Changing Relations Between Parents and Adult Children with Frank Furstenberg

In this episode of Family Troubles, I sit down with Frank Furstenberg, one of the most influential sociologists of family life, to unpack how modern families are evolving and why parenting today feels harder than ever. We explore how rising inequality, shifting expectations, and longer paths to adulthood are reshaping the bond between parents and children in ways that are both deeply meaningful and, at times, incredibly challenging.

We also get into the “good news, bad news” of modern family life: while many relationships are closer and more emotionally connected than ever before, the pressure, expectations, and stakes have never been higher, sometimes leading to distance, conflict, or even estrangement.

Listen for more on:

• Why parenting today is more expensive, demanding, and longer-lasting
• How inequality is increasing stress and pressure on families
• Why adulthood is delayed and how that impacts parent-child relationships
• How closer, more involved parenting can sometimes lead to tension or distance
• Why estrangement feels more intense today, even if it’s not entirely new
• A hopeful truth: families may be more emotionally connected than ever

If this episode speaks to you, give it a listen and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review to help more families find support.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Okay, well, welcome everybody. I am more than delighted and honored to have my friend and colleague on the call today, Frank Fresenberg. He is regarded as one of the most distinguished and influential sociologists of family life of his generation. That's not an exaggeration. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has fundamentally shaped how scholars, clinicians, policymakers understand the modern family and family life. For decades, Frank's been at the forefront of research on how families adapt to social change, especially around divorce, inequality, and the transition to adulthood. His scholarship is both rigorous and deeply humane, illuminating not just how families function, but how they endure, adapt, and sometimes struggle across the generations. In particular, his work on intergenerational relationships, including the evolving role of grandparents, has helped redefine how we think about family bonds in an era where those bonds are increasingly complex, extended, and at times fragile. So, Frank, it's such an honor to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Well, it's a great pleasure to be here, Josh. I admire your work as well and could go on about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

That's very kind. Well, thank you. Well, so to jump on in, you know, you you wrote um in one of your articles that the financial and emotional burden on families has grown in ways that were almost unimaginable a half century ago. What's driving that shift and how do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Well, the shift to education and the cost of education and the role of education that really has altered family relations in all nations, in the developed world and in the developing world. Um the cost of education, our particular way of financing education has put the burden on families as as medical care. So between education and medical care, um there are it's it's hard to manage um uh for I would say the bottom three quarters of the population.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah. So that's made the um poorer people with less resources much less more closed out of the kind of opportunities that once existed for them.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yes, definitely that. Um and it's it's in in as inequality has grown, it's put an increasing share of the American population under risk of having limited resources and insufficient resources.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Yeah. I know economists have done research on the way that social inequality affects the family. And one of the findings that I thought was so interesting is that countries with h with high social inequality like the United States, China, uh, the UK to a certain extent, parents are much more pulled to be tiger moms or helicopter parents because they can't really count on the kind of resources that countries say in Scandinavia or most other Western democracies can provide, such as a decent paying union job or inexpensive child care, and high-quality childcare, or inexpensive college. And um, I know that the political scientist uh Jacob Hacker called that the great risk shift that happened in the 1980s, where there was this enormous shift onto the backs of the parents. It sounds like you're identifying a similar kind of a process.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Very uh very similar to what Hacker has stated. Um the the growth of inequality has really made existence precarious for uh uh a now growing share of Americans. Um and it's no surprise that affordability has become the key word in the current discourse, political discourse.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah. And how do we think of that, in your terms of your research and observations, how does that affect sort of the overall general mental health?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Well, I think, you know, if we look from the very bottom to the very top uh of the range of income in the family at the bottom has a limited set of supports that were put in place, uh medical support and food support. Um the next fifth up from the bottom fifth are in a particularly vulnerable situation because they often don't qualify for public programs. And the middle fifth is increasingly uh under-resourced. So we're now talking about a world in which the or a country in which the um really the three-fifths of the population are are struggling.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Yeah, right. Yeah, and it affects the mental health of people as well. You know, our our friend and colleague, the historian Stephanie Kuhn said that the removal or the straining of the social safety net has caused a strain of the psychological safety net. And I think one of the reasons that the United States has so much wealth with so much mental illness is in part due to these more structural factors.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

