Brad Wilcox
@BradWilcoxIFS
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Professor @UVA | Fellow @FamStudies | Fellow @AEI | *GET MARRIED* https://t.co/wLmRAqsysH
Charlottesville, Virginia
Joined January 2013
The new book just dropped. It is about all the most important things:. ✔️ Sex.✔️ Money.✔️ Kids.✔️ Love.✔️ Happiness &. ✔️ Saving Civilization. Buy a copy at your local bookstore or here:.
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Never thought I'd see this. Churchgoing ⬆️ in Gen Z. Led by. young men. @ryanburge: "Religious attendance is actually *increasing* among [young] men."
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Married men broke Republican by 20 pts. Married women broke R by 14 pts. Unmarried men broke R by 7 pts. But *unmarried women* broke D "by whopping 37 pts". ~ @conncarroll.
The Republican Party is the party of the married and…. Increasingly unmarried men. The Democratic Party is the party of unmarried women. This gender*marriage story will rise in importance as share of unmarrieds climbs.
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Truly breathtaking class divide in marriage and motherhood. ✔️95% of upper-income moms are married. ✔️76% of middle-income moms are married. ✔️35% of lower-income moms are married . @TheAtlantic
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New study:. Boys who grew up apart from their biological father about 2 times more likely to land in prison or jail by @ age 30. NB: fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. @AEI @FamStudies #FathersDay2022
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The Republican Party is the party of the married and…. Increasingly unmarried men. The Democratic Party is the party of unmarried women. This gender*marriage story will rise in importance as share of unmarrieds climbs.
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Whoa. New study: (Parental) divorce is worse than death—when it comes to kids’ educational attainment. “with data from 17 countries from the Generations and Gender Survey, we found that parental divorce had a larger impact than parental death.”.
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NYT: "Married motherhood in America is a game no one wins". New PEW: Marrieds.- 62% less likely to be “lonely” .- Nearly 20 ppts more “optimistic”
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Truly *astonishing* research on marriage & cancer:. For “prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers, the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy.”.
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Young black women from intact-2-parent families more likely to graduate from college (36%) vs. young white women from 1-parent families (28%). Young black men from intact-2-parent families less likely to be incarcerated (14%) vs. young white men from 1-parent families (18%)
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Couples w/ joint checking accounts are happier. But correlation or causation?. Causation. Fascinating new *experimental* study assigned some newlyweds separate & other newlyweds joint accounts. Joints did much better in their marriages.
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Truly jaw dropping findings from @jean_twenge: . ✔️ In-person activities so much better for young adults . ✔️ Electronically mediated activities so much worse for y adults
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Truly astonishing indictment of our welfare policies fr @AtlantaFed. A single mother in DC can make no gains, financially, as her earnings rise from $11,000 to $65,000. because benefits like food stamps & Medicaid phase in/out as her income rises. Terrible for work/marriage.
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Studies indicate “Boys were more interested in war, comedy, sports, and science fiction, and more excited about informational texts, whereas girls preferred narrative books and romantic stories.” . Guess which kinds of books schools incorporate more?.
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Whoa: . Talk about gender (+ educ) political polarization on steroids.
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New study: . Happiest men and women in Europe are:. ✔️ In *neotraditional relationships* where he works full-time, she works part-time. ✔️ Married. ✔️ Parents of young children . Unhappiest are:. ✔️ She works, he doesn’t. ✔️ Neither work.
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Democratic support among young men (18-29) collapsing. ✔️ 2016: 51% young men ID Democrat. ✔️ 2023: 39% young men ID Democrat. Source: @dcoxpolls
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Unheralded Good News: .Share of Black Children Being Raised by 2 Parents Rising 👇🏼
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My comment to @GovCox: "There’s no state that has more kids who are being raised in intact families than Utah — about 70% of Utah children are raised in stable, married families."
