Highlights
Many Family Studies readers are likely familiar with the partisan divide in American family life. Conservatives and Republicans are far more likely than liberals and Democrats to get married and have children. This is a fairly recent development: just a generation ago, the gaps were much smaller. If these trends continue, families may become an endangered species in Blue America.
Yet Blue families certainly do exist. I live among them. Specifically, my family lives in the District of Columbia, where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90% to 6% in the last election. Essentially all the families in my kids’ elementary school are Democrats, and most are liberal Democrats. These families also have some remarkable features: marriage is virtually universal, while divorce is virtually nonexistent. Almost every kid is growing up in a two-parent married family. And if we’re going to highlight the general retreat from marriage and parenthood in Blue America, we should also look at the circumstances where Blue Americans buck the trend.
As it turns out, there are three features that might account for these strong Blue families in my own family’s social circle:
- These families have a surprising mix of egalitarian and “trad” lifestyle markers.
- They have rejected the money-first Midas mindset in favor of a family-first one.
- They have found ways to create a sense of community.
A Mix of Egalitarian and Trad
Given that Blue Americans tend to favor egalitarian gender roles over traditional gender roles, you might assume that deep-Blue families in a deep-Blue city like DC fall squarely on the egalitarian side. But that’s not what you see among the families in our social circle. Instead, you see a more surprising mix of egalitarian and trad lifestyle markers.
On the egalitarian side, virtually every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home mothers are unheard of, for the most part. Educational attainment is equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also fall on the egalitarian side. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only 9 kids out of 50 (18%) have parents with the same last name. If the traditional American default is for wives to take their husbands’ last name, these families cheerfully go the other way.
But on the trad side, income hypergamy is alive and well among these families. Most fathers out-earn mothers, and it’s rarely the other way around. To generalize slightly, there are three main career buckets among these well-educated DC parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the non-profit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle bucket, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. For example, among my kids’ close friends and classmates, there’s one family where the husband is a private-sector lawyer and the mother runs a literacy nonprofit. There is another family where the father is an engineer for a large tech company and the mother is a government lawyer. And another family where the father is a real estate executive and the mother is another government lawyer. Even in the one military family, the father out-earns the mother. And, yes, my wife and I practice some income hypergamy, too.
These families have other traditional markers as well. For example, they’re surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis. This might not reach the churchgoing levels of devout Bible Belt communities, but it’s higher than the churchgoing levels of Americans as a whole, let alone liberal Americans in one of the most liberal cities in the country.
[The Blue families in my social circle] borrow freely from both trad and egalitarian values.
In his book Get Married and accompanying article in The Atlantic, IFS Senior Fellow Brad Wilcox described it this way: educated Blue families “talk left and walk right.” In their book, Red Families v. Blue Families, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote that educated Blue families practice left-coded egalitarianism and secularism. However, the Blue families in our social circle offer an interesting twist on this debate. If “right” means traditional conservative lifestyles and “left” means modern liberal lifestyles, then the Blue families in our social circle walk a hybrid path. They walk right in the primary way Wilcox described—getting married before having kids and staying married thereafter. And in their income hypergamy and relative religiosity, they walk right in other ways. But in their strong commitment to dual-career families and even separate last names, they walk left as well. Simply put, they borrow freely from both trad and egalitarian values.
Putting Family Above Money
These families also put family above money. By and large, they don’t maximize their potential earnings in the marketplace but deliberately take lower-paying jobs that allow them more flexible hours and more time for their kids. For example, the government lawyers I mentioned earlier graduated from elite schools and could have easily worked for big law firms for much more money. The literacy nonprofit director also graduated from an elite university and could have likewise gotten a higher-paying job. Her husband makes a comfortable living as a private lawyer, but he left a more lucrative law firm partnership in favor of working fewer hours in a solo practice. And while individuals may have differing reasons for choosing lower-paying and lower-hours jobs, it’s probably no coincidence that these parents are all very involved in their kids’ lives. They pick them up from school. They attend PTA meetings. They’re at the neighborhood playground with their kids on late afternoons and weekends.
Just last month, a New York Times op-ed wrote about “greedy” white-collar jobs that drain educated professionals of the time, energy, and inclination to raise kids. The families in our social circle have done quite well avoiding that trap.
Building Community
Finally, these families have a strong sense of community. The school fundraisers are packed with parents and kids—last month the parents manned a table for the library fundraiser while their kids roamed the sidewalks giving flyers to passersby. The Christmas tree sale is equally well-staffed, and my wife is part of the close-knit (if slightly scary) gang of chainsaw parents who trim the trees.
The families also live in easy walking distance to each other, and there’s a de facto open-door policