Thanks so much for taking this on. And for some healthy myth-busting. Bravo Meghan and Sarah.
A few thoughts (okay, a lot of thoughts) from an adoptee:
Many people miss the connection between the Baby Scoop and the Baby Boom. I think of them as flip sides of the same thing. Both started in 1945 when the men who survived WWII returned home. As a society we were eager to turn away from the devastation of war, especially in our personal and even sexual lives. Young men sought good jobs via the GI bill and enormous defense contracts that flowed into the states. A two-car garage and backyard barbecue in a new suburb suddenly became attainable for many. Families of 5 kids or more were common. The recently married became part of the Baby Boom. Those who had sex outside of marriage and got unlucky became the unwed mothers and unknown fathers of The Scoop.
Prior to WWII, as you both noted, adoptions mostly occurred within families when children were orphaned or a young unmarried woman in a family became pregnant. Georgia Tann, horrific as she was, helped create the adoption industry as we know it today. She normalized the idea of adoption outside of the familial setting by selling stolen children to high-profile prospective parents like Governor Lehman of New York and Joan Crawford. Her second big contribution was the sealed birth certificate. She convinced legislators in Tennessee that the adoptee's original birth certificate should be sealed to protect the child from the shame of illegitimacy, the adoptive parents from the shame of infertility, and the unwed mother from the shame of sex outside of marriage. Georgia Tann is the reason 39 states still seal original birth certificates, and closed adoptions still exist.
Yes, people need their blood relations, knowing who you are matters, and you have to destroy a family to make a new one through adoption.
Today, as during the Baby Scoop era, many people want the experience of raising children. Sarah said that she wanted a family, but if it hadn't happened, she would have been okay. I felt the same. Yet in the US we now believe everyone should be able to have everything they want, and that wanting a child is the same thing as having a right to a child. This is where adoption falls off the rails ethically.
Saviorism is the justification—the adoptive parents may believe they are entitled because they can provide a better home. This is a hold-over from The Scoop. My mother told me my original mother couldn't afford to keep me. Money does play a part in the argument for adoption. And by the way, life happens to everyone. Even the best adoptive parents suffer financial difficulties, addiction, and marital woes.
Thank you for recognizing the experience of the birth mothers, and for sharing your personal experiences of pregnancy and post-partum, Sarah. Not only do mothers bond with their children while in utero and after, not only does the mother's brain change during pregnancy and after birth for reasons of survival, but research has shown that the baby bonds with the mother while in utero too. And the baby's brain development is slowed when they are separated at birth. There are lifelong repercussions emotionally for mother and child, especially around attachment and fear of abandonment. Research has shown that babies recognize their mother's voice, smell and heartbeat. This is part of why even an addicted mother and her addicted baby do better (the mother is more likely to get off and stay off drugs, the baby more likely to gain weight and thrive) when kept together than when separated. The one thing that rarely get mentioned in ethical conversations around adoption is that it requires the severance of the mother-child bond. We as a culture seem to have forgotten that it exists and that it matters. It poses ethical questions to surrogacy as well.
Meghan's story about women in the 80s and 90s who opted for single motherhood via adoption—yes it was glamorized, and it was also considered to be feminist, at least where I worked in New York City.
So yeah, the sexual revolution, while mostly a good thing, had lots of unintended consequences. We are losing the "social glue" of partnerships, building a life together in which family may be a goal.
Meghan and Sarah—you have such fascinating conversations connect so many dots for me. Thank you!
The “brain not fully developing until age 25” stat comes with a very large caveat that’s consistently left out of public discourse. The last brain region to develop is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). It’s the one that controls executive functioning, careful decision making, impulse control, etc. Its formation is what makes us adult. Yes, it stops forming around age 25; however, this is not a static condition. The PFC forms via experience, meaning it can fully form before age 25 (making us capable of adult decisions). Jean Twenge wrote about this via a generational lens in her book iGen. As teens, Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers had more practice and experience with accumulating adult skills, such as having part-time jobs, driving cars, dating, having more sex, etc. without access to cell phones to text adults for help anytime something went wrong. We were routinely placed in situations where we had to exercise independent decision making. MRI scans from the ‘90s & ‘00s showed brains were fully formed around age 21. The age 25 demarcation is only a recent phenomenon. There’s a psychologist at Vassar College named Abigail Baird who studies adolescence and has a tremendous series on Amazon’s Great Courses discussing this. She’s found the age 25 thing has more to do with societal expectations and technological innovation. So, if we want teens to act like adults by age 18, we have to allow them the space to practice and learn adult skills during their teens, which inevitably means they’ll mess up a lot, because we all did and were (mostly) better for it. Allowing young adults to make mistakes and learn from them is the point.
I’m an educator and I admit my field has perpetuated this half-truth for years now. It’s further infantilized late teens/early adults by letting them off-the-hook because their brains aren’t fully developed. That’s flat out bullshit. They’re capable. The adults in their lives are just too preoccupied with shielding them from harm (which is another very complex topic in and of itself). I teach teenagers and I’m a mom; I won’t pretend this is a simple fix. But as hard as it is, I/we have to start letting go a little more.