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Kelce says . ✔️being a father brings more "fulfillment" than football. ✔️a loving, present father is "greatest gift a child could ask for". Kelce is right. Look at the data on men's happiness & kids' well-being👇🏽
Jason Kelce talking about the importance of fathers in his retirement speech: "I think one of the best things a person can be in this world is a father. A father who is present, devoted, and loving is the greatest gift a child could ask for in our society."
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Jawdropping NYT story: . From South Korea to South America, from Italy to the U.S., we're witnessing an epochal fall in fertility: "Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding & accelerating."👇🏽.
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NEW: STRIKING gender gap in romantic relationships reported by @pewresearch. "Recent years have seen a historic rise in 'unpartnered' Americans" hitting young men esp. hard. Now: . ✔️34% of young women (18-29) single.✔️63% of young men (18-29) single .
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Family men enjoy a happiness premium. Looks like it is growing, doesn't it?👇🏽
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Depression among teenage girls has *doubled* since the mass adoption of the smartphone @ 2010: @jean_twenge @FamStudies
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The most striking pattern in our new study:. Black children from intact, two-parent families *do better* than white children from single-parent families when it comes to poverty, prison, and college graduation. @WendyRWang @IanVRowe @FamStudies
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🚨 New Pew: . Share of young adults, esp. y women, who say they are "unlikely" to have kids is surging.* . Biggest reason: "Just don't want to". 🚨. * Among those who are currently childless.
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It’s happening. “Pornhub has pulled out of multiple states rather than comply with age-verification laws.”. @politico.
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Whoa, Big News from @CDCgov: . * U.S. Birthrate Hits Lowest Level Ever: 1.64 Births Per Woman. * U.S. now well below replacement fertility level of 2.1 births per woman. * 25 states had more deaths than births in 2020, a record.
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1. NEW: Growing ideological polarization between men/women spells bad news for marriage as. ✔️ Y men moving slightly Right. ✔️ Y women moving strongly Left. & “fewer Americans willing to date/marry across aisle.”. My latest w/ @lymanstoneky @TheAtlantic .
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This comes on heels of evidence fr @jean_twenge’s new book, *Generations*, which shows HS boys turning right (even as female peers turn left). Stunning ideological divide among HS seniors today:. ✔️ @ 65% of HS senior boys conservative. ✔️ @ 31% of HS senior girls conservative
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Right. You'd never know, from pieces like this, that the happiest prime-aged women in America are married w/ kids:
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The divorce rate for first marriages continues to fall.
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Striking, new evidence young men in America are moving Right:. ✔️ Fewer than half of Gen Z men think “feminism has made America a better place”
The fact that fewer than half of Gen Z men think that "feminism had made American a better place" is a data point that we should all take pretty seriously. From the new @equimundo_org survey: .
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Parenthood is the pathway to misery, immiseration & planetary degradation. This is the message too many young women (& men) are getting. They have *no idea* what we really know about family life and flourishing—including happiness👇🏼.
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“ Marriage is more than your love for each other…” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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There’s *no racial gap in marriage rates* in U.S. military. “What’s the military’s secret? It provides great benefits & doesn’t give them to cohabiting couples. In other words, it privileges marriage. The rest of the govt. should do likewise.” @Deseret
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GET MARRIED @HarperCollins drops @ Valentine’s Day. Learn:. ✓ Why marriage matters more for happiness than work & 💵. ✓ How so many of our problems trace back to marriage ⬇️. ✓ The path to forge a strong & stable marriage of your own. Pre-order:
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Whoa. @GovernorVA appoints conservative slate of 4 new board members to UVA’s Board of Visitors, including 1 of UVA’s strongest critics, Bert Ellis. Suggests @GlennYoungkin wishes to see big changes at VA colleges & universities.