I agree, and I think we're we as a society do not handle um our do not handle the support for the family that other societies take for granted. Um in the during the 90s there was a lot of discussion about family values and supporting the family, particularly from the right. Um, and um family support uh was uh a public issue. Yeah. Child support, family supports have disappeared from public discourse. Right. Um, and um the idea that the conservatives are protecting the family has become, I'm afraid, almost laughable.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah, well, it is laughable. When you're not supporting a minimum sustainable sustainable minimum wage or reasonable cost of child care or college or any of the things that give families a feeling of security, um, it is it does become really laughable.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

I completely here's here's the other part of it that has produced a lot of strain for families. Um in the 1950s, we had a uh a kind of uh organization of the life course where people went from uh childhood into adulthood in a rather rapid, and it was not altogether positive, fashion. Um the timetable has become so extended, as you well know, that even people in their late 20s, early 30s are still um requiring um support from family or not fully autonomous. I mean, that's that was unthinkable in the world in which I was growing up when people when the median marriage age for women was 19 in 1957. Wow. Uh 19, I uh that is the that's you know, it boggles the mind. How young that is. And my, you know, my grandchildren regard it as uh laughable that uh, you know, I married at uh 22, uh and uh um, you know, uh the life li you were an adult um at age 18 in a way that has absolutely no meaning now.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

None, yeah. But it also seems that the high level of parental investment the parents have been called upon to do because they need to overinvest in their children to get.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

It's over a longer time, it's more, it's more and over extended over a longer time. The the job of parenthood um is is uh much more demanding, I think, than it was uh in the era that I grew up where parents just said, go play, you know, I'm bored, go out and play.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Exactly. Yeah. That was that was the mantra of all of our parents. Yeah. It's not my problem that you're bored, go do something with yourself. Exactly. Right. Yeah, and I do wonder a lot about a certain percentage of estrangements that happen in part because the there has been this much more enmeshed family environment. You know, I think when you and I were coming up, there was, you could be, there was a greater separation between parents and adult children in terms of how much time was spent in the house. There's been this, you know, massive reduction in outdoor play, smaller family sizes. And so families have become much more kind of locked inside together. And then you've got parents who are very anxious, very guilt-ridden, very concerned that they're not doing a good job. And I think for a certain percentage, I don't think it's the majority of people who become estranged, but I think for a certain percentage of them, they don't know any other way to feel separate from their anxious parents than to cut them off, at least for some period of time.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Well, it you know, the idea that children were kind of totally uh supervised by their parents was very foreign. Yeah, it was a it when it went in a half century or more ago. Um the the notion that it was uh parental responsibility as uh that um makes or breaks a child has become more and more extreme. The parents feel as though they have uh the responsibility that is uh far more burdensome than I think um parents like mine who had six kids and the kids uh uh spent a lot of time with each other. Um and the parents did not feel the same, our parents did not feel the same kind of obligation. At the age of 10 or 11, I got on the trolley car and went downtown and uh had by had a lunch and walked around downtown and came home. And my my parents would never think anything of it. That is inconceivable to them. Right, exactly. The whole um video of that shift of parental responsibility puts a lot of pressure, as you're indicating, on both parent and child. Um I yes, there was estrangement in in the past. Indeed, I would I would say estrangement was culturally um orchestrated in the uh in the uh mid-century uh twentieth century family where um young people were expected to distance themselves from their parents and um and often had relatively little contact. Um and whereas I think the rules of uh family life have changed so profoundly today, where you know, I watch my grandchildren uh go on vacations with their parents when they're adolescents. I that was less likely to occur um uh in you know a century or uh 75 years ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

I mean, I'm not sure I would call that estrangement, but I would say that that it was much more normative for adult children. Distancing. Yeah, distancing was more normal and expectable and considered healthy.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