Thanks for your input. I know Jordan Petersen is polarizing but he makes an important observation. As Western families get smaller, parents have more money and time to devote to helicoptering. (Especially the affluent)
Hence the independence of adulthood gets delayed further and further into the 20s.
(Recognizing that the increasing financial cost of adulthood is a factor).
Absolutely! I really appreciate your comment because this is such a multi-faceted issue. I’ve read some really interesting studies from economists on this, too, who claim the fewer kids we have in highly developed countries, the more we view our kids as investments. This is largely a protective instinct, I think, because we want to give our kids the best possible shot at future success (i.e. financial stability), and we encourage them to make safe, wise decisions to not put their futures at risk. That’s certainly not a bad thing, but it comes with trade offs I’m not sure we know how to deal with. I wonder sometimes if the rising mental illness rates in young people is partially due to a mismatch between societal expectations of adulthood and their delayed psychological development. It’s probably the social media, but I do wonder sometimes. 🤷🏼♀️
I am interested in the discussion about brain development, young marriage and early medical decisions as well.
I am biased to a naturalist viewpoint, but I do think the big difference between two life changing decisions like marriage and surgery come down to development. Marriage and having children is part of the natural process of human development, while major surgeries to significantly alter your body in ways that go against your biological are doing the opposite... essentially stifling development. It's one thing to allow people to take a path in line with their normal biological growth, and quite another to cut into them to go against it.
Also, I think in terms of pair bonding, it's easier to pair up and create families from a young age. *Because* you aren't completely mature, a couple can begin to grow together, forming personalities and habits that are complementary. At 20, you aren't "stuck in your ways" the way you are as you get older.
I do think that young marriage can be amazing (I was married young), but it's important that it not be impulsive. I think a long courtship period and input from older mentors like parents or other family members are important in creating a successful match between two young people. Also, we should be talking to young people about looking for a marriage partner the way we talk about careers. You need a goal, and a plan with an idea about what qualities are important in a mate. All this sounds terribly old fashioned, and I certainly didn't follow all of it.
I married at a young age, and my husband and I grew up together. We started off broke together, and we created everything we have together. It creates a sense of a shared life that would be hard to achieve if you already come with your own houses, cars, careers, and habits.
(Obligatory throat clearing) - I'm not saying it's not possible to have a successful marriage at an older age, just that I think young marriage is dismissed too quickly as a bad thing. There are very positive aspects to meeting and marrying your partner when you are fairly young.
@Michelle: yes,very well said. Without divulging personal information, would you mind answering two pertinent questions:
1. What year did you marry?
2. Did you or your husband have significant student loan debt. My arbitrary definition of "significant" being $10k per person.
I ask because context matters so much - getting married debt-free in 1995 differs greatly than being saddled with debt in 2023.
The cost of education and housing have grown exponentially, well beyond normal inflation.
Anecdata alert: Tuition at my college has quadrupled since the early 1990s. The rental price for a Philly suburbs apartment I had in the late 1990s has tripled. (Same apartment, the price boosted by some nearby gentrification). Young people today deal with costs that were unthinkable 30 years ago.
We married in 2009. We worked during college to pay our own bills at an affordable school. No student loan debt. I think the reality is that you have to make choices, and you can't have everything. You can't both go get masters degrees, and marry young, and start having kids in your 20s.
I want my kids to learn a marketable skill in high school that can be used regardless of whether they go to college or not. I also want them to pick an affordable school, and have some kind of plan for what they want to do before they start spending money on a degree. If they don't know what they want to do, I would prefer they take a job and earn some money while they grow up, and then go to school. The common strategy of just going to a good school and figuring yourself out through binge drinking and partying is not something that is worth $30,000/year.
The cost of college is a problem. It doesn't matter if a degree earns you a slightly higher salary if you spend your life paying the extra money back in loans. People need to start doing a real cost/benefit analysis, because not every degree is worth the money anymore.
I am also fully prepared for the possibility that they will be 18 and know everything, and not take my advice. 🤣
Great discussion! Looking forward to another one on the topic you brought up at the end (how to square the advice to pair up in your early 20s with the knowledge about brains not fully developing before 25). It's one thing to advocate for better awareness of the realities of life and biology (i.e. fertility declines and it gets harder to meet potential partners later in life) and another to prescribe a course of action, which is the vibe I get from trad quarters. I don't know if it's the same in other countries but the American 'anything is possible if you try hard enough' attitude tends to downplay the role of luck in finding a partner regardless of age, and there seem to be so many factors working against healthy partnering these days.
It’s also a very woman point of view. Young men in particular are poor at impulse control and prone to make bad decisions. And if you get into a relationship and find out your life partner is out there tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages, where does that leave you?
And of course, the realistic dating market for young men is a wasteland, whereas there is some improvement in prospects with age if you play your cards right. Throw in a hefty dose of Title IX and I can’t see much incentive for any young man to be chasing women.
I would be interested in this as well and would like to know more about research that determined brain development was full at 25. I'd suspect there is a range, there, maybe 20-30?, and how much the spread is. That is, is it a Bell Curve and is it tall or flattened or maybe not quite that at all.
My grandfather was adopted back before the Great Depression. We know very little about him other than he was the youngest of 5 children who all ended up in the same orphanage. The orphanage later burned down, so much of where he came from is a mystery. (Although he did finally connect with a brother later in life.)
