Transcript of Celebrity Families Might Solve Everything

Wo gibt es eigentlich die weißen Rosen aus Athen?

Und wo regnet es für mich noch mal rote Rosen? Natürlich im Europa-Rosarium Sangerhausen mit der größten Rosensammlung der Welt. Viele tausend Rosenarten warten auf Sie mit prachtvollen Blüten und herrlichem Duft. www.rosarium.de. The phenomenon of celebrity influence is nothing new, of course, but in the modern era, many of us underestimate just how much the celebrities we people we look up to can shape our lifestyle choices.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. Lyman, thanks for coming on.

It's great to talk to you.

So you recently wrote an op-ed available on the Daily Wire platform arguing for more famous families. So can you describe, um, what a famous family is, what counts, and why you think we need more of them.

It turns out that we live in a culture where celebrities matter, where people actually do care about influencers, public figures. And what we did is we surveyed almost 5,000 Americans. We asked them who do they most admire. We figured out how many kids the person that they named had, and then we checked to see, does that predict their own family size desires, their intentions to have kids, things like that. And the answer is yes, it does. Uh, people who admire celebrities with more kids want to have more kids, and if the celebrity they admire has more kids than they have, um, they're slightly more likely to actually intend having more kids. So we interpret that to just be a way of saying that, uh, public celebrity culture matters.

So when you were looking up these famous families, could it be any person that they said they admired? You would just— for example, there's a lot of like Instagram influencers that aren't necessarily famous people, but they have a wide following. Just when you were talking about that, I thought about like the Mormon mommy bloggers that were huge 10 years ago, and they tend to have very large families. Okay, so it could be anyone and you just look at—

Yeah, and in fact, we got some really— we got some people you may know. I think we got 3 people who said Ben Shapiro was their number 1 most admired figure. We got like 9 who said Allie Beth Stuckey. Some people said athletes, some people said the Pope, um, musicians, artists. We got a whole game.

Now, when you were creating this survey, what were the demographics that you were going after? Just American adults writ large, or did you look at like Gen Z, Millennials, maybe Gen X?

We're looking at Americans, Americans ages 18 to 50. But when we specifically studied the question of how do these celebrity family sizes shape your own desires, we looked at people under the age of 30, um, because we really wanted to look at people kind of just starting out their families for that question. And so we had about 1,200 respondents who were under 30, um, and so obviously we could really only study some, some of the, the bigger names. But yeah, it was, it was an unselected population of, of people in the U.S., um, ages 18 to 50, uh, and we did control for various demographic background traits in all of this, um, particularly the number of children they already had, uh, but it was a, it was a pretty broad slice of the population.

And were you able to determine that it was causal, that the celebrity that they admire caused them to want to have more kids, or you just observed that there was that correlation there?

Yeah, mostly we're just observing the correlation. We, you know, we, we can't see, um, how people change their admired figures over time or something like that, um, So this is mostly a correlation. At the same time, the existing academic literature makes it very clear that public culture really does cause changes. So the famous example is in Brazil, when they were rolling out the TV network, the TV network would like only run telenovelas from one network. They found wherever the telenovelas expanded, people have fewer kids because the telenovelas focused on the lives of people, uh, of these like ambitious young women, um, who were having smaller average family sizes. You might say, well, how do you know that's really causal? Well, you can, you can do the math and try and prove it, but then they're like, what if we just look at the names of children? And they found that the names of characters in the show, like, immediately spiked in popularity for the names of children born after the TV network arrived. So I don't think it's crazy to think that these effects could be causal, but we didn't— we were not able to specifically show causality.

All we're able to show in our first— in this first round of this, this project is There is an association, and the association is not small. The, the— for, for a young woman, for example, the effect of admiring a celebrity with one more kid on her desired family size is actually bigger than the effect of her having one more sibling. And we all know that the family you grow up in shapes your view of your own family, but it turns out the family of the celebrity you admire is even more predictive.

Interesting. Um, I, I mean, of course the, the confounding factor is shared values. People who admire Allie Beth Stuckey most likely are also religious, and they have some shared values that would make them also want to have more kids in the way that Allie— I think Allie is expecting her fourth. I wanna ask you about Elon Musk. He has— I don't even know how many kids he has at this point. People who admired Elon Musk, how many kids did they wanna have?

They wanted about 2.1 or 2.2, possibly much fewer depending on kind of how you cut the sample. Um, and actually I mentioned Elon and this, uh, NBA YoungBoy or NBA Youngblood, whatever it is, who's a rapper, I think. Um, and both of them have a ton of kids. They both have like 12 kids or something like that. And yet their fans don't want very many kids. They want below average. The US average is 2.4. That's the number that people say they want. So they both want below average numbers of kids. So what's going on there is interesting because if you think, well, you know, a celebrity having one more kid will make people want more kids, then Elon's fans should want a ton of kids. But the distinction with Elon is that he has a lot of kids, but by a lot of women. Same with this NBA YoungBoy. So our view of what's going on here is people don't just look at offspring, they look at families. They look at a family they want to emulate.

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What do you think is driving the almost disdain we see for having children, or at the very least disinterest in having children, particularly among Gen Z and even some millennials?