I mean, the idea that you would a move was often accompanied, Josh, if I can interrupt. Sure. It was often accompanied by a certain amount of anger during adolescence, you know, propelling uh young people, their parents a little apart in an early uh schedule where people were marrying by in their late teens or early 20s, um, you know, there was a pulling away, I think, that was a little bit different. Uh the pulling away uh in the majority of families doesn't occur anymore. Um, and so when it does, it may be more extreme.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Well, yeah, I've been I've been sort of sitting with an article title that I haven't written yet, but it's something like, How can I have a rebellious adolescence when my parents are so nice? You know, I think that for many of us, when families were less enmeshed and they were more strict and less invested in our happiness and much less psychological, it was more, it was easier to have a rebellious adolescence because there was a lot more to rebel against. But if your parents are really trying to be your best friend, as so many parents are today, and really trying to figure out how to, you know, give you a happy and your interior and exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Yes. Well, parents thought less about your interior. Um, you know, I was raised in an upper middle class family and uh, you know, had a lot of advantages. But one of them was that my parents, you know, knew that if they asked too many questions, I wasn't going to give very many answers. And you during adolescence, I kept my head down and uh you know uh disappeared a certain amount, but it was it wasn't conf uh so much conflict that maybe that's or anger, but there was a kind of under this this took place so much earlier than it does today. Now, you know, um the the relations really don't get that uh time of distancing, and that's good for many families, and for some kids and families, I think it's it's hard a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Right. No, I agree. I think for some some people they're able to have a kind of a close transition between their adolescence well into adulthood. I like Amy Shalett said, Did you ever read her book? Um, yeah. I mean, I like her concept of adversarial individualism versus interpersonal individualism. She says that Dutch American, Dutch parents, not Dutch American, but Dutch parents are very different from American parents because they'll let their adolescent children after a certain age have wine with dinner, have uh boyfriends or girlfriends over and have sex while they're there. And their whole perspective, which is tied to the whole, you know, the Dutch system of sex education and like, um, is that you shepherd the child into adulthood in it with the parents' collaboration. Whereas in the West, well, not Western, but in the American model in particular, it's an adversarial relationship. That's why she titled her book, Not Under My Roof, No American Parent, very few American parents are gonna let their teenager have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, spend the money.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

I think it's changing a little bit. Uh-huh. Um, there is a, you know, it does happen now. Um, and um, you know, I remember teaching when I was first teaching, I used to ask my class to write about the first when I actually I taught the Amy Shalad uh stuff of one of her articles early on. Um, and I had asked the my students to write about the first time they had a the last time they had a conversation about sex with their parents, and half the students said I've never had one. Um and you know, uh so it uh it it we really do have a peculiarly American system that is somewhat differentiated from European families, where um I think uh the the process of becoming adult is still gradual, but it starts earlier, and uh parents you know are prepared to watch this unfold over the teenage and early 20s, the years of the early 20s.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Yeah. Well, you've also written that um and there's sort of a good news, bad news to all this, isn't it? It's kind of like the change in in uh our ideals around marriage. And at the same time, with marriage, we went from having an ideal um from just being kind of, you know, being a good place to raise children and a kind of a site for economic development to being a place of personal growth and satisfaction and identity. Similar transition happened, you know, in parent, adult-child relationships where um parents now, um, adult children, if they don't feel like the parent was really provided them with the same kind of um happiness or social capital to interadulthood, well equipped to manage all the you know vicissitudes of of adulthood and the insecurities of adulthood, then they've got a bigger claim against the parent and they can actually cut off the parent. Um the bad so the good news though is that it seems like the majority of people today, at least according to P research and I think your own research, say that they have closer, more intimate relationships with their parents than they believe their parents had with them. So that's the good news. The bad news is that they're, you know, estrangement seems to be a real thing and and on the rise. How do you think about all that?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Well, I, you know, I I think we count it differently. Um I'm I'm not so sure that it's uh on the rise, um, partly because I think it's always been a part of you know American families. Estrangement early on meant going out west, um, and or without estrangement, but it often an estranged child um was free to roam and uh at an early age, and there were, I think, a fair number of runaways. Um and there it even when I was growing up, uh the literature talked about runaways. Um and those were kids who were highly estranged from their parents and maybe disappeared. You know, the charting of estrangement um is is very difficult. Um uh parent there was a uh in the 19th century, it was not uncommon for parents who had too many children to deposit them somewhere. And those children in the 19th century there was a tradition of sending them out west and um letting them work for letting them work for f uh families, but they were domestic slaves in a uh in a certain way, some kids. So um estrangement kind of uh has has changed over time for the reasons that we're we're discussing. Whether it's increased, it may be, but if if people have one or two children and one of them is is uh not working out, that's different from if they had eight children and one of them was not working out. Right. Well it's gonna certainly be psychologically different.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Right, it's gonna be miserable. Yeah, by the parent. I mean, the reason that I would say that it's on the right, and it is it's difficult to know for sure because we didn't really even begin to uh to chart you know until maybe you know 15, 20 years ago. But the reason I think that it's on the rise is is several fold. One is that, you know, we know from my research and other researchers that divorce is an enormous cause of estrangement, non-marital child, particularly for fathers, non-marital childbirth is a big cause of estrangement. We have rising rates of individualism in the United States, the role of social media, the increase in therapeutic narratives is the way that we define ourselves, the role of therapists as being kind of the moral arbiters of life is, you know, now that now that uh clergy no longer occupies that role. Political differences, you know, I did a survey with the Harris poll that we published in Time, where we found that political differences were a significant cause of estrangement. So to me, uh I I mean it sounds like what you're saying is that the sort of what we're now calling estrangement may have just been I mean, it's sort of a, I guess it's sort of a different entity, isn't it, if psychologically the relationship has changed because parents really want and crave and need a close relationship.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