He grew up in a great home of a couple that was unable to have children of their own, and I don't doubt that there was at least a fairly decent reason for giving him and his siblings up to an orphanage. Nonetheless, you could tell that he was somewhat scarred by that adoption throughout his life. He didn't like talking about it and didn't even tell my dad until he was an adult himself.
Great conversation & research by Sarah. This episode did not approach adoption from the angle I anticipated, i.e., the massive decline in the number of both domestic and international infants available for adoption. I know several couples who have successfully adopted infants, but that was at least a decade ago. Then, I know couples in their early 50s who have tried repeatedly to adopt an infant only to have the mother change her mind right before giving birth. They were completely devastated and have given up. I think this speaks to Sarah’s broader point that no one is entitled to the life they want. I agree, considering that my stepdaughter is a profoundly autistic young woman who cannot speak, feed, or toilet herself, and must be institutionalized for the rest of her life. That is not the child her parents expected and their lives are incredibly difficult by her sheer existence. That’s a horrible thing to say about a sweet, blameless child, but it’s sadly true. Then, technology is moving in the direction of making it so people can form embryos from skin cells, making it possible for men to conceive biological children on their own.
I really loved this thoughtful episode... And I think, even more, reading Meghan’s New Yorker article. I knew, being a longtime listener, how how felt about motherhood, but not that you had once been pregnant (which changes my perspective on this somewhat). The article does not say, but also knowing you are no longer married, I wonder if his realizing he wanted to be a father after all ultimately made “the Central Sadness” win and ended the marriage? Without intruding on anyone’s privacy, I would love to know where your ex is now (did he ever become a dad?). Also, most of all: did you hear about “Michael” and what he became? I was sooo rooting for him. 🙁
The marriage had many issues, but the child issue was the most obvious. It was a very sad time but we are great friends now and it's a very positive outcome overall. My ex is not remarried and still doesn't have kids, but that's his "journey," so to speak. If I'd become a parent I'm sure I would have risen to the occasion and no doubt loved my child. But I suspect I would have hated my life and yearned for the one I currently have. I actually love my life now, despite its challenges.
Thank you for replying to me. Honestly, I’m sure you would have made a great mother and always felt you were cutting yourself a little short when you said otherwise. I recognize myself a lot in your life story… I ended up having 2 kids (whom I adore obviously, even as the teenagers they are now), but I’m still taken aback sometimes, that it happened to me. Because I never really thought it would or wanted it that way. All this to say, I believe you. I know I would have been happy with my life if I never had them, I don’t think women NEED to become mothers. I felt that too, deeply. (Then life decided otherwise and it’s all good.) I thought your work in the foster care system was really remarkable, above and beyond.
I was thinking about Meghan’s convo with Diane Fleishman, specifically about how neuroticism is heritable. It seems likely that the kids in need of foster care have biological parents who are high in neuroticism, and thus are likely high in it themselves. The adopted people you mention who have no interest in finding their biological parents are probably the opposite.
I have a friend like that. He’s not adopted, but his mom was schizophrenic and showed it from an early age. He figured out she wasn’t normal by the time he was six. Fortunately an aunt stepped in and raised him, and he doesn’t seem to have been traumatized by it.
I had this idea in my head from a very early age that adopting a child would be preferable to having one biologically, simply as part of the general desire to escape from my family and the associated genetics. The selfless do-gooder aspect that others seemed obsessed with was more of a bonus for me. But I certainly think there was something very ‘90s and very decadent about this idea of American celebrities adopting babies from poor countries as a form of virtue-signaling.
For me, it seems less realistic and less desirable the more I hear about it.
Adoption skeptics emphasize the importance of biological ties in children’s lives. But the decrease in adoption coincides with the paradox of women having more children born out of wedlock. Plus, we lately have increasing rates of abortion (after rates falling considerably in the early 2000s) despite the reversal of roe versus wade and normalization of single motherhood.
The math doesn’t add up. It seems that many women having abortions today are comparable to women who gave children up for adoption 50 years ago. By that logic, they probably would not regret these adoptions, considering we are told by the media that women rarely regret their abortions.
Yeah, pregnancy & childbirth, hormones, etc. I get it. That’s why adoption is expensive, and it would seem that $50,000 might vastly improve the life chances of some women with unwanted pregnancies if they pursued adoption instead of abortion.
//It seems that many women having abortions today are comparable to women who gave children up for adoption 50 years ago. //
It is very unlikely that we are talking about the same women! The mothers in the Scoop era were late teens on average, but the women getting abortions now are (on average) late 20s. They are also different in other ways (income, education, race, even history of sexual activity).
And I'll add, that while it is very likely that abortion rates actually did rise quite a bit after Roe, it is hard to say by how much (as at least some portion were illegal abortions being converted to statistically visible legal ones). I'm not sure if that's a huge effect, but worth pointing out.
I see how you conclude there is a paradox here, but it becomes more intuitive when you consider the mechanism that is actually working behind the scenes, affecting both groups: the destigmatization of sex before marriage for women.
On the one hand, it means women keep their babies when they want them.
