens.
This is going to be heavily data-driven, but first we need to talk about The underlying conflict in society and within really the human condition, I would argue.
You know how we always want to rest but rest is bad for us?
We always want more calories than we need but excess weight is bad for us.
These are fundamental aspects of being, you know, carbon-based biological entity.
And one of them, one of the most fundamental conflicts in society which really shows up in this single mom situation, this explosion of single motherhood in the West over the past 40 or 50 years, is the risk of It's the relationship between risk and security.
Think of insurance.
If you have a house and you buy insurance against being robbed, If you never get robbed, then you're out a lot of money for no purpose.
But the point is you don't know ahead of time whether you're going to be robbed or not.
If you don't take out insurance and you do get robbed, you're out even more money.
Now, the reason that people take out insurance against being robbed is because people get robbed, and if they get robbed, they don't get paid.
That's sort of the fundamental driver of these things.
And some people...
There's no right answer.
It's just costs and benefits.
There's no right answer to this.
Some people will choose to buy insurance and clearly they are paying more than their generalized risk, otherwise the insurance company couldn't make any money.
But they're paying less than their specific risk, like if they get robbed.
Some people say, you know, forget it.
It's a sucker's game, but the odds of getting robbed are very low, and so I'm not going to buy insurance.
And a lot of those people do fine, and a lot of those people don't.
It's sort of like when you're a kid, you've got a test coming up, and you really want to go and ride your bike rather than study for your test.
Well, you can go ride your bike, and maybe you'll be fine on the test.
Maybe it'll be easier than you think.
Maybe the teacher will get sick, or maybe something will happen, and you don't have to take the test on that day.
So you're doing that kind of risk and reward, whereas if you don't ride your bike, you study for the test, you'll probably do better on the test.
So what's the right answer?
Well, it's hard to say, but I think most people who study for their test would not want some of their marks taken away from them and given to the kids who don't or didn't study for their test.
In the same way, like in the United States, a lot of laws went into place in health insurance, which would say, That you could not refuse someone health insurance if they had a pre-existing condition.
In other words, you couldn't refuse health insurance to somebody who was already sick.
So, of course, a lot of people just said, well, if they can't say no to me if I'm already sick, I'll wait until I get sick and then I'll apply for health insurance, which is not at all how it's supposed to work in the free market.
That's like phoning up quickly and saying to the insurance company, hey, man, I really need some theft insurance because I'm currently being robbed.
They'd say, a little late for that.
You have to kind of do it when you don't know.
So because...
People were not allowed to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, like you couldn't refuse insurance to somebody who was already sick.
What people did was they said, okay, I'll wait till I get sick, I'll apply for insurance.
That drives the price of insurance up enormously, and then people have to be forced to buy insurance because the incentive is to wait until you're sick to buy insurance, and then you end up with Obamacare.
This is just how this snowballs generally work.
When you start messing with the risks and rewards of human society, It's a big challenge, a big problem.
Things unravel enormously quickly.
So why is there so much single motherhood these days?
Well, I mean, there's probably lots of reasons, but the most fundamental one is that the costs of single motherhood have been shifted from the families of single mothers, the parents of single mothers, to society as a whole.
You can look at democracy plus taxation as a form of after-the-fact insurance.
Where you have taxation, you replace insurance.
So certainly when you have socialized medicine, like you have in Canada here, then you don't really have much of a market for health insurance.
There's still a little bit for the stuff that's not covered.
But taxation replaces insurance.
Now, there's also, I want to mention too, there's another kind of insurance called being really well-liked in a particular community.
So...
I was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, and I had to flee Canada because the healthcare system here just was not working, misdiagnosed me for a year and wouldn't give me We're good to go.
It was the elders who really took note and care and control and to some degree custody of youthful sexuality and we're talking about really times before reliable birth control and so if your daughter got pregnant Then this was bad for you as a family.
There was no sort of welfare state that you could put your daughter on and have her bills paid for.
I mean, there's always been the, quote, welfare state of the public educational system, which is socialized daycare of mind-numbing capacities.
But if your daughter got pregnant, then certainly prior to, I guess, 1973, when abortion was legalized in the U.S., you would have to send your daughter away for six months or so.
She would have...
The child would be given up for adoption, and pretty much everybody would know what was going on, and then the future marriageability of your daughter would be significantly lowered, like her value in the marriage marketplace would be significantly diminished.
So that would be bad all around.
You'd end up with a lower quality son-in-law on average if your daughter got pregnant, which meant that you'd Not have as much money for her, so you might have to kick in more.
So it was pretty bad.
This is one reason.
And you have family honor and so on.
And your parenting would be revealed as less than optimal, perhaps, in some ways.
So that's one outcome that can happen.
The second outcome is you would try to get an abortion, particularly when it was illegal.
This was horrendous and hugely risky and dangerous and all that kind of stuff.
So that was bad, too.
You could have the boy marry your daughter at a shotgun wedding.
But then what you're doing is you're inviting some relatively low-quality, short-sighted guy who knocked up your daughter to become part of your gene pool forever and live with you in your general environment for the next 40 years.
Not exactly the most optimum solution of all time.
So there were lots of different ways.
Or, of course, the daughter could simply have the baby, in which case you, as the grandparent, would be responsible most likely for paying and raising and backstopping and so on.
So these were all highly negative outcomes.
And because they accrued to individuals rather than to the social collective in the form of taxation, individuals really got involved in managing female sexuality and male sexuality.
And because prior to reliable birth control, sexuality carried with it a virtually, for certain, commitment of 20 years or more in the raising of a child, That was why you needed commitment before unleashing the happy demons of youthful sexuality.
You needed people to be committed.
This is why there was sex after marriage.
Because it contained within it this implicit commitment requirement of producing a human being who's going to need resources for 20 years or more.
So in the past, there was a lot of focus on, you know, chaperoning and raising kids right so that they wouldn't have too much sex or they wouldn't have unprotected sex and so on.
When the welfare state came along, this eroded the whole thing.
And now parents don't have to be the enforcers, right?
They don't have to be the testicle terminators of involved parents.
And a lot of them, of course, still do, but the financial drivers are not there.
So the risk of Being an out of wedlock mom, being an unmarried mom has gone down enormously and in some ways the rewards have gone up and so this is kind of after the fact insurance through the forced redistribution of income under the tax system This is the conflict that's going on in society at the moment.
So that's just a general background.
Thank you for your patience to explicate that.
I think it's pretty important stuff to have in perspective.
Now we can do the deep data dive, blow your mind, with a series of hopefully not too phallic graphs.
This is the truth about single moms.
I grew up without a dad.
And I grew up watching, I mean, it was a bit kind of retro, but I watched shows like Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons and so on, where the dads were pretty positive.