That's what changed. Right. Yeah. The power of children over time has changed relative to the power of parents. And therefore, children can can set the agenda of estrangement in a certain way, and they um and they're aware of it by, you know, I I just said a a while ago that they withdrew in the 1950s, but now the the withdrawal uh has a different meaning. Right. Um, and the parents are anxious that they're going to be left out. Um and the I I think you've noted this in in some of your work, that the children just have more power. A young adult today has more power than they had in the past. Right. Their parents.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah. And within that, I think that um in the same way that parents have feel, I believe irrationally, that they have this enormous power to sort of shape their child into the kind of ideal person that they hope they would be, or at least a happy person. I think that now, because of the role of therapy and therapeutic narratives and social media, adult children are much more armed with a language and kind of a social legitimacy to come after parents and say, well, you it's because you verbally um when I was 12.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Exactly. Um, yes. Um I I agree with that. There is the rhetoric, there is the the parental guilt and responsibility. The parental responsibility has grown in a way that um that was really unimaginable, I think, um, where they feel you know the the threat of kidnapping, of things that parents worry about, that they they just didn't worry about um a hundred years ago. It just wasn't um a concern, the idea that your kid was going to be kidnapped, right? And that you had to know where this child was because you were responsible. That scenario didn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

No, right.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Yeah, and it's made parents. Kidnapping occurred occasionally, but it just wasn't the social phenomenon. Um uh so I think that's a um, you know, partly it's the timetable of growing up, partly it's the resources that parents need and children are aware of and sometimes resent if their parents don't have. Um, but it's uh, you know, the fact is that are relations generally worse or better or closer uh among families if we compared over the last hundred years? Um it's a very hard question to answer, and I might uh be perverse enough to say that things are much better today psychologically, that relations between parents and kids generally are stronger. Parents certainly, by all indications, seem to invest more of what little time and money they have. So I don't think parental sacrifice, for example, or parental commitment or concern has changed uh in a downward or negative direction. I think if anything, it's been more positive. And it's more the, you know, that parents often have these impossible standards or live in a community where they're impossible standards, and that generates a lot of the your clientele, I think. Um because the uh you know there is uh a much more intense awareness of the development and growing up and uh the parents' role in in managing that than there was uh, I think three quarters of a century ago.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, no, that that makes sense. And I don't disagree with the idea that in the main, um, parents and adult children um probably are closer, those who who can kind of successfully navigate this terrain. And I do think that these higher rates of parental investment where parents have become much more psychological, much more invested, you know, where today a career mother spends more time with her children than our mothers did, who if they were stay-at-home mothers back in the you know, 50s and 60s and 70s, that that the opportunities for really close, intimate relationship, and the research bears this out as well. But it's kind of a it is a good news, bad news things that because I agree. Yeah, because nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with a parent beyond that adult child's desire.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