On the other, more women have much more sex out of wedlock. This leads to greater incidence of abortions, and fewer marriages (because the justification behind "shotgun weddings" dies when women have a choice to abort, and because there is greater state/legal infrastructure to support unwed mothers).
The Turnaway Study, among others, has shown that the choice for most women is not between adoption and abortion, but rather between abortion and parenting. They see adoption as too emotionally and physically difficult. A solution might be to find ways to support women who want to parent.
"Considering we are told by the media that women rarely regret their abortions." This depends on what media you are paying attention to. I am one of those women, but I often hear the opposite from media sources I follow.
I'm curious as to how an open transaction between consenting adults constitutes exploitation and coercion? "Poor" people have the same freedom of contract as anyone else. I recommend Googling Sally Satel, who has written about your argument in the context of organ donation.
Oh, I have a conspiracy theory! So far as I know this is mine, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's crossed someone else's mind (also, it isn't much of a conspiracy, but nevermind that). Sarah and Meghan were talking about the fashionable idea of professional women becoming single mothers. And I expect most have heard about how many children Elon Musk has fathered, rather a few from professional women (some even former co-workers). Why would I not be surprised to learn most of those births weren't the result of romance, but transactional? If you were a success-oriented woman, what better genetic donor than the avant-garde billionaire? And if you're a bit geeky and "futuristic"-minded like Musk, how much novelty would there be in simply knowing your genes would live on in so many lineages? (I am not suicidal, so if I should turn up dead in the near future it will not be an accident.)
Meghan is lucky she's not Kryptonian. She looks the same with and without glasses, so the Clark Kent charade wouldn't play out. If she hadn't pointed out she wasn't wearing glasses I don't think I'd have noticed.
This did, however, make me notice the screens of both ladies reflect in their irises. Which made me realize that, on camera at least, Sarah's appear to be black. I assume that's an illusion? They're just a rather dark brown? I've read fiction in which a character's eyes are described as "black," but I assumed that was poetic license. Is this evidence of androidhood? A glitch in the matrix?
Like Sarah, I believe personality and individual life outcomes are about 85% genetic (if not more). The prospet of adoption, therefore, terrifies me. What if one parent had a major psychiatric disorder? Or the father was a rapist? I am admittedly highly (maybe unhealthily) risk-averse, but I wonder how many adoptive parents actually realize how much risk they're assuming, or if they're enmeshed in the tabula rasa myth?
The thought's provoked by a personal anecdote. An adult acquaintance of mine was adopted, and I suspect he might have been a product of rape. He's not a criminal - in fact he's fairly successful in business - but his personality is quite aggressive, I'd consider him generally a womanizer, and in his earlier adulthood he did get into some civil trouble due to damages he caused to others' bodies in mutual fights (it doesn't help that he's quite physically powerful by nature). I suspect that the 15% contribution from parentage may be the only thing that stood between his being an "alpha" male and a lifetime of incarceration. Did his parents know what they were in for?
An unpleasant thought emerging from discussion of the pre-Roe adoption markets: I wonder how many children adopted out as accidental teen car-degeneracy were actually the result of incest? (Maybe I should've lead with the horrible stuff and closed with the eyeballs.)
Re Sarah's gross-out | horror | sadness about single parents raising children, she should watch a few episodes of 1970s classics: Diahann Carroll's show, "Julia" (single black nurse raising a child), the
Partridge Family" (widow singer raising five kids), The Courtship of Eddie's Father (single dad raising son). These shows were breakthroughs in showing how real people actually lived healthy lives, not recruiting devices to destroy two-parent families.
I am not at all horrified at the idea of single parents.
The catalyst for this episode was the fact that, before the time of the Sexual Revolution, yes there were fewer single parents but there were many more coerced child relinquishings (amongst many, many other social ills).
Having said that, it would be dishonest to suggest that single-parenthood is as easy for the parents or as good for the children as two-parent households.
I strongly suspect you are more interested in playing "gotcha" rather than engaging in a good faith dialogue. But on the remote chance that the latter is true, I would say in some circumstances, absolutely yes.
If I'm a family court judge and my choice is a financially unstable, sometimes homeless single mother with addiction issues who cycles between rehab and jails OR Pete Buttgieg and his husband, I'm going with the two dads.
I can't speak for Sarah but I'd be mildly surprised if she disagrees.
Also, a lack of mention of how birth control fits into everything. Griswold v. Connecticut (the Supreme Court decision that made birth control legal nationwide) didn't come out until 1965.
Of course, birth control has everything to do with it, albeit indirectly. Birth control was the catalyst for this conversation as it was prompted by my debate on the sexual revolution.
Griswold in particular is not directly relevant because it made birth control legal only for married couples. We mentioned that the "Baby Scoop" era ended around the passage of Roe--it was in the early 70s that non-married couples also got access to BC.
Thanks so much for taking this on. And for some healthy myth-busting. Bravo Meghan and Sarah.
A few thoughts (okay, a lot of thoughts) from an adoptee:
Many people miss the connection between the Baby Scoop and the Baby Boom. I think of them as flip sides of the same thing. Both started in 1945 when the men who survived WWII returned home. As a society we were eager to turn away from the devastation of war, especially in our personal and even sexual lives. Young men sought good jobs via the GI bill and enormous defense contracts that flowed into the states. A two-car garage and backyard barbecue in a new suburb suddenly became attainable for many. Families of 5 kids or more were common. The recently married became part of the Baby Boom. Those who had sex outside of marriage and got unlucky became the unwed mothers and unknown fathers of The Scoop.
