What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day?
With Pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible
stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, Pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the Pray.com app today. 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 look up to can shape our lifestyle
choices. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Beckley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Lyman Stone, Senior Fellow and Director of the Pro-Natalism 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, are youing for more famous families? So can you describe what a famous family is, what counts, and why you think we need more
of them? 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-sized desires, their intention-staff kids, things like
that, and the answer is yes it does.
People who admire celebrities with more kids, want to have more kids, and if the celebrity they admire has more kids than they have, they're slightly more likely to actually intend having more kids. So we interpret that to just be a way of saying that public celebrity culture matters. So when you were looking up these famous families, could it be any person that they said
they admired you? 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 looked at it.
Yeah, and in fact, we got some really, we got some people you may know.
“I think we got three people who said Ben Shapiro was there, a number one most admired”
figure. We got like nine who said Ali Beth Stucky. And people said athletes, some people said the Pope, musicians, artists, we got a whole gamut. Now when you were creating the 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 age 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.
Because we really wanted to look at people kind of just starting out their families for that question. And so we had about 1200 respondents who were under 30. And so obviously we could really only study some of the bigger names. But yeah, it was an unselected population of people in the U.S. age 18 to 50.
And we did control for various demographics, background traits in all of this, particularly the number of children they already had, but 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 were just observing the correlation. We, you know, we can't see how people change their... All right, figures over time or something like that. 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. And they found, wherever the Telenovelas expanded, people have fewer kids because the Telenovelas focused on the lives of people of these like ambitious young women who were having smaller
than average families. You know what I 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 round of this project is there isn't association.
And the association is not small. The, for a young woman, for example, the effect of admiring a celebrity with one more kid on her desire to family size is actually bigger than the effect of her having one more sibling. And we all know that the family who 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. I mean, of course, the compounding factor is shared values. People who admire Ali Beth Stucky 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 Ali, I think Ali is”
expecting her fourth. I want to 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 want to have? They wanted about 2.1 or 2.2, possibly much fewer depending on kind of how you cut the sample.
And actually, I mentioned that you on a and this NBA young boy or NBA young blood, whatever. This is a rapper, I think, in 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 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 than Elon's fans shouldn't want to 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 young boy.
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.
“And very few people look at Elon's family life and say, that's what I want.”
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Bolton Branch.com/wire, codewire, exclusions apply. What do you think is driving the almost-estane we see for having children or at 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 millennial or 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, we have seen a rise in a very outspoken anti-family 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 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 boyfriend's girlfriends, kids, marriage, anything. 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 and what's happening in Korea, where you've”
got these very outspoken anti-family movements arising, and so I think that elite celebrity 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 three nose or the five nose movement, but certainly Korea is a place where you get really polarized gender relationships, and a lot of it driven by attitudes towards family and kids and sex.
And I think that a lot of that is absolutely related to an elite celebrity culture that sets a tone. You know, you talked about the people who might be Alibeth Stokey 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 in 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. And get these people, had some of the highest fertility preferences in our sample. Like, how many kids does Cardi B have? I don't know anything about her personal.
Well, off-hand, I don't remember, I want to say it's five or six. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. And Tom Brady, I think, is also four or five, something like that. 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 real life.
Very interesting. Do you think celebrity culture 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.
They've 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 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 much elite American families,
to be families in public, to not be silent about who they are, and furthermore to talk about their experiences as families. We don't need to allow negative Hollywood narratives about family to dominate the story. We can talk about the joy of our own family lives. And I would say, actually often find that people who really have great family lives are
often like really resistant to talking about it. You see this, you know, people who have lots of kids in a happy family life will like
never put pictures of their kids on social media, they're like, "Oh, I don't want to
put my kids on social media, like if I like their privacy or expose them to weirdos." Well, I get that fair concerns. At the same time, that's selectively creates a public environment where happy families are out of self-spirited, we need a society to recognize that in the sees public images of families where the mom and the dad love each other and love time with their kids.
That's persuasive.
“That's why I think UN's example is not persuasive, because it doesn't look like the family”
life most people dream of. Now, you mentioned that the desire for children 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 are looking for a spouse or
Their, for whatever reason, they do not have the large family that they desir...
have anything to do with them choosing not to have kids or idolizing a celebrity 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 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.
It doesn't mean we don't need structural changes. We've got to be building more family from the housing. We've got to eliminate marriage penalties in the tax welfare codes. We've got to be doing more direct financial support to encourage middle class families to have babies.
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.”
When you see, let's say your person who wants to kids, but all the celebrities in your life are waiting until they're 37 to get married. And they're going through seven 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 fall.
“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% earned. Yeah. Well, certainly an interesting topic and something that my friends and peers are talking
about a lot is why the birth rate is what it is and what people really would like to see instead, um, Lyman, thank you so much for coming on today. My pleasure. Great to hear, too. What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day with prey.com?
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