You know, and since children, grandchildren come along a lot later, yeah, um, there is this quite long period where uh where parents um do not get hooked back in. I my my sense is that in the system that I grew up in, the point where where you had children was the point of re-entry for your parents. It still is, of course. Sure. Um in a big way, but parents helped, they they quailed, they made a fuss. Um but um it they were they were uh very important as as childbearing occurred. Um so that if there had been an adolescent estrangement and distance, it often was um uh bridged by the advent of grandchildren. That may be true today, I don't know. Uh that's an interesting issue of how children figure in the uh the grandchildren figure in the process of estrangement, because you know, this is one something that the child can certainly hold as uh, you know, as uh collateral to um negotiate a relationship with the parent.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Um what in fact many do. I would say the vast majority of adult children who cut off contact with the grant with the parents deny access to the grandchildren, um, even if the grandparents have been very loving and involved. Uh, and the idea that's typically stated is well, if it's not good for me, it's not good for my children, which I think is an incredible conflation. But how do you how do you think about all of that?

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Well, I think that um clearly, you know, the children are resources just as they are in in a divorce. It's uh the you know, um, so uh I I believe that um that uh children are generally likely to uh reach toward their the older generation when after uh the childbearing, but but when that doesn't occur, it's a source of incredible pain. And I mean this is I I'm talking to the the expert on dealing with that incredible pain. And you know, the the idea that um that the children should be uh restricted from their parents as punishment um on the part of the child um may be present, but it's a it's a powerful resource, it's a powerful battering ram against the parents. And I guess you deal with this all the time.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah. Well, the thing I object to is that so many adult children are doing this will say, well, the trauma, you traumatized me when I was a child, and um, you know, the trauma stops with me. And I always want to say, well, actually, no, it's not stopping with you because you're traumatizing your parents. And if your parents were loving decent grandparents, as a lot of these parents were, um, you're also traumatizing your children. And so to me, it just, you know, it begs the question, nothing begs the question, but it's just such a testimony to how much this kind of psychological warfare Yeah, warfare exactly, is is at play in these family dynamics and how they can be kind of manipulated and misunderstood. And and I'm not talking here about grandparents who are clearly abusive or even clearly abusive to the adult child, so that when they say, you know, it's not good, it's not good for my child, what's that?

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Absolutely. Um, I you know, I I think it's usually the case that when children come along, it softens, I believe, it softens the relationship when it's been somewhat estranged. I mean, there are degrees of estrangement, as you undoubtedly know. Um and, you know, you probably deal with the most extreme.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Um I don't think I do. No, I think I deal with it, I don't think I deal with the most extreme. I think I deal with with really the norm of estrangement. Meaning, well, I don't know where you were going with that, but I certainly don't think that I'm not dealing with parents who were abjectly abusive or neglectful or traumatizing. So, but go ahead, finish your point.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