Prior to WWII, as you both noted, adoptions mostly occurred within families when children were orphaned or a young unmarried woman in a family became pregnant. Georgia Tann, horrific as she was, helped create the adoption industry as we know it today. She normalized the idea of adoption outside of the familial setting by selling stolen children to high-profile prospective parents like Governor Lehman of New York and Joan Crawford. Her second big contribution was the sealed birth certificate. She convinced legislators in Tennessee that the adoptee's original birth certificate should be sealed to protect the child from the shame of illegitimacy, the adoptive parents from the shame of infertility, and the unwed mother from the shame of sex outside of marriage. Georgia Tann is the reason 39 states still seal original birth certificates, and closed adoptions still exist.
Yes, people need their blood relations, knowing who you are matters, and you have to destroy a family to make a new one through adoption.
Today, as during the Baby Scoop era, many people want the experience of raising children. Sarah said that she wanted a family, but if it hadn't happened, she would have been okay. I felt the same. Yet in the US we now believe everyone should be able to have everything they want, and that wanting a child is the same thing as having a right to a child. This is where adoption falls off the rails ethically.
Saviorism is the justification—the adoptive parents may believe they are entitled because they can provide a better home. This is a hold-over from The Scoop. My mother told me my original mother couldn't afford to keep me. Money does play a part in the argument for adoption. And by the way, life happens to everyone. Even the best adoptive parents suffer financial difficulties, addiction, and marital woes.
Thank you for recognizing the experience of the birth mothers, and for sharing your personal experiences of pregnancy and post-partum, Sarah. Not only do mothers bond with their children while in utero and after, not only does the mother's brain change during pregnancy and after birth for reasons of survival, but research has shown that the baby bonds with the mother while in utero too. And the baby's brain development is slowed when they are separated at birth. There are lifelong repercussions emotionally for mother and child, especially around attachment and fear of abandonment. Research has shown that babies recognize their mother's voice, smell and heartbeat. This is part of why even an addicted mother and her addicted baby do better (the mother is more likely to get off and stay off drugs, the baby more likely to gain weight and thrive) when kept together than when separated. The one thing that rarely get mentioned in ethical conversations around adoption is that it requires the severance of the mother-child bond. We as a culture seem to have forgotten that it exists and that it matters. It poses ethical questions to surrogacy as well.
Meghan's story about women in the 80s and 90s who opted for single motherhood via adoption—yes it was glamorized, and it was also considered to be feminist, at least where I worked in New York City.
So yeah, the sexual revolution, while mostly a good thing, had lots of unintended consequences. We are losing the "social glue" of partnerships, building a life together in which family may be a goal.
Thanks again for raising this.
beautiful
Meghan and Sarah—you have such fascinating conversations connect so many dots for me. Thank you!
The “brain not fully developing until age 25” stat comes with a very large caveat that’s consistently left out of public discourse. The last brain region to develop is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). It’s the one that controls executive functioning, careful decision making, impulse control, etc. Its formation is what makes us adult. Yes, it stops forming around age 25; however, this is not a static condition. The PFC forms via experience, meaning it can fully form before age 25 (making us capable of adult decisions). Jean Twenge wrote about this via a generational lens in her book iGen. As teens, Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers had more practice and experience with accumulating adult skills, such as having part-time jobs, driving cars, dating, having more sex, etc. without access to cell phones to text adults for help anytime something went wrong. We were routinely placed in situations where we had to exercise independent decision making. MRI scans from the ‘90s & ‘00s showed brains were fully formed around age 21. The age 25 demarcation is only a recent phenomenon. There’s a psychologist at Vassar College named Abigail Baird who studies adolescence and has a tremendous series on Amazon’s Great Courses discussing this. She’s found the age 25 thing has more to do with societal expectations and technological innovation. So, if we want teens to act like adults by age 18, we have to allow them the space to practice and learn adult skills during their teens, which inevitably means they’ll mess up a lot, because we all did and were (mostly) better for it. Allowing young adults to make mistakes and learn from them is the point.
I’m an educator and I admit my field has perpetuated this half-truth for years now. It’s further infantilized late teens/early adults by letting them off-the-hook because their brains aren’t fully developed. That’s flat out bullshit. They’re capable. The adults in their lives are just too preoccupied with shielding them from harm (which is another very complex topic in and of itself). I teach teenagers and I’m a mom; I won’t pretend this is a simple fix. But as hard as it is, I/we have to start letting go a little more.
So interesting and so well-explained.
I'm glad you're an educator because, if this post is any indication, you are brilliant at it.
Wow--I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your comment! It’s very kind and I’m humbled. Thank you. 🙏
Thanks for your input. I know Jordan Petersen is polarizing but he makes an important observation. As Western families get smaller, parents have more money and time to devote to helicoptering. (Especially the affluent)
Hence the independence of adulthood gets delayed further and further into the 20s.
(Recognizing that the increasing financial cost of adulthood is a factor).