But that made me kind of resentful, because if this positive dad role model was absent from my life, It meant that my mom basically had me with the wrong guy, or she was unable to keep the right guy, or something like that.
But something was missing, and I really missed that, and I mourned that growing up without a dad.
I could go on and on, but just tiny little examples, like learning how to shave.
I found it in a magazine somewhere.
This is before YouTube.
I don't know if there's shaving instructions on YouTube.
It probably is.
For all the fatherless kids, but given that I wasn't shaving my legs, I couldn't really ask my mom for too much help.
And it's like that Michael Keaton movie, you know, this way, not this way.
That's how you shave.
But just little things like that.
Now, what has replaced fathers for the vast, well, for a lot of the kids, a lot of the boys in particular, who are growing up without fathers, and the daughters, of course, Is the media.
Is the portrayal of fathers in the media.
Now this has gotten progressively worse since the 1950s and early 1960s.
It's really gotten terrible now to the point where you almost simply cannot find any kind of positive role model in media fathers.
And there's a lot of reasons for this, but I think a fundamental reason is that single moms don't want their kids to be exposed to very positive male role models because then the kids will sort of resent the single moms and like, well, where is this great dad that I see all around me on the media?
So when something's missing, we tend to downgrade it.
It's called sour grapes, you know, after that old fable about the fox who tries to grab the grapes from the trellis, can't reach them, and says, oh, they're probably sour anyway.
And so...
Throwing derogatory statements at something which you can't have is an inevitable human impulse, and this is one of the reasons why.
There are so many kids growing up without positive male role models, and therefore you have negative male role models in the media.
It's inevitable.
I mean, you can't watch TV. I mean, this is true in particular of commercials, but it's also true of shows as well.
Men are just like functionally retarded mouth breeders.
Can't tie their shoes.
Can't play an important role in the raising of a family.
They're always out of step.
They're always retro.
They're always ridiculous.
Always bad.
It's a huge epidemic.
I mean, if you can imagine blacks being portrayed in the way that fathers are portrayed on television, I mean, Al Sharpton's head would literally go full scanner's explosion.
In the U.S., 24.7 million kids are living absent their biological father, one-third of all children in the country.
17.7 million, or 39%, of students in grade 1 through 12 absent their biological fathers in their homes.
Now, this doesn't mean that they never see their dads, it doesn't mean that they aren't stepdads, but absent their biological fathers.
It's not just in the U.S., The amount of children born outside of marriage each year is staggering.
Fatherlessness is associated with a long list of negative child outcomes.
We'll look at that a little bit later.
Now, of course, you're going to hear about the brave, hardworking, dedicated, heroic, noble single moms.
But what does the data say?
What is the truth about single motherhoods?
So let's just have a little bit of a look here.
In study of sitcoms, a number of times a mother told a joke at the father's expense increased from 1.8 times per episode in the 1950s to 4.3 times per episode in the 90s.
Working class fathers are twice as likely as upper class fathers to be regarded as the butt of the joke.
Now this is just one tiny, tiny sliver of how negatively men are portrayed, but it's something that can at least be measured.
So two to three times higher.
Father made fun of the mother, mother made fun of the father.
So in the 1950s, the father made fun of the mother a lot more.
You can think of sort of the I Love Lucy stuff.
And now, in the 1990s, mother makes fun of the father almost twice as much.
As they used to in this ratio.
And again, this is because they're single moms and there are no dads around and it's painful for children without fathers to be exposed to positive male role models.
There's just this unconscious demand for this downgrading of masculinity.
And how much are kids being exposed to this?
Well, a huge amount.
A huge amount.
Television has a huge influence on children from a very early age.
These are statistics from kids from ages of 8 to 18.
And as you can see, it's almost 8 hours of media a day.
And this is, you know, tablets, TVs, and computers, and so on.
And when they're 11 to 14, it's almost 12 hours a day!
It's almost 12 hours a day!
It's McKensian!
They must have stuffed them up chimneys with screens.
It dips a little 15 to 18, 11 to 23.
Probably for boys because of Kerpal Tunnel from the 11 to 14 years age.
Men slightly more than women.
White kids, kids of white families, eight and a half hours of media.
Hispanic kids, 13 hours of media.
Almost the same for blacks.
So, not quite twice as much, but a huge amount more among Hispanic and black.
Now, of course, feminists constantly are railing against portrayal of television, of women in television.
And if you look at Gamergate or Anita Sarkeesian's comments about how women are portrayed in video games, she's like, she makes these cases and the cases are disputed.
But nonetheless, feminists have a very powerful and strong focus on how women are portrayed in the media.
Do you hear a lot about how men are portrayed in the media?
I would say you don't.
At least not proportional to women.
But the degree to which men are negatively portrayed in the media, I argue, is far outstripping how negatively women are portrayed.
And it's not just if men are idiots.
Men are also just cold and violent.
You saw the James Bond thing, the Schwarzenegger thing.
You know, men are cold and violent or incompetent.
Both of which, of course, are highly negative for society.
So let's have a quick look at marriage and divorce ratios.
So the top red line is the marriage rates per thousand people.
This is not like 16 people get married.
It's every year, every particular year.
This is from 1930 to 2011.
You can see this big spike in the post-war period, right, when all of the men came back from the Second World War, the baby boom, and so on.
And this is the divorce rate.
As you can see, it's very low, below...
Two per thousand, and then rising to a high of close to six per thousand, and now it's settled back down.
But it's settled back down because divorce rates, sorry, because marriage rates are going down.
So fewer people are getting married, therefore fewer people are getting divorced.
The orange line is the marriage-divorce ratio, so when it's higher, it means that there are fewer divorces, and when it's lower, so as you can see.
And this is huge for kids, right?
Between 25 and 50 percent of the kids of divorced parents never, or almost never, see Their fathers.
And that's terrible.
So this is a chart of births outside marriage in the United States.
And as you can see, back in 1940, only 4% of children were born outside of marriage.
And as you can see, by 2010, it's 41%.
So it is a massive, massive increase.
From 1950.
It's a tenfold increase since 1950.
Now, this is, according to the Flynn Effect, James Flynn, who has been on this show, has pointed out that IQ is going up every...
generation and so there's a more intelligent people having more children outside of wedlock and i would only assume this is the great tragedy is that people aren't being given the facts about how difficult and in fact dangerous it is for both children and society for children to be born outside of marriage and by marriage i don't necessarily mean you know formal government legal institution i simply mean sort of public commitment with contractual obligations
it doesn't have to be government based, but a marriage predated government.
So let's look at the births outside marriages by states.
This is the quote best states in the U.S. and this is broken down by major racial groups.
The other probably includes Native Americans, Asians and so on.
But as you can see here in Tidy Whitey, Utah, only 18.7% of births are outside of wedlock, down to Washington, 32.5.
And this, of course, is the great challenge of talking about U.S. statistics is that racial characteristics play a lot into how the data goes.