So uh, you know, my thought was that typically when children come along, the relationship between adults and their parents become more collaborative. Sure. That's that that would be the typical case. And the cases you didn't deal with probably um that collaboration is very, very uh difficult to manage. But it you know, the the the parents and the children have a common interest in the grandchildren. I've always thought that I've always thought that um that the advent of children can can be a point of reconciliation. I don't know whether that works. Uh that's sort of my idea as a sociologist, not a I'm not a clinician. Is that the case? I mean, how do you deal with sometimes estrangement where they're before grand uh children come along, you must.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Um Yeah, I I've seen it go both ways. I've seen it happen where the a strange adult child said, Well, we're gonna have a baby, and I want my child to have grandparents, you know, or my spouse wants them to have grandparents, and so I want to reconcile. But I've also seen it happen where somebody's raising young children and they say, Well, now that I'm raising children, I can't believe how you treated me, and I don't want that around my my children. So it can it can kind of express itself both ways, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Well, there, you know, I I think that one of the things that parents can do when they're having, I mean, again, this may be uh a simple idea, but when they're um the investment in grandchildren is a common activity that the parents and and the grandparents can have. So investing in the grandchild seems to me to be one of the routes that could uh help in in reducing estrangement. Sure. But uh, you know I I I've noted that in like in step families, uh, after divorce, um the uh or and remarriage, the the willingness of grandparents to invest in in the in the stepgrandchildren, for example, has been often a uh a very helpful step in getting um uh a uh a young adult who or a uh someone in their 20s, 30s to come closer to their parents.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

Yeah, no, I could I could certainly see how that would be the case and have seen that, that the kind of generous spirit of the grandparents towards the new spouse's uh children, um, yeah, that that can be seen as uh an act of generosity that that generates a lot of affection and forgiveness and and the like. And um, yeah, and for some adult children, seeing their parents being loving, decent, involved grandparents, again, that there can be a good news, bad news of that as well. For some, there can be jealousy, kind of like, well, how come you could do that with them and you couldn't do it with me? On the other hand, it can feel kind of reparative, kind of you know, being loving, decent, affectionate grandparents, that can help them to be more forgiving over ways that that grandparent wasn't as a parent.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

So exactly. The question I kind of think about a little bit when it comes to estrangement, Josh, is if you if you started, um, let's say uh just for the sake of discussion, that uh 10 or 15 percent of children become estranged uh in the course of growing up. I I'm making that up. Um what happens over time to that 10 or 15 percent? Yeah. You know, if we look at them in their early, in their late teens, early twenties, and if we looked at if we looked at the same group 10 years later, would there be coming together of what have been estranged people, you know, sometimes with intervention of the people like yourself, but sometimes with the vicissitudes of life. And my guess is, my guess is that relatively few people re are estranged when their parents die. But could could I there are surely some I who don't go to their parents' funeral um that are that estranged. Right. But um, if we looked at over time, uh a cohort of estranged families, what would happen?

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Yeah, well, one large study, this is by Rin Rezick at Ohio State, found that 80% of mothers eventually reconcile and 69% of fathers eventually reconcile. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

Yeah. So do you know I should know that figure. I should be saying that to you, but um but yeah, that's that's what I would expect. The fathers, of course, divorce has has, as you uh observed at the beginning of our discussion, been a powerful uh source of estrangement between, particularly between fathers and their children. It was a topic that I gave a lot of attention to earlier in my career. Yeah um, some I think it's now been 40 years ago. Um, but um the estrangement of fathers, um it doesn't surprise me that it's way higher because there are a certain number of fathers who never see their children or have fleeting contact with them when they're growing up, and then expect to have a relationship with them later on. That happens, I I'm I know, but it it's it's a hard uh it's a hard expectation to fulfill. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

Well, the same study by Rezix found that fathers, something like 26% of fathers are estranged from a child, which might be high, but but might probably not crazy high, and that they're 22% more likely to be estranged from a daughter. Um so um, yeah, I mean, fathers are at great risk. They're especially at risk when they remarry, uh, when the children are adults, um, which is it's kind of a tragedy. So, in the same way that we have we're kind of experiencing closer adult relationships on the one hand, so many more children are growing up without paternal involvement, right?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Well, I think we've probably hit uh a level, uh a very high level. I'm not sure it continues to increase. I I haven't seen the very latest figures, but um certainly marriage has become less common. So what we have is frequently um uh unmarried parents uh separating, unrecorded, but uh where often uh children lose contact with their father altogether, or the mother is a gatekeeper and prevents uh the father from participating, how things go on. Yeah. I think the more common thing is fathers withdrawing, but mothers do, in my in the research that I did over the years, mothers do often become gatekeepers with reason or without reason.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