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No, @chelseahandler. Single, childless women are not happier than married mothers. Rather the opposite is true. @WendyRWang & I ran the numbers in @TheAtlantic .@FamStudies
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Babies. I wonder if babies play a role in the teen mental health crisis, too. Teens have so few opportunities to care for babies, given smaller families, more age-segregated activities & screen time. Yet whenever my school-age kids are w/ babies and toddlers, they love it.
2023 study: “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."
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Black kids from intact families *less* likely to be suspended than white kids from non-intact families. "Suspension rate for black students living in intact families, 12%, is less than suspension rate for white students from non-intact families, 13%" 👇🏽.
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Astonishing 35 percentage point difference between liberal-conservative women in infidelity attitudes:. ✔️36% of liberal women say it is always wrong for a woman to have extramarital affair. ✔️71% of conservative women say same. New from @dcoxpolls @AEI: .
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Most troubling finding related to children in Get Married is that boys who raised outside of an intact family are more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from college. By contrast, boys from intact families are about 4x more likely to graduate college than go to jail.
Striking new research: "Young Men Raised Apart from Intact Family: More Likely to Go to Prison than Graduate from College".
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It’s happening. A majority of those confirmed, received & baptized tonight at STA/ @CatholicHoos were…. Men. Definitely seeing more & more signs that the feminization of American religion may be over.
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“Couples who lived together before marriage were 48% more likely to divorce than couples who moved in together after being engaged or married, according to a new study.”
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3. One psychologist who studied 56 school shooters found that "82% of the sample either grew up in dysfunctional families or without their parents together (for at least part of their lives)."
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Whoa. Some have doubted the idea that young men (18-29) are turning right. Time for them to wake up. Truly striking #s from @Gallup care of @dcoxpolls:
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Who wants to tell @Aella_Girl? 👀
People who wait till marriage to have sex must have waaaay worse sex, on average, than people who didn't wait. The gap must be huge.
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STUDY: . Churchgoers, Republicans, conservatives report less anxiety, depression & mental distress during COVID’s early days. Secular, Democratic, liberal Americans report more anxiety, depression & mental distress during COVID’s early days.
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Feminist: . Religion is *bad and bigoted*. New @Harvard study: . Religion is the arena *least biased* against poor kids forging friendships across class lines. ABTW: Colleges don’t look so great here.
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Went camping w/ a bunch of dads this past weekend & met FBI agent working on fentanyl, huge factor in this wave of drug deaths. I asked him: What do we need to do to tackle fentanyl?. His response: Get control of the border.
Drug deaths are surging. Last year, more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses. @RealJoeGrogan @caseybmulligan tell us what can be done to stem the wave of death. via @WSJOpinion
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For those who doubted rightward turn of Gen Z men:. We witnessed a *29-percentage-point shift to the right* among young men (18-29) from 2020 to 2024.
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"The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes. " @CaitlinPacific @TheAtlantic
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Which is why elite colleges are disproportionately made up of students from intact families, a fact rarely acknowledged on college campuses:
Not a coincidence that the kid most academically successful is also the kid most likely to have a two-parent nuclear household.
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Your coworkers will *not* be there for you in the last chapter of your life. Plan accordingly.
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Too “many elites today—professors, journalists, educators and other culture shapers… ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right’” when it comes to marriage and family. I explain why this “inverted hypocrisy” matters @TheAtlantic, adapted from new book, *Get Married*: .
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“Boys who don’t reside w/ their married fathers are, amazingly, more likely to go to prison than graduate from college, whereas boys from intact, married families are markedly more likely to graduate from college than spend time in jail.” @deseret
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No. Don't fall for the Red Pill take on marriage. @pearlythingz doesn't know the stats. Divorce is down dramatically since 1980. No longer true that half of marriages end in divorce.
I’ve also noticed there’s a plethora of 10-15 year married people pushing marriage but much less 20-30 year married people pushing married. Remember, most people are not special. They are the stats. Half the people pushing this stuff will be divorced. Look at the conservatives.