In terms of the number of children that people want, there has not been a big decline across generations. Most— the reality is the average number of kids that a millennial or a Gen Z American wants is very similar to Gen X or even baby boomers. It's maybe a tiny bit lower, but it's not that much lower. The decline in fertility has been much bigger than the decline in fertility desires. But I think nonetheless, um, we have seen a rise in a very outspoken anti-family, uh, minority. And I think that some of that is related to celebrity culture. The example I like to give is in Korea, which is a much more extreme case than than we have in the US. Some of the biggest celebrities are pop stars, right? K-pop stars. And most K-pop companies actually contractually restrict their musicians from having boyfriends, girlfriends, kids, marriage, anything. They're, they're not permitted to. And as a result, they've created a celebrity elite that is selected for loneliness. I think this has to be part of the story on what's happening in Korea, where you've got these very outspoken anti-family movements arising. And so I think that elite celebrity family culture gives people a permission structure.

So Korea, there's a very outspoken anti-family culture in Korea specifically?

Absolutely, yes. I mean, more so than here? Oh, absolutely. I think it's called the, uh, the Three Nos or the Five Nos movement. But certainly Korea is a place where you get really polarized, um, gender relationships, um, and, uh, and a lot of it driven by attitudes towards family and and kids and sex. Uh, and I think that a lot of that is absolutely related to, um, an elite celebrity culture that sets a tone. You know, you talked about, you know, the people who might be Allie Beth Stuckey fans might be very different than the average person, but I thought it was interesting that two of our highest fertility preference celebrity groups were Cardi B and Tom Brady. I don't think Cardi B fans are probably like the most overwhelmingly, like, right-wing traditionalist conservative family people. I think they're probably just Middle America. Likewise, Tom Brady fans, maybe they're a little more religious than average, but like, yeah, he's broadly appealing. Yeah, right. And yet these people had some of the highest fertility preferences in our sample.

Really? How many kids does Cardi B have? I don't know anything about her personal life.

Offhand, I don't remember. I want to say it's 5 or 6. Oh wow, okay. Uh, and Tom Brady I think is also 4 or 5, something like that. Um, that is that these are people who— I don't think people choose to be a Cardi B fan for her family. I don't think even people choose to be a Tom Brady fan for his kids. But once you select into a fan for music or football or whatever, I do think that you're— the celebrities we admire they set a tone for how we engage in public and how we think about our own life.

Very interesting. Do you think celebrity culture is— has more of an impact now than celebrities 20 or 30 years ago? You talked about how our fertility preferences have been pretty stable over the generations. Of course, social media is new for our generations. Do you think that our parasocial relationships with celebrities are a unique factor with this current generation? I think they could be.

I think that social media, the digital revolution, all this stuff has just created a different kind of relationship with celebrities. There have always been celebrities. I mean, go back 200 years and there were celebrities, but you couldn't have the same— like you said, the same parasocial relationship, the relationship where you feel like they're speaking to you, where they engage with fans, where, um, where their content is ubiquitously present. So I do think that it's plausible that celebrity culture matters now more than in the past. And so it is uniquely important that we be thinking about ways to nudge elite American families to be families in public, to not be silent about who they are, and furthermore, to, to talk about their experiences as families. You know, we don't need to allow allow negative Hollywood narratives about family to dominate the story. We can talk about the joy of our own family lives. And I will say, I actually often find that people who really have great family lives are often like really resistant to talking about it. Um, you see this, you know, people who have lots of kids and a happy family life will like never put pictures of their kids on social media.

Um, they're like, oh, I don't want to put my kids on social media and like violate their privacy or expose them to weirdos. Um, and I get that, uh, it's fair concerns. At the same time, that selectively creates a public environment where happy families are out of sight, off-screen. Yeah. Um, we need a society that recognizes that and that sees public images of families where the mom and the dad love each other and, uh, and love time with their kids. Um, that's persuasive. And that's, that's why I think Elon's example is not persuasive, because there's— it doesn't, it doesn't look like the family life most people dream of.

Now, you mentioned that the desire for children, it has been roughly stable across generations, but the fertility rate has been dropping. Just from my own life, I know many people who either they, they are looking for a spouse or they're for whatever reason, they do not have the large family that they desire, and it doesn't have anything to do with them choosing not to have kids or idolizing a celebrity who, who's not having children. Most people, I would say, would love to have a big family, but for whatever reason, aspects of modern life have made that more challenging. Do you think that this is a, a matter of desire, or I mean, do you think seeing more pictures really will make a difference, or do you think there needs to be structural things too?

Well, I think, yeah, first of all, I would say yes, I think it will make a difference. That doesn't mean we don't need structural changes. We've got to be building more family-friendly housing. We've got to eliminate marriage penalties in the tax and welfare codes. We've got to, um, be doing more direct financial support to encourage middle-class families to have babies. Um, that's absolutely stuff we need to be doing, but that doesn't mean that other factors don't matter. They matter a very great deal, and I think it's worth thinking about how they can matter. Um, when you see— let's say you're a person who wants 2 kids, but all the celebrities in your life, or that you admire, are waiting until they're 37 to get married, and they're going through 7 partners along the way and waiting for someone who checks 100 different boxes. It's not that that person discourages you from having kids per se, but they create a rubric for life that may be impossible for you to follow. I think the celebrity cultures that we have, they don't always discourage people from wanting kids or having kids. They set up models of life that may be difficult to emulate if you're not a top 0.2% earner.

Yeah, well, certainly an interesting topic. Something that my friends and peers are talking about a lot is, uh, why the birth rate is what it is and what people really would like to see instead. Lyman, thank you so much for coming on today.

My pleasure. Great talking to you.

Wo gibt's eigentlich die weißen Rosen aus Athen?

Und wo regnet's für mich noch mal rote Rosen? Natürlich im Europa-Rosarium Sangerhausen mit der größten Rosengärtnerei Rosensammlung der Welt. Viele tausend Rosenarten warten auf Sie mit prachtvollen Blüten und herrlichem Duft. www.rosarium.de