Absolutely! I really appreciate your comment because this is such a multi-faceted issue. I’ve read some really interesting studies from economists on this, too, who claim the fewer kids we have in highly developed countries, the more we view our kids as investments. This is largely a protective instinct, I think, because we want to give our kids the best possible shot at future success (i.e. financial stability), and we encourage them to make safe, wise decisions to not put their futures at risk. That’s certainly not a bad thing, but it comes with trade offs I’m not sure we know how to deal with. I wonder sometimes if the rising mental illness rates in young people is partially due to a mismatch between societal expectations of adulthood and their delayed psychological development. It’s probably the social media, but I do wonder sometimes. 🤷🏼♀️
Thanks for clarifying!
I am interested in the discussion about brain development, young marriage and early medical decisions as well.
I am biased to a naturalist viewpoint, but I do think the big difference between two life changing decisions like marriage and surgery come down to development. Marriage and having children is part of the natural process of human development, while major surgeries to significantly alter your body in ways that go against your biological are doing the opposite... essentially stifling development. It's one thing to allow people to take a path in line with their normal biological growth, and quite another to cut into them to go against it.
Also, I think in terms of pair bonding, it's easier to pair up and create families from a young age. *Because* you aren't completely mature, a couple can begin to grow together, forming personalities and habits that are complementary. At 20, you aren't "stuck in your ways" the way you are as you get older.
I do think that young marriage can be amazing (I was married young), but it's important that it not be impulsive. I think a long courtship period and input from older mentors like parents or other family members are important in creating a successful match between two young people. Also, we should be talking to young people about looking for a marriage partner the way we talk about careers. You need a goal, and a plan with an idea about what qualities are important in a mate. All this sounds terribly old fashioned, and I certainly didn't follow all of it.
I married at a young age, and my husband and I grew up together. We started off broke together, and we created everything we have together. It creates a sense of a shared life that would be hard to achieve if you already come with your own houses, cars, careers, and habits.
(Obligatory throat clearing) - I'm not saying it's not possible to have a successful marriage at an older age, just that I think young marriage is dismissed too quickly as a bad thing. There are very positive aspects to meeting and marrying your partner when you are fairly young.
Well said. Makes sense.
@Michelle: yes,very well said. Without divulging personal information, would you mind answering two pertinent questions:
1. What year did you marry?
2. Did you or your husband have significant student loan debt. My arbitrary definition of "significant" being $10k per person.
I ask because context matters so much - getting married debt-free in 1995 differs greatly than being saddled with debt in 2023.
The cost of education and housing have grown exponentially, well beyond normal inflation.
Anecdata alert: Tuition at my college has quadrupled since the early 1990s. The rental price for a Philly suburbs apartment I had in the late 1990s has tripled. (Same apartment, the price boosted by some nearby gentrification). Young people today deal with costs that were unthinkable 30 years ago.
We married in 2009. We worked during college to pay our own bills at an affordable school. No student loan debt. I think the reality is that you have to make choices, and you can't have everything. You can't both go get masters degrees, and marry young, and start having kids in your 20s.
I want my kids to learn a marketable skill in high school that can be used regardless of whether they go to college or not. I also want them to pick an affordable school, and have some kind of plan for what they want to do before they start spending money on a degree. If they don't know what they want to do, I would prefer they take a job and earn some money while they grow up, and then go to school. The common strategy of just going to a good school and figuring yourself out through binge drinking and partying is not something that is worth $30,000/year.
The cost of college is a problem. It doesn't matter if a degree earns you a slightly higher salary if you spend your life paying the extra money back in loans. People need to start doing a real cost/benefit analysis, because not every degree is worth the money anymore.
I am also fully prepared for the possibility that they will be 18 and know everything, and not take my advice. 🤣
yup. the very definition of a keystone marriage; you build together
Great discussion! Looking forward to another one on the topic you brought up at the end (how to square the advice to pair up in your early 20s with the knowledge about brains not fully developing before 25). It's one thing to advocate for better awareness of the realities of life and biology (i.e. fertility declines and it gets harder to meet potential partners later in life) and another to prescribe a course of action, which is the vibe I get from trad quarters. I don't know if it's the same in other countries but the American 'anything is possible if you try hard enough' attitude tends to downplay the role of luck in finding a partner regardless of age, and there seem to be so many factors working against healthy partnering these days.
It’s also a very woman point of view. Young men in particular are poor at impulse control and prone to make bad decisions. And if you get into a relationship and find out your life partner is out there tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages, where does that leave you?
And of course, the realistic dating market for young men is a wasteland, whereas there is some improvement in prospects with age if you play your cards right. Throw in a hefty dose of Title IX and I can’t see much incentive for any young man to be chasing women.
I would be interested in this as well and would like to know more about research that determined brain development was full at 25. I'd suspect there is a range, there, maybe 20-30?, and how much the spread is. That is, is it a Bell Curve and is it tall or flattened or maybe not quite that at all.
My grandfather was adopted back before the Great Depression. We know very little about him other than he was the youngest of 5 children who all ended up in the same orphanage. The orphanage later burned down, so much of where he came from is a mystery. (Although he did finally connect with a brother later in life.)