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Indeed, @elonmusk, happiest men in America are married dads👇🏽
@WallStreetSilv Too many men are tepid about having kids. All the hedonistic sex in the world is nothing compared to the fulfillment of having children.
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Boys from working-class families are floundering in school w/ one exception:. NYT: "Teenage boys from w-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in church & strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees".
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Truly astonishing: ER visits for self-harm among teen girls have *doubled* since 2009 #TeensandTech
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Actually, men & women who marry in their 20s are happiest. They are less set in their ways, more likely to embrace a "we-before-me" mindset & have accumulated less relationship baggage.
This is not true for the very simple fact that many of us are very different people at the age of 30 than we were at 20. College is a great time to find your first serious relationship but probably not your last.
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Our elites generally talk Left when it comes to gender. But new study finds “Men are sole breadwinners in over half of super rich heterosexual couples–defined as those in top 1% of households–while the women” are stay-at-home wives. @ConversationUS.
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If "conservative forms of fatherhood were obviously toxic relative to the Walzian glories of liberal dadhood, you would presumably expect to see those effects made manifest among children," @DouthatNYT. But the data pt in a different direction:
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1. "Guess which group of women ages 18-55 are the happiest? . *Conservative* women. It turns out they enjoy a 15 percentage-point advantage over liberal women in being 'completely satisfied' with their lives.". My latest for @Newsweek w/ @AlysseElHage.
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For young men, *gaming is up* more than 50% since 2019. Guess what’s down the most among young men?. ✓ Sports/Exercise. ✓ Working. Our male malaise cannot be understood apart from gaming. @FamStudies
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Incredibly bad news from Pew today: . “A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married.” . Poor, working-class, and black Americans hit hardest. @r_fry1 @pewresearch
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In fact, at most stages of adulthood:. ✔️Married moms are more than 2x as likely to be “very happy” as are single, childless women. Source: @WendyRWang .
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WaPo: "The declining birthrate is puzzling, given that being married w children correlates w self-reported happiness — among both men & women. Nearly 40% of women who are married w children say they are 'very happy.' It’s just 25% for those married w/o children & even lower for.
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1. “Young and middle-aged American men are less likely to be working now than at any time in U.S. history.” @jtrothwell @Gallup has a new take on why this is happening.
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Hey, @TheEconomist, what's with the negative framing re: motherhood? There's more to life than work. Guess which women are happiest?. Married mothers. ✔️ They're almost twice as likely to be "very happy" with their lives compared to childless, unmarried women.
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Pearl: "Modern marriage is a death sentence to men". Data: Deaths of Despair *much lower* for married men. Caveat emptor re: @pearlythingz re: marriage
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Or. we could just give families @ $3,000 per year per child aged 0-5 with this pot of money and let them *choose* how to best care for their kids.
Elizabeth Warren to reintroduce $700 billion universal child care proposal “to build out a new, larger child care network with the aim to cover all the nation’s children.” via @19thnews.
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1. NPR underlines the family factor: "Many, though not all, of perpetrators have experienced childhood traumas such as physical or emotional abuse & unstable families w/ violent, absent or alcoholic parents. most have experienced significant losses."
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If you’re middle-aged (as am I) or older, and esp. if you’re a guy (men are more vulnerable to COVID), and esp. if you have kids who love and depend upon you, please get vaccinated. No need to die prematurely for no good reason. @RichardvReeves.
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Amidst the culture’s increasingly anti-natalist turn, worth noting:. ✓ Parents less lonely than the childless. ✓ Parents report more meaningful lives than childless. ✓ Parents report more happiness than childless
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Women who are:. ✔️mothers.✔️married.✔️exercising.✔️religious.✔️college educated.✔️tattoo free and/or.✔️vegan. Reporting the best mental health. Overall, most robust correlates: exercise, religion, and marriage. Source: @lymanstoneky’s analysis of a new sample of women 18-44
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New study: "In every country (without exception), more girls than boys aspired to a people-oriented occupation, and more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation." @FamStudies
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Careful here. Plenty of evidence that Black & Hispanic kids are doing exceptionally well in one state, Florida, that has pioneered on school choice. This from Brookings:
A half century ago, so-called "segregation academies" started sprouted across the South, private schools founded as an escape from integrated public schools. Now, they're getting millions in taxpayer $$$ thanks to the expansion of private-school vouchers.