So if you can see here, the highest rate, 54.7%, is in Mississippi, and 63.6% of those are in the black community.
New Mexico, of course, high in Hispanic, 20.1% is most likely Native Americans are in New Mexico.
District of Columbia, 77% of the out-of-wedlock births are in the black community, and so on.
So, although race is a challenge to talk about, it really needs to be in here to explicate some of the data.
It's not just an American problem.
U.S. is 41% births outside marriage, Canada 27%, Mexico 55%, Australia 33%, New Zealand 49%.
In Western Europe, all the way from the high of 56% in France to the low of 28% in Italy, no doubt as a result of the intense Catholic pressures on sex and marriage, it is a Western European problem as well.
Looking a little bit further around the world, Israel 5%, Turkey 3%.
Hungary, 45%.
So in the Russian and ex-Russian federations, you can see this ex-Soviet bloc countries are much higher.
And of course, communism took a direct assault against what they considered to be the bourgeois family after the revolution of 1917, and particularly after the incorporation of Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
war, there was a massive attack on the family, which we have a presentation on which we can link below to.
Sub-Saharan Africa, from a low of 6% in Nigeria to a high of 63% in South Africa.
And again, fascinating though it would be to delve into the whys, that would be to make a lengthy presentation even more lengthy.
Hard not to spot the outlier.
Births outside marriage in India, only 1%.
So it's not human nature.
It's not all, you know, human nature, all this stuff.
In the Philippines, of course, was a U.S. satellite for quite some time.
There's still 300,000 Americans, a lot of Christians in there.
So Indonesia 3%, Japan 2%, South Korea 2%, Taiwan 4%.
And you can look, if you want, into R versus K reproductive strategies, which have been differentiated by some thinkers among the races, if you want to look into more of that.
Births outside marriage, Central and South America, Argentina 13%, Colombia a jaw-dropping, leg-opening 84%, and quite high outside of the Argentinian outlier.
Birthside marriage over 40%, from the U.S. at 41%, down to Peru at 76%, Colombia at 84%.
And again, I'm going to run through these pretty quickly.
You can pause the video.
And remember, you know, this is a long presentation, but just close your browser window for the most part when you open it back up to this presentation.
You can pick up where you left off or you can listen to the audio.
Lots of different ways to consume this stuff.
We will also put the PowerPoint, or at least a PDF of the PowerPoint, below in case you want to use any of this stuff.
So, single motherhood was disapproved of significantly and was associated with the socialist attack.
There's actually a book from the early 1900s called Fatherism, something like Fatherhood, Absent Fathers and Socialism.
So the goal of socialism is to carve out the dad, to downgrade the dad, which makes the women more dependent on the state, allows for the growth of state power, according to some thinkers.
So this is the percentage of adults who approve of a woman who wants to have a child as a single parent but doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man.
For those my age, or slightly younger I suppose, there was a Murphy Brown episode with Candace Bergen, or a series of episodes where she, as the character, decided to have a child out of wedlock.
Dan Quayle criticized this, and then all of the savage harpies of feminism...
And the left descended upon his jugular, like so many drill bit-wielding vampire bats, and although a lot of people, it's like the Patrick Moynihan report on the black families from the 1960s, a lot of people have realized in hindsight that there was value in having the discussion, though at the time the reaction is always very strong.
So, Germany, which has a very low single motherhood, also has low approval of single motherhood.
Spain, very high, and These values do translate into outcomes.
Most people navigate not according to any objective or rational philosophy, but according to what is socially approved of by those around them.
In other words, most people are, you know, dust in the wind.
What can I get away with?
And that's what they do.
I do.
Do children need two parents?
So here's a survey.
Germany, again, of course, with low single motherhood, has a very high number of people, almost 9 out of 10, who say, yeah, kids need two parents.
Sweden, with a massive socialist redistribution estate, is down at 47%.
You can see the numbers here.
So where are kids growing up?
So here you can see this is U.S. children by family structure.
Almost 60% are married parents.
Cohabiting parents, 3.5%.
Married parent and step-parent, 5.1%.
Unmarried cohabiting parent and step-parent, single mom, 21%, almost cohabiting mom, single father, very low, 2.7%, cohabiting father, and other, 3.9%.
Now, we've talked about this before.
It can't really be repeated often enough that if you look at sort of the bright green here, moderate abuse and serious abuse, number of children per thousand, the safest place for children by far is married biological Now, I understand, and I will say this for the nth time in these presentations, you cannot describe automatically causation to correlation.
So it could be that people who are nicer get married more, and therefore marriage and not abusing their children is a byproduct of them being nice, right?
Correlation and causation is tricky.
Otherwise, space aliens would come down, look at the world, and say, The human beings are slaves to dogs because they pick up their poop.
But nonetheless, this is important to understand that if you're not able to get married and stay in a stable relationship, then you are significantly more likely to abuse your children.
Again, these numbers are low, but the incidence of multiple, as you can see, for moderate abuse, it's almost 10 times as likely that a single parent with a partner It's going to have their children abused, her children abused usually, than if married biological parents.
So, non-marriage is bad, very bad for children in terms of raising the incidence of abuse.
Child abuse by parents.
We've talked about this before and you can go to bombinthebrain.com for more information on this.
Child abuse by parent, almost half Of children who are abused are abused by mother only.
Both parents 21%, father and other 1%, father 22%, mother and other 7%.
Now, one of the real, very interesting facts that I have learned in doing these kinds of presentations is most people have an automatic compulsion to rush to the defense of women.
This is incredibly sexist.
This diminishes women's moral responsibility, moral capacity, and that is horrendous.
Women are equal to men.
And if you hear negative statistics about a man and don't rush to men's defense, then don't do it for women.
And if you do it for women, then at least do it for men.
But let's not have this disparity where we immediately try to find excuses for immoralities on the part of women.
And people say, well, you see, but moms or women are exposed to children a lot more because they're primary caregivers, so of course there'll be more child abuse.
This is not particularly valid.
Like, if I retire...
And then end up beating up my wife and say, well, officer, I used to work, now I'm home with my wife a lot more, so of course I beat her up more.
He wouldn't be like, well, that sounds legitimate to me.
It's like, continual exposure does not excuse these kinds of things.
If I work around diamonds, it's like, whoa!
I had to steal those things.
Anyway.
So, again, we're going to break this down a little bit by race.
Children living with both parents from 1960 to the present, or near the present.
It's really astonishing to think that in white communities, 96.9% of children lived with both parents in 1960.
What's even more astonishing, in some ways, given the current disintegration of black families, is that almost 66% of black children live with both families.
These numbers have been declining, and one of the reasons we put this up here is there is a general, again, knee-jerk explanation for problems in the black community, racism, slavery.
Racism, slavery, slavery, racism.
However, in 1960, blacks were much more subjected.