He grew up in a great home of a couple that was unable to have children of their own, and I don't doubt that there was at least a fairly decent reason for giving him and his siblings up to an orphanage. Nonetheless, you could tell that he was somewhat scarred by that adoption throughout his life. He didn't like talking about it and didn't even tell my dad until he was an adult himself.
Great conversation & research by Sarah. This episode did not approach adoption from the angle I anticipated, i.e., the massive decline in the number of both domestic and international infants available for adoption. I know several couples who have successfully adopted infants, but that was at least a decade ago. Then, I know couples in their early 50s who have tried repeatedly to adopt an infant only to have the mother change her mind right before giving birth. They were completely devastated and have given up. I think this speaks to Sarah’s broader point that no one is entitled to the life they want. I agree, considering that my stepdaughter is a profoundly autistic young woman who cannot speak, feed, or toilet herself, and must be institutionalized for the rest of her life. That is not the child her parents expected and their lives are incredibly difficult by her sheer existence. That’s a horrible thing to say about a sweet, blameless child, but it’s sadly true. Then, technology is moving in the direction of making it so people can form embryos from skin cells, making it possible for men to conceive biological children on their own.
What If Men Could Make Their Own Egg Cells?
https://www.wsj.com/health/what-if-anyone-could-make-a-human-egg-22002407?reflink=integratedwebview_share
So, I guess we still strive to enable people to have the lives that they want, as long as technology can provide it.
Without ethics?
I really loved this thoughtful episode... And I think, even more, reading Meghan’s New Yorker article. I knew, being a longtime listener, how how felt about motherhood, but not that you had once been pregnant (which changes my perspective on this somewhat). The article does not say, but also knowing you are no longer married, I wonder if his realizing he wanted to be a father after all ultimately made “the Central Sadness” win and ended the marriage? Without intruding on anyone’s privacy, I would love to know where your ex is now (did he ever become a dad?). Also, most of all: did you hear about “Michael” and what he became? I was sooo rooting for him. 🙁
The marriage had many issues, but the child issue was the most obvious. It was a very sad time but we are great friends now and it's a very positive outcome overall. My ex is not remarried and still doesn't have kids, but that's his "journey," so to speak. If I'd become a parent I'm sure I would have risen to the occasion and no doubt loved my child. But I suspect I would have hated my life and yearned for the one I currently have. I actually love my life now, despite its challenges.
Thank you for replying to me. Honestly, I’m sure you would have made a great mother and always felt you were cutting yourself a little short when you said otherwise. I recognize myself a lot in your life story… I ended up having 2 kids (whom I adore obviously, even as the teenagers they are now), but I’m still taken aback sometimes, that it happened to me. Because I never really thought it would or wanted it that way. All this to say, I believe you. I know I would have been happy with my life if I never had them, I don’t think women NEED to become mothers. I felt that too, deeply. (Then life decided otherwise and it’s all good.) I thought your work in the foster care system was really remarkable, above and beyond.
First!!!!
You did it!!
One more week and it’s a trend
I was thinking about Meghan’s convo with Diane Fleishman, specifically about how neuroticism is heritable. It seems likely that the kids in need of foster care have biological parents who are high in neuroticism, and thus are likely high in it themselves. The adopted people you mention who have no interest in finding their biological parents are probably the opposite.
I have a friend like that. He’s not adopted, but his mom was schizophrenic and showed it from an early age. He figured out she wasn’t normal by the time he was six. Fortunately an aunt stepped in and raised him, and he doesn’t seem to have been traumatized by it.
If you saw and heard my children you’d understand. #HereditaryGenius 😂
Yes, intelligence is quite heritable. That’s why I should probably adopt
I had this idea in my head from a very early age that adopting a child would be preferable to having one biologically, simply as part of the general desire to escape from my family and the associated genetics. The selfless do-gooder aspect that others seemed obsessed with was more of a bonus for me. But I certainly think there was something very ‘90s and very decadent about this idea of American celebrities adopting babies from poor countries as a form of virtue-signaling.
For me, it seems less realistic and less desirable the more I hear about it.
Adoption skeptics emphasize the importance of biological ties in children’s lives. But the decrease in adoption coincides with the paradox of women having more children born out of wedlock. Plus, we lately have increasing rates of abortion (after rates falling considerably in the early 2000s) despite the reversal of roe versus wade and normalization of single motherhood.
The math doesn’t add up. It seems that many women having abortions today are comparable to women who gave children up for adoption 50 years ago. By that logic, they probably would not regret these adoptions, considering we are told by the media that women rarely regret their abortions.
Yeah, pregnancy & childbirth, hormones, etc. I get it. That’s why adoption is expensive, and it would seem that $50,000 might vastly improve the life chances of some women with unwanted pregnancies if they pursued adoption instead of abortion.
//It seems that many women having abortions today are comparable to women who gave children up for adoption 50 years ago. //
It is very unlikely that we are talking about the same women! The mothers in the Scoop era were late teens on average, but the women getting abortions now are (on average) late 20s. They are also different in other ways (income, education, race, even history of sexual activity).
And I'll add, that while it is very likely that abortion rates actually did rise quite a bit after Roe, it is hard to say by how much (as at least some portion were illegal abortions being converted to statistically visible legal ones). I'm not sure if that's a huge effect, but worth pointing out.