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The @nytimes spotlights soaring gun violence in Chicago today. What’s driving it? . Poverty. Bad schools. No grocery stores. And: *Not Enough Banks*. Yes, bank-lessness driving violence in Windy City. What’s left unmentioned? . The unmentionable word. The F-word. “Family”
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Happiness is collapsing in America, @arthurbrooks notes @TheAtlantic, because more & more Americans have become disconnected from 4 core institutions:. ✔️Family.✔️Faith.✔️Friendship.✔️Work .
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1. Housework gets a bad rap. It's bad, bad, bad. This is the explicit or implicit message in tons of media & academic coverage of family. Paid work gets a good rap. It's good, good, good. This is the message in these venues. But what if<bear w/ me>the work of the home is good. .
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Motherhood gets a bad rap in too much media, like NYT piece claiming "married heterosexual motherhood. is a game no one wins.". But surveys of actual women point to a different truth. Moms report . ✔️ Less loneliness.✔️ More meaning &.✔️ Greater happiness
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Remarkable partisan shift re: infidelity attitudes since 2014. Share of Americans who say sex w/ someone besides spouse is "always wrong". ✔️ Falls to just 52% of Democrats. ✔️ Even as 80+% of Republicans maintain classic fidelity view. @AEI @FamStudies
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“In the past decade, the share of ‘kinless’ (18-55) adults — those who are never married & have no children in the home — exceeded the share of Americans who are married w children for the 1st time in our nation’s history.” @Deseret
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Well, you should also tell them the truth. Men are 2x as happy when they are married, compared to being unmarried. Stably married men heading into retirement (in 50s) have 9 times assets as single men. Today, most marriages make it. Get the facts re marriage, @pearlythingz.
THERE'S A REASON WHY THE REDPILL TELLS MEN TO BE CAUTIOUS ABOUT MARRIAGE. And no, it's not because we want them to be alone and miserable. It's because we don't want them to be divorced, financially crippled, separated from their children, and alone and miserable.
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Did not know:. Rural America, too, has seen a surge in violent crime. “I’ve never seen these numbers before,” said one South Carolina sheriff about homicides. Homicide rates in 2020:. ✔️rose 25% in rural America.✔️rose 30% in urban America. via @WSJ.
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Big part of rising drug deaths story is the collapse of marriage in American working class. Overdoses have surged among single, never married, and divorced working-class Americans, as this JEC figure indicates:
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The power of marriage💍 in men's lives👇🏽. “It’s no coincidence I have enjoyed my best years with Kylie by my side. She has brought the best out of me through love, devotion, support, honesty, intelligence, and a swift kick in the ass—from time to time." ~ @JasonKelce.
The most Philly love story of all time 🥺. Jason Kelce tells us about the night he met his wife Kylie during his retirement press conference.
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WOW:. 1. “Staggering” “25.2% mortality increase over nine years” for young adults (25-34) in America — with deaths surging also in *2020*. Not primarily COVID but homicides and drug overdoses seem to be likely causes, writes @foxjust
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The @FDRLST on our new report: . “Lacking the day-to-day involvement, guidance & positive example of their father in home, boys are more likely to act up, lash out, flounder in school & fail at work as they move into adolescence & adulthood.” @FamStudies.
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A better child tax credit won't fix the problem. Nor paid parental leave or childcare. Not even more affordable housing. Our family problem is primarily cultural. @FT: "Birth rates are falling in Nordics. Are family-friendly policies no longer enough?"
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