This is four years before the Civil Rights Act.
In 1960, blacks were more subject to social racism and lack of opportunity, but family stability was much higher.
So it cannot be when blacks are further away from slavery and further away from more institutionalized racism that the black family has disintegrated more.
Therefore, we can't say that the cause is slavery.
And racism, which is not to say that they have no effect, but they cannot have a weaker effect almost half a century further away from slavery and institutionalized racism when they just can't have more of an effect now than back then.
So it has to be something else or something in conjunction with the lingering effects of slavery and racism.
But this is really important.
More blacks were getting out of poverty in the post-war period up until, yes, the welfare state.
The welfare state, which many people wrote at the time, would cause a disintegration of the family.
And, of course, many people said, oh, don't be ridiculous.
And now the data is causing them to put pepper and mayonnaise on their words for a nice, tasty regret sandwich.
Children living with father only.
Bit of a scattergraph, I understand.
I understand.
Bit of a random walk here.
Divorced, separated, widowed, and never married.
I want to sort of point this out, too.
A single mom does not mean It doesn't mean father died, husband died.
That's called widowed.
Single mom is single, either never married or got divorced.
Single by choice, not by accident.
So a bit of a random walk here, and we're comparing this with, so children living with mother only, 1968%, all the way up to 2012, 24%.
These numbers are a bit more coherent insofar as if you look at never married, went from down sort of five or six percent in 1968 to almost half.
Now.
And that's quite important.
You see, the widowed has gone down considerably.
As you look, it's over 21-22% in 1968, down to 3% now.
So the reason there are single moms is not because of their widowed, not because the husband died.
Much, much lower than that now.
So what's causing it, basically, is either not getting married, never married here, going up, or divorced, or separated.
Separated even is going down.
So...
This is a lot more to do with choice than it is to do with accidents or circumstances.
Children living with mom only?
Let's look at the black population.
So almost half now, but back in 1960, it was only 20% of black kids lived with their mother only.
And you can see it creeping up from 5 or 6% in 1960 for whites to 18.5% now.
But again, here we see that black families, we cannot look at the disintegration of black families and say, slavery, racism.
That is a non-answer and it defies the data.
So the fact that children living with Mother Roni, the black community, has more than doubled since 1960.
If you're going to say slavery and racism, then we have to say that the effects of slavery and racism are greater now than they were in 1960, more than twice as high.
That can't be remotely sustained rationally.
Births outside of marriage by race.
This is from 2012 in the US. White kids, 29%.
Hispanic kids, 54%.
Black kids, 72%.
Again, this has crept far higher than it was in the 1960s.
Children living absent their biological fathers.
White kids, 21%.
Hispanic kids, 31%.
Black children, 58%.
This is one reason why blacks and Hispanics tend to vote more on the Democrat side.
Because the Democrat, if you look at it on paper, what happens when the Republicans get in power, social spending actually goes up.
But on paper, to the voters, the Democrats, The Democrats are like, here's some free goodies.
And basically it goes to, it appeals to single moms, which is why women, single women in particular, single moms in particular, and Hispanic and black single moms, even more in particular, tend to vote Democrat.
Interestingly enough, women who are married tend to vote Republican because they tend to be reliant on their husband's income and Republicans tend to promise lower taxes and so on.
So if you like, at least on paper, a smaller government, a more free market, then you need to promote marriage as a social institution.
Now, who are having these births outside of marriage?
It's the Murphy Brown scenario where there's some woman in her late 30s who decides their kid on her own.
Very unusual.
19 years and under 20%.
24 years, almost 37%.
25 to 29 years, 23%.
And change.
So this is women who can't afford, for the most part, least able to afford the expenses associated with being a parent.
How can they afford these children?
Well, because of the welfare state, to some degree, to a large degree.
This is interesting.
Underage children of single parents per $100,000.
So underage, are you still a single mom if your kid is 30?
Well, not really.
I mean, you were, but government welfare tends to cut off when the kids turn 18.
Well, then it shifts to student loans, which we'll do another presentation on.
But underage children of single parents per $100,000, U.S. government welfare spending.
I've made the case before that the welfare state is the single mom state.
It is the marriage disintegrated state.
And this is not, of course, the only form of welfare out there is corporate welfare, the military, industrial complex, and so on, which we'll do another presentation on.
But at this point, look at these numbers.
As the underage children go up, lockstep government welfare spending goes up.
If you look here, right third of the chart, in the early 90s, Clinton tried to reform welfare.
Now, you can see, like, all that happened was the rate of increase slowed of welfare.
It didn't actually decline significantly or at all.
And a lot of this came out of Charles Murray's Losing Ground book, which is well worth a read.
But what's interesting is that when the government, if you look at welfare spending, which slowed and actually declined slightly in the 90s, so did the underage children as single parents.
As the welfare goes down, there are fewer single moms.
And then, you know, naturally it again just started, this is under Bush, started to go back up again, another slight dip, and then it just goes up.
But it is interesting to see how when welfare spending declines, the number of single kids declines, kids of single moms.
These are all in constant $2,009.
This is very important.
This is very important.
Again, the welfare state is the single mom state or the non-two-parent family state.
So this graph from 2000 to 2014 is a subsection of welfare, temporary assistance for needy families, and this has decreased from 2.2 million to 1.5 million.
But what's really important here, look over on the right-hand side.
The two-parent family is a tiny, tiny proportion of this form of welfare spending.
No parent family is raised by grandparents or Cousins or aunts or something like that, one parent family.
But two parent families, it's almost unheard of for them to need this kind of welfare.
So if you could imagine two parent families become the norm, welfare spending would go down enormously.
And that's just important.
It would be taxes, debt, inflation, money printing, all of the economic instability that comes out of that.
Working moms.
And the age range of the youngest child.
Under three years, in 1975, only 34% of working moms had a kid that young.
Now it's almost doubled to 60%.
And it is the youngest children, in many ways, the most vulnerable, who've seen the greatest increase in moms not being there.
Like kids put in daycare for 20 hours or more a week, exhibit all the same symptoms of Kids who've been literally abandoned by their mothers.
So symptoms of maternal abandonment, being in daycare as a baby and onwards for 20 or more hours a week is maternal abandonment.
If you're going to work full-time and your kid is six months old or a year old, they're likely to exhibit similar characteristics.
So working moms by age range are the youngest child.
And as you can see, under three years from 1975 has gone up enormously.
And under six years has gone up as well.
And what happens if you don't have a father or a husband to provide for you as a mom with kids?
The bills don't stop coming.
You just have to find other ways to get them.
Working mothers, children under one year old, in 1940...
This includes all working married moms with children under 6 years old.
That's just the data that we could find.
But it's only 6%.
Now in 2013, children under 1 year old, 57.3% of moms are working.
This is tragic.