I see how you conclude there is a paradox here, but it becomes more intuitive when you consider the mechanism that is actually working behind the scenes, affecting both groups: the destigmatization of sex before marriage for women.
On the one hand, it means women keep their babies when they want them.
On the other, more women have much more sex out of wedlock. This leads to greater incidence of abortions, and fewer marriages (because the justification behind "shotgun weddings" dies when women have a choice to abort, and because there is greater state/legal infrastructure to support unwed mothers).
The Turnaway Study, among others, has shown that the choice for most women is not between adoption and abortion, but rather between abortion and parenting. They see adoption as too emotionally and physically difficult. A solution might be to find ways to support women who want to parent.
"Considering we are told by the media that women rarely regret their abortions." This depends on what media you are paying attention to. I am one of those women, but I often hear the opposite from media sources I follow.
That would be a good idea. Support for the original mother.
I think a large chunk of the money should absolutely go to the mother and I don’t know how much they currently cost at least $30,000 to adopt a baby.
I'm curious as to how an open transaction between consenting adults constitutes exploitation and coercion? "Poor" people have the same freedom of contract as anyone else. I recommend Googling Sally Satel, who has written about your argument in the context of organ donation.
Oh, I have a conspiracy theory! So far as I know this is mine, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's crossed someone else's mind (also, it isn't much of a conspiracy, but nevermind that). Sarah and Meghan were talking about the fashionable idea of professional women becoming single mothers. And I expect most have heard about how many children Elon Musk has fathered, rather a few from professional women (some even former co-workers). Why would I not be surprised to learn most of those births weren't the result of romance, but transactional? If you were a success-oriented woman, what better genetic donor than the avant-garde billionaire? And if you're a bit geeky and "futuristic"-minded like Musk, how much novelty would there be in simply knowing your genes would live on in so many lineages? (I am not suicidal, so if I should turn up dead in the near future it will not be an accident.)
Meghan is lucky she's not Kryptonian. She looks the same with and without glasses, so the Clark Kent charade wouldn't play out. If she hadn't pointed out she wasn't wearing glasses I don't think I'd have noticed.
This did, however, make me notice the screens of both ladies reflect in their irises. Which made me realize that, on camera at least, Sarah's appear to be black. I assume that's an illusion? They're just a rather dark brown? I've read fiction in which a character's eyes are described as "black," but I assumed that was poetic license. Is this evidence of androidhood? A glitch in the matrix?
Like Sarah, I believe personality and individual life outcomes are about 85% genetic (if not more). The prospet of adoption, therefore, terrifies me. What if one parent had a major psychiatric disorder? Or the father was a rapist? I am admittedly highly (maybe unhealthily) risk-averse, but I wonder how many adoptive parents actually realize how much risk they're assuming, or if they're enmeshed in the tabula rasa myth?
The thought's provoked by a personal anecdote. An adult acquaintance of mine was adopted, and I suspect he might have been a product of rape. He's not a criminal - in fact he's fairly successful in business - but his personality is quite aggressive, I'd consider him generally a womanizer, and in his earlier adulthood he did get into some civil trouble due to damages he caused to others' bodies in mutual fights (it doesn't help that he's quite physically powerful by nature). I suspect that the 15% contribution from parentage may be the only thing that stood between his being an "alpha" male and a lifetime of incarceration. Did his parents know what they were in for?
An unpleasant thought emerging from discussion of the pre-Roe adoption markets: I wonder how many children adopted out as accidental teen car-degeneracy were actually the result of incest? (Maybe I should've lead with the horrible stuff and closed with the eyeballs.)
Re Sarah's gross-out | horror | sadness about single parents raising children, she should watch a few episodes of 1970s classics: Diahann Carroll's show, "Julia" (single black nurse raising a child), the
Partridge Family" (widow singer raising five kids), The Courtship of Eddie's Father (single dad raising son). These shows were breakthroughs in showing how real people actually lived healthy lives, not recruiting devices to destroy two-parent families.
I am not at all horrified at the idea of single parents.
The catalyst for this episode was the fact that, before the time of the Sexual Revolution, yes there were fewer single parents but there were many more coerced child relinquishings (amongst many, many other social ills).
Having said that, it would be dishonest to suggest that single-parenthood is as easy for the parents or as good for the children as two-parent households.
Do you think that a child with two dads is better off than a child with a single mother?
I strongly suspect you are more interested in playing "gotcha" rather than engaging in a good faith dialogue. But on the remote chance that the latter is true, I would say in some circumstances, absolutely yes.
If I'm a family court judge and my choice is a financially unstable, sometimes homeless single mother with addiction issues who cycles between rehab and jails OR Pete Buttgieg and his husband, I'm going with the two dads.
I can't speak for Sarah but I'd be mildly surprised if she disagrees.
Also, a lack of mention of how birth control fits into everything. Griswold v. Connecticut (the Supreme Court decision that made birth control legal nationwide) didn't come out until 1965.
Of course, birth control has everything to do with it, albeit indirectly. Birth control was the catalyst for this conversation as it was prompted by my debate on the sexual revolution.
Griswold in particular is not directly relevant because it made birth control legal only for married couples. We mentioned that the "Baby Scoop" era ended around the passage of Roe--it was in the early 70s that non-married couples also got access to BC.