You know, uh both. No, right. Seen that, seen that as well. Yeah, and I think about men, this sort of tragic moment now where dads are kind of required to be much more psychological and vulnerable and empathic if they want to have a continued relationship with their children, particularly post-divorce, because dads are much more at risk post-divorce and separation. And a lot of dads just don't have that. They've put you know their eggs into the basket of achieving status and you know money and that kind of thing. And that was how they invested in the family. And then when they're separated or divorced and they have to navigate hearing their children's disappointment in them or their feelings of hurt or trauma. So many dads just don't have the language for that. And um, you know, and then they're it's hard to buy love.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

It really is. And you know, I I do think on the uh in general, fathers the uh the language of emotion, of um of empathy, of uh of listening, um uh that has gotten better, but it's a slow process. I mean um men have to be willing to engage in it, and you know, women tend to be raised with the skills a little more. Right. So again, I think there is a a real shift over the past uh century in in males' ability to um to engage emotionally. I I I'm I don't think it's a lost cause at all. Um I I I really think that um there has there have been genuine shifts in gender, uh uh the behavior of uh males and females. And for the good, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Right. No, I can I completely agree. I think it's that's really true. Yeah, well, this has been such a pleasure, Frank, to talk to you. We know we don't always get to talk at this kind of level about the kind of broad, broad range of topics. Yeah, it's been really, really fun. And um, I'm just kind of curious, it's kind of a closing thought. Um, do you you know you've been been a researcher for for you know decades. Is there anything in particular that surprises you kind of from this this vantage point of where you sit right now viewing your history of research and studies and working with families? Um anything uh anything of the kind of code?

SPEAKER_01 46:46

I I I think what surprised me as a um as a uh participating researcher, sociologist, and family demographer was the rapidity of the change. That the collapse of early adolescence of the early uh regime for growing up was so rapid that as a I kept writing in my articles in the last 20 years there's been more change in the family than in the preceding 200. And you know, it was a little rhetorical, but but there's some truth, there's a lot of truth to it. The um it was uh inconceivable, uh, you know, uh as uh you know people look back, it seems uh uh unbelievable that we had this uh early post-war pattern of rapid adulthood, and then it collapsed in the in the late 60s, and has now become uh a pattern of the slowest growing up that we've ever seen, the longest, I would say, uh, period of maturation that we've seen ever in American history or in in history, really. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Right.

SPEAKER_01 48:34

Um and does anything give you cause for help or uh you know the the world is I I generally I when when people disparage uh families and the strength of families, I'm I'm on the other side. I think families are as important, as resilient, as um as committed as they've ever been. And I think the task, as we talked about at the beginning of our discussion, has become harder and harder. It's just harder to be a parent um now than it was before. It's more demanding, it's longer, it's more expensive, it's more psychologically more psychological resources are required. So um it's not surprise, it's no surprise to me that fertility is as low as it is in the US and getting lower all the time. And um I think uh uh vice president uh Vance would like to declare that families should have more children and we should uh we should encourage fertility. Well, yeah, parents are looking and saying, this is a tough job. I don't know whether I want to undertake it. I don't have the money, I can't have more than two. Right. It's just too expensive, too demanding. Absolutely. So until our society really builds support for families, stops talking about it, but really builds support for families, I don't think fertility is going to change and it's not gonna go up, and it's gonna be a, you know, it's a powerful job to get fertility to rise. It's not easy. We don't easily do it. It is um um it it can reverse, but it reverses when people feel as though they have the resources to do it.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

Right. Yeah, no, I think that that's really, really well said and probably a good place for us to to end the uh our conversation today, Frank. Well, it's been a pleasure. Such a pleasure. Yeah, thank you, Josh. And if you found this helpful, please follow the podcast and leave a review. It helps other people find the show who could benefit from it. If you want to learn more about my work, you can visit me at www.drjoshua Coleman.com. That is D R J O S H U A C O L E M E N dot com or subscribe to my substack, Family Troubles. Hope to see you in one of those places soon. Take care.