And it's not tragic because I'm against women working.
It's great.
It's tragic for a variety of reasons.
Maternal bonding, maternal presence.
I worked in a daycare as a teenager for a number of years.
And We had two adults.
I was an assistant.
But myself and another adult, we were in a room with like 25 kids aged 5 to 10, sometimes more kids.
And you can't give that kind of individualized attention.
Also, it's really tough to breastfeed if you're working full-time.
I mean, you can pump and dump and all of that, but It is really hard to breastfeed when you are working that much.
And children who are breastfed for at least 12 months have an IQ of 4 points higher.
4 points higher!
This is pretty significant.
It's pretty significant.
And so if you only breastfeed for less than a month, you're going to get a 4 point drop in IQ versus breastfeeding for 12 months.
And if you breastfeed for 18 months or so, which is the recommended, the results are even better.
So this is costing children IQ points.
So, 2001 to 2011, children living in female-headed households with no spouse present have a poverty rate of 48%, which is over four times the rate in married couple families.
You could virtually eliminate poverty if people would just get married before having children.
No matter what your views on marriage, the data doesn't lie.
But if you're going to have kids...
It just makes more sense at every level to get married.
And again, not necessarily talking about government regulated or instituted marriage and so on, but that kind of public commitment.
So you can have a look at the data here.
This is average poverty rate in yellow, married couple, poverty rates, and female-headed households.
As you can see, it's catastrophic.
And they still need, the kids still need dental care, they still need health care, they still need additional food, you need larger living quarters, you probably need a car.
All of these things used to be paid for by the husband and now are paid for, in a weird way, by the kids through national debt.
What are the negative outcomes in terms of poverty rate?
So married white families have a 3.2% rate of poverty, non-married 22%.
Hispanic families 13.2% versus 37.9%.
Black families who are married have only a 7% poverty rate, just a little over twice white families.
But if they're not married, a 35.6% rate.
Tragic.
So, married women are less likely to experience poverty, and marriage also reduces the rate of poverty for both employed and unemployed single moms.
Women who had their first birth outside of marriage 3.6 times more likely to live below the poverty line, 4.5% more likely to be receiving food stamps than women who've had their first birth within marriage.
The likelihood of unemployed single moms being in poverty drops 65% if they married the father of their children.
Marriage more than doubled the family income of these mothers and their children.
If you want to get rid of poverty, get married!
Or, you know, keep sucking at the teeth of the state and destroying the economy and the opportunities of your children.
Among single mothers who were employed part-time, marriage decreased poverty rate from 55% to 17%.
Marriage increased the household income by 75% and would raise 83% of such households above the poverty level.
And as usual, again, you find all of the sources...
In the window below the video or attached to the notes of the podcast.
Among moms who were employed full-time, marriage would boost the incomes of nearly two-thirds of such households to 150% of the poverty level.
Marriage increases the median family income of moms by between $10,200 and $11,400 per year, reduced the probability that mothers would live in poverty by at least two-thirds.
So, fatherlessness.
So, fatherless homes, again, doesn't mean you never see your dad, doesn't mean your dad was abducted by space aliens, it just means it does not live with you, does not live with the mom.
So, in 2009, a study showed 1.5 million children experienced homelessness in a year, and only 10% of those came from homes with a father, and 90% of them came with homes with no father.
And that is, again, pretty important.
It's almost 78% of women, sorry, almost 78% of those in homeless shelters, homeless families, are women.
And these are some pretty tragic statistics.
Fatherless children have more trouble academically scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills.
In children grades 7 to 12 who've lived with at least one biological parent, youth that experienced divorce, separation, or non-union birth reported lower grade point averages than those who have always lived with both biological parents.
Now, again, correlation causation is a challenge, which is...
That maybe smarter people tend to stay married longer, and there is strong correlation between marital success and educational level, like the more educated you are, which is an indication of intelligence, then the more likely you are to stay married.
Married people who are intelligent are more likely to give birth to more intelligent children.
The correlation between the genetic, as far as I understand it, the genetic correlation between an offspring's intelligent and the parent's intelligence is 0.5.
So it's not 0, which is no correlation, it's not 1, which is the perfect correlation, kind of half between.
There's a regression to the mean around IQ or intelligence.
And so it could be that less intelligent people tend to get divorced more and less intelligent people will tend to have less intelligent children.
So I understand all of that.
However, however, the Flynn, in fact, says people are getting more intelligent.
Therefore, stable marriages should be increasing.
However, non-marital situations are increasing instead.
So there's no way that all of those people can be less intelligent.
Father involvement in schools is associated with the higher likelihood of a student getting mostly A's.
True for fathers in biological parent families, for stepdads, and for fathers heading single-parent families.
So if you're a dad, even if you're just a dad with no mom around, your kids are more likely to get mostly A's.
Children living with their married biological father tested at a significantly higher level than those living with a non-biological father.
So stepdads, you know, you ain't the master of me, you're not my dad.
Those things just don't work as well.
It's not that they don't work at all, but they don't work as well.
Kids from father-absent homes are more likely to be truant from school, be excluded from school, and leave school at age 16.
They're less likely to attain academic and professional qualifications as adults.
Researchers found that fathers showed sensitivity to their child in the transition to school and encouraged their child's autonomy.
It predicted a much better relationship between the child and their teachers.
We'll talk another time about the really fascinating general differences between male and female parenting.
But in general, women are more cautious and more protective, and men are more rough and tumble and encouraging, and both are necessary and important for children to flourish.
High school dropouts.
Only 29% of high school dropouts come from a fathered home.
Fatherless homes account for 71%.
In 2012, more than 305,000 teenage girls gave birth across the country.
In the U.S., 30% of teen girls who leave school say it's due to parenthood.
Only 38% of mothers who have a child before the age of 18 earn their high school diploma by age 22.
Less than 2% earn a college degree by age 30.
Children who exhibit behavioral disorders, 15% of them come from fathered home, 85% come from fatherless homes.
And remember, because of the way the educational system works in the West and in most countries, these kids are all jammed together.
So your decision to have...
A child outside of wedlock and potentially risk higher rates of dysfunction, well, my kid's going to be exposed to that in the neighborhood, in the school, in the mall.
There could be bullying.
There could be a drug culture.
There could be drinking.
All of these things flow out from children, so they're not contained within the household.
They flow out into society.
A study examined the prevalence and effects of mothers' relationship changes between birth and age three on their children's well-being.
Children born to single mothers show higher levels of aggressive behavior than children born to married mothers.
Living in a single mother household is equivalent to experiencing 5.25 partnership transitions, breakups and make-ups.
Disengaged father-infant interaction as early in the third month of life predicts early behavioral problems in children, including a higher rate of aggressiveness.
The effects which are greatest for male infants remained similar regardless of the mother's behavior and were observable at one year old.
I did have, because I do these shows, take these exciting bullets for the cause and accept donations, which if you enjoy these presentations, there's no commercials.
It is at freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
I was able to stay home with my daughter and spend a huge amount of time with her, which was a real blessing and a wonderful thing.
I was able to sing to her before she was born and play with her from birth onwards and so on.
And she is very assertive, but not aggressive.
Affectionate, playful, and engaging interactions between fathers and their children are predictive of later popularity among peers and within the school environment.
It is estimated that among children under the age of 13, those living with single mothers spend 12 to 14 fewer hours with their parents per week compared to children living with married parents.
The challenge of juggling multiple responsibilities can result in heightened stress levels and insufficient child-rearing practices among single parents.
Let me give you an analogy here.
In terms of intelligence and causality, we've got a video called The Truth About Spanking.
Where we make the argument with data that spanking results in a sort of 4 to 5 point drop in IQ. Don't spank your children and breastfeed them.
That goes from the difference between 100 to 110 IQ, almost.
And that's pretty significant.
And people say, ah, yes, but you see, children who are less intelligent are more likely to be spanked.
It's not that spanking produces lower intelligence.
That's just proven by the data, but it's an understandable thing.
But let me sort of give you an analogy here.
So it's true, data-wise, that kids without fathers are more aggressive and more dysfunctional, on average, not all of them.
And people say, well, maybe they're, you know, come from dysfunctional, chaotic people, genetic, and so on.
Ah, yeah, it's a problem, though.
Let me sort of give you an analogy.
So let's say a smarter kid who grows up in Japan will learn his native tongue faster.
He will.
But all kids pretty much will learn their native tongue to some degree, right?
However, if you're really not exposed to Japanese, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're not going to speak it.
So intelligence doesn't replace a lack of exposure to something.
And so if you grow up without a dad, you're simply not going to have those interactions.
Therefore, it's not a matter of intelligence.
It's a matter of exposure.
Juveniles in state-operated correctional institutions.
This is controlled for income and all other factors that can be imagined.
Youths in father-absent families, so mother-only, mother-stepfather and relatives or other, had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from mother-father families.
30% of them come from fathered homes, 70% from fatherless homes.
And again, your taxes and your negative life experiences by being exposed to these sorts of potential criminals is significant.
Adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers, 29% come from father-at-home, 71% from fatherless homes.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that, quote, fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.
Among rapists who are motivated with displaced anger, 20% of them come from fathered homes.
80% come from fatherless homes.
Now, we've got a video which you should really watch, or a podcast, and you can go to fdrpodcast.com if you'd rather get the podcast through a feed, called The Truth About Rape Culture, which is really, really important to understand.
You know, the best way, particularly for these kinds of rapists, the best way to reduce prevalence of rape in society is to have women marry husbands, have...
Boys raised by fathers.
Women are part of the cycle of violence, as I continually point out.
And we've got the truth about violence again.
I don't mean to pimp all these presentations, but I'm just touching on a lot of information that we've gotten out.
Over the years.
But women are part of the cycle of violence through hitting their children, spanking abuse, through choosing bad men or men who disappear and so on.
They're part of the cycle of violence.
And men have been hammered a lot, and rightly so, about men's role in the cycle of violence.
I'm trying to actually work on the root cause of at least half the problem by reminding women that their choices have a lot to do with the kind of society they're going to grow old in.
Researchers have estimated between 60 and 80% of rapists, sex offenders, and sexually aggressive men were sexually abused by a woman in their childhood.
This is part of the cycle of violence and rape.
A study from 1989 found that male adolescent incest offenders abused by females only targeted female siblings 93.3% of the time, compared to 32.5% for offenders abused only by males.
A meta-analysis of studies found that in 17 studies, sex offenders were 3.4 times more likely to have experienced sexual abuse in their childhood compared to non-sex offenders.
In other words, childhood sexual abuse was significantly correlated with becoming a sexual offender later in life.
As we saw earlier, rates of abuse can be up to 10 times higher in non-marital families, non-married families.
So...
If we want to have fewer sex offenders, more people need to get and stay married.
That's what the data says.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Youth suicides.
Children with single parents showed increased risks of suicide.
Father at home, 37% of suicides.
Fatherless home, 63%.
After adjustment for factors such as socioeconomic status or SES, parents' addiction or mental disease, Children in single-parent households were twice as likely to attempt suicide, and risks of alcohol-related disease were also doubled.
The risk of childhood narcotic abuse was increased three times among girls and four times among boys living in single-parent households.
Single mothers and crime.
So violent crime rates per 100,000, as you can see, were still significantly higher.
More than twice as high probably as we were in 1960, but the peak, which was the late 80s and early 90s, we're declining from there.
A couple of reasons for that that have been argued, I can't speak to the validity of all of them, but some of the arguments put forward are the banning of lead in paint and lead in toys.
Various states within the U.S. banned these at various times, and you can see a fixed amount of time period later That crime rates go down relative to when it was banned, so there's some effect.
Lead exposure has been shown to increase aggression.
In children, abortion, of course, is an argument that's been made a number of times.
So abortion became legal in the United States in 1973, and now, you know, huge amounts of babies are being aborted.
So fewer unwanted children, we assume to mostly single parents, results in, you can see sort of a decade and a half later, less violent crime.
Also, of course, the media revolution that occurred in the 2000s would further, I think, decline crime.
Kids get out their aggressions in violent video games, they want to stay home more, they're less bored, and so there's less crime.
But there's some interesting correlations about all of this.
Compared to peers in intact families, adolescents and single-parent families and stepfamilies are more likely to engage in delinquency.
This relationship appeared To be driven by differences in parental involvement, supervision monitoring, and parent-child closeness between intact and non-intact families.
A study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health explored the relationship between family structure and risk of violent acts in neighborhoods.
The results revealed That if the number of fathers is low in a neighborhood, then there is an increase in acts of teen violence.
The statistical data showed that a 1% increase in the proportion of single parent families in a neighborhood is associated with a 3% increase in an adolescent's level of violence.
In other words, adolescents who live in neighborhoods with lower proportions of single-parent families and who report higher levels of family integration commit less crime.
This is true when I was growing up, and I grew up dirt, dirt, dirt poor, like eviction notices, not enough to eat kind of poverty.
And mostly married families...
Partly it's due to income, but mostly married families don't want to live around single-parent households.
And partly it's due to the aggression of the kids and what kind of kids you want in your kids' circle of friends and in your kids' school and all that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, 1% increase in single-parent households, 3% increase in adolescence level of violence.
So when we talk about teen bullying and teen aggression and teen violence, we're talking again that the shadow behind the statue, which we really need to look at, Is single parenthood and really fundamentally single motherhood is behind a lot of these dysfunctions and it's hard for us again.
There's this weird thing where we want women to be equal and responsible but it's like pushing two opposing magnets together sometimes to get people to connect to female responsibility in terms of shaping and framing society because there's this women as victims narrative and so on.
And the idea that women's bad reproductive choices could be driving a lot of social dysfunctions is kind of alien to a lot of the propaganda that we get, particularly in television where women are always victims or usually victims.
There's a reason why they call it television programming.
Children aged 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity.
They were also less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.
So this is important as well.
People who prey on children prey on children who have Non-attachment or less attachment to their parents.
I mean, you pray on some kid who's got a great relationship with his mom and dad.
He runs to his mom and dad and says, this guy prayed on me.
Bingo, bango, bongo.
Your life becomes horrible, and rightly so, very quickly.
But if a kid is alienated and has no connection, they're going to be hungry for adult attention, and they're not going to have the kind of connection that allows them to discuss difficult things like being victimized and so on.
So that's important.
What about negative outcome by something as interesting and simple as family dinners per week?
So, if you have five to seven family dinners per week as opposed to zero to two, you're significantly less likely to use tobacco, to use alcohol, to use marijuana as kids.
Have friends who drink regularly, friends who use marijuana regularly, and likely to use drugs in the future.
And so these are really important things to understand.
So it's not like, oh, we're just forced everyone to have family dinners.
But family dinners are where you have conversations, you ask about the day, you keep up with what your kids are doing.
And having these family dinners per week is indicative of a family bond, which is a shield against a wide variety of dysfunctions.
Now, this will blow your mind.
It blew my mind.
So, girls are increasingly reaching puberty earlier.
Between 2004 and 2006, twice as many Caucasian girls showed breast maturity at age 7 as compared to 1997.
That's a very, very big change.
Early puberty has been associated with a higher probability of developing breast cancer and reproductive cancers later in life.
Sort of burns out the engine.
So, this is from Dr.
Jay Belsky from Birkbeck University University.
An evolutionary biology perspective says, look, the thing that nature most cares about with respect to all living things, humans included, is dispersing genes in future generations.
Thus, under those conditions in which the future appears precarious, where I might not even survive long enough to breed tomorrow, then I should mature earlier, so I can mate earlier, before that precarious future might get me.
The body, from the moment of conception onwards, and even genetically before that, the human body is scanning the environment, even within the womb, to figure out, am I living in a peaceful world or an aggressive world?
Now, if you grow up in a father-absent environment, It seems that you're going to produce what's called an R reproductive strategy, which is have lots of sex and just not really care that much for your kids and just hope that they make it to adulthood, also known as the frog approach, the spray and pray approach.
If your father is around, it means you're less likely to be in a war-based or violence-based society.
It's going to be more trade.
It's going to be more negotiation.
So you're going to look for win-win negotiations and you're sexually mature later.
More time living without the biological father in the household is associated with earlier puberty in girls.
It programs the very body itself, thus raising future cancer risks.
Studies have even shown that younger sisters in biologically disrupted families reached puberty earlier than their older sisters did.
No such trend emerged in biologically intact families.
So if you're four when your father leaves and you have older sisters, the older sisters will reach puberty later than you did.
The quality of the father's involvement with daughters was the most important feature of the early family environment in relation to the timing of the daughter's puberty.
So a lot of researchers believe that this influence may be chemical in nature.
So fathers admit pheronomes and farts, but let's just talk about pheromones for the moment.
These are airborne chemical signals that trigger behavioral and physiological effects.
Animal research has shown that male pheromones have different effects on young females.
Exposure to the pheromones of biological fathers appears to slow down puberty in girls, while exposure to the pheromones of unrelated adult males speeds it up.
And again, if there's not a father around who's going to sort of help and take care of you, you need to find another man quickly, and so you're going to have earlier puberty, and so on.
A recent Australian study found that having older brothers can also delay the onset of puberty in girls.
The more older brothers a woman has, the older she is when she gets her first period.
The protectors, you could say.
Again, biologically speaking.
Interestingly enough, boys whose fathers are absent are more likely to reach puberty at a later age.
The opposite of girls.
Despite reaching puberty later, they're more likely to become fathers at an earlier age.
So, now we're talking about the hypersexuality of youth, particularly amongst girls.
Well, moms who choose dads for their children who aren't going to stick around are programming their daughters to have earlier puberty and be more sexualized.
So, this is hundreds of thousands, I think, tens of thousands of kids who are grades 8 to 12.
After accounting for a set of biological, sorry, parental involvement variables, adolescents living with two biological parents were significantly less likely to transition into sexual activity when compared to adolescents from all other family structures.
Adolescents from other family structures were between 40 and 198% more likely to enter into sexual activity than adolescents living with two biological parents.
And so the yellow here is a virgin and non-virgin, and as you can see, if you don't feel at all close to your dad, you're much more likely to be a non-virgin.
If you feel very close to your dad, you're much more likely to be a virgin at these times.
Adolescents from intact families are less likely to have ever had sexual intercourse, have had, on average, fewer sexual partners, are less likely to report sexually transmitted diseases, and are less likely to have ever experienced a pregnancy or birth compared to peers from non-intact families.
Now, this has nothing negative to say about sexuality, enjoyment of sexuality, and so on, but it's the best environment for children to be in a married family, intact married family, and it certainly is the best environment for regular happy sex as well.
So it's actually sex positive to talk about this stuff.
It's not anything negative or...
For adolescent females, each year spent in a single-parent household from birth to 11 years old increased the likelihood that they would engage in sexual intercourse during adolescence by approximately 8%.
Teenage girls living with two married biological parents during their 8th grade were roughly 50% less likely to give birth before the end of 12th grade, even including high school dropouts.
Females between the ages of 15 to 19, whose parents were married at the time of their birth, were 42% less likely to report sexual activity when compared to those whose parents cohabited at birth.
For adolescent males, each change in parental marital status between the ages 6 to 11 increased the males' odds of engaging in sexual intercourse by 37%.
When comparing 14-year-old boys, those living with a single mother had almost double the odds of having impregnated a girl compared to those who live with both biological parents.
What about infant health and infant death?
Studies have also found that a father's involvement with the pregnant mother pre-birth lowered the risk that that infant would die before its first birthday.
The father being absent raised the odds of infant death in the first year by nearly four times, or 400%, compared to when the father was involved.
If fathers were not involved during pregnancy, babies suffer increased odds of being born prematurely or at a lower weight.
The risk of poor birth outcomes was highest for infants born to black women, as even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, black infants were seven times more likely to die in infancy than babies born to either Hispanic or white women in the same situations.
There's also an increased likelihood of maternal complications that could impact the infant's health, including high blood pressure, anemia, eclampsia, placental abruption, and more if the father is not around during the pregnancy.
Expectant mothers in the father absent category tended to be younger, more educated, more likely to be black, and had a higher percentage of risk factors like smoking and inadequate prenatal care.
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study found that fathers who were engaged with their partners before childbirth were more likely to be involved with the children both a year later and three years later.
Fathers are proven to engage children in what is called rough and tumble play more often than mothers.
Mothers are more inclined to use toys to play with their young children, while fathers often challenge their children's physical limitations.
A study found that infants preferred to be held by their fathers because fathers were more likely to play with them, while mothers were likely to change their diapers and feed them, etc.
According to another study, two-year-old children approached their fathers more often than the mothers when wanting to play.
When parents played with infants about the same amount of time, it was found that the infants responded more positively to the fathers.
Higher father involvement in overall care is also associated with fewer nighttime awakenings by babies, which means that there is a significant relation to fathers and infant sleep.
Given the importance of infant sleep on overall development, the importance of this finding cannot be overstated.
Studies have also found that children play an incredibly crucial role, even larger than the mother, in the language development of their children.
It is suggested that fathers use a more diverse vocabulary in their interactions with their infants compared to mothers.
A lot of cooing and baby talk for moms.
Children were found to have more advanced communication skills of 15 months and more advanced expressive language development of 36 months, even when controlling for mother language input and education.
These findings suggest that father language input when children are as young as six months may be important in understanding children's language development even two and a half years later.
And language development, of course, is very important in negotiation, very important in the development of an exercise of empathy, very important in finding win-win situations.
Surprisingly, there were no significant effects of maternal vocabulary on child communicative skills or language development.
Whose advice do mothers value?
Only 11% of mothers value their husband's input when it comes to handling problems with their kids.
Teachers and doctors rated 45% and close friends and relatives rated 16%.
I don't even know what to say about that.
Imagine if this was fathers with wives, with moms.
What's being studied, according to a search of PubMed?
Research studies reference mothers over six times more than fathers and maternal over 15 times more than paternal.
In a review of 500-plus studies of child and adolescent psychology from the major journals, almost half of them completely excluded fathers.
Some studies involved both parents, while only 11% focused on fathers exclusively.
The essential role of fathers in healthy childhood development has been overlooked for decades to the detriment of children.
Around the world.
You get enough single moms, and they don't want to hear it, and the kids don't want to hear it.
It's painful, it's painful to see what's been robbed, what's been missing, what's lost.
So, why am I talking about female responsibility in this?
Well, surveys indicate men are the ones to ask women on dates between 90 to 95% of the time.
Only 5% of married hetero couples say that the woman proposed.
In a study of more than 17,000 unmarried heterosexual men and women, 84% of men and 58% of women said men pay for most dating expenses even after dating for an extended period of time.
So 84% of men and 58% of women, well, one set of them is lying.
I wouldn't assume it's the one opening the wallet.
44% of women said they were bothered when men expected them to help pay.
57% of women offer to help pay, but 39% confess to hoping that men would reject their offer.
76% of men report that they feel guilty accepting the woman's money to pay for dating-related expenses.
Why is this important?
And it seems weird to even have to say this, but men propose and women dispose.
Men ask if they can date, if they can get married, and women say yes or no.
Women are in the position of saying yes or no.
Women are the ones choosing the men.
Of course, men are responsible for fathering children outside of marriage, but women are the gatekeepers.
Women say yes or no.
And women are responsible for the choices of who they choose to have children with.
They're responsible.
And if we say, ah, yes, but you know, he turned out to be a bad and unreliable and unstable guy.
Who could have known this ahead of time?
Oh, come on.
The markers are everywhere if you want to see them.
How is it that women in the past were able to choose better men?
And women now can't.
Well, to some degree it's because they grew up without dads, but that's the fault of their parents, their moms in particular, choosing the wrong guys to have children with.
There are very few social dysfunctions that you can't trace back to early family situations, early family choices.
A lot of those dysfunctions involve bad male choices, and we kind of have been combing over that for half a century or so.
What is often missed, almost invariably missed, is the degree to which women are responsible for creating the conditions that are difficult and harmful for children as a whole and for society as a whole.
If women complain that society is violence, if women complain that society is dysfunctional, if women complain that there are not reliable men around, then women need to look at their sisters and say, well, what kind of choices are we making?
What kind of choices are we making?
Because what's happened is we've subsidized bad decisions.
You know, whatever you tax, you get less off.
Whatever you subsidize, you get more off.
We have taxed good decisions in that we raise taxes on married families with children.
Those people are more wealthy and more responsible and are taxed at a much higher rate.
In fact, really tax it all because a lot of single moms don't pay taxes in any way, shape, or form.
So we have taxed responsible families and we have subsidized irresponsible half-families.
And so we have fewer stable families and we have more unstable families.
Now, it's one thing for a woman to date a guy who turns out to be unreliable and maybe sticks her with some bills or whatever.
That's bad.
That's terrible.
At least that choice only accrues to her own responsibilities and her own effects.
What we've basically done is we have taken a sledgehammer to the base of the most stable, most child-beneficial, most human-beneficial institution the world has ever seen, which is the traditional marriage.
We've taken a sledgehammer to the base of that And we have subsidized bad decisions on the part of women in general.
Go find yourself a good, decent, reliable man.
Don't go for the alpha player.
Don't go for the high-status guy.
Don't go for the guy's abs or his Lamborghini.
Go for a stable, reliable, decent provider.
That's what is best for your children.
But in the massive disruption of family life, largely led by the left, that has occurred over the last 50 years, We have subsidized bad decisions largely on the part of women.
We have indebted future generations at truly staggering levels.
We have undermined the intelligence of children by creating situations where high taxes and subsidies lead to more women working, which is less.
A chance for children to develop their intelligence.
We have hampered the children's development of appropriate social skills, academic excellence, language skills, all of the things that are really foundational to a civilized society where people use their words, not their fists.
Language development is essential to the development and maintenance of social peace and negotiation instead of aggression and violence.
So we have subsidized bad decisions largely on the part of women We have taxed and harmed the interests of women who've made good decisions in their partners.
And all of this, in general, accrues to significant and escalating harm against children.
You know, we as a society, how often do you, oh, we do anything for our kids, we care about our kids, kids are everything, family is everything.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's accept that.
Let's accept all of these hallmark sentimental statements about how we'd do anything for our kids.
Okay, let's do that.
Let's follow the data.
Start making better decisions about who we're having children with.
Men, choose the good women.
Women, choose the good men.
Because in so doing, you are choosing what is best for your children and you're choosing the kind of peaceful, virtuous, undeaded society that you can grow old in with confidence and calm and serenity.
You know, if you're doing a long sea voyage and you get a few degrees wrong at the beginning, you can end up in a whole different continent.
We really need to review what we have done to the family, what we have done to the children.
What kind of seeds are we sowing here?
And is it too late to change?
I don't think so.
But we have to accept the data and commit to a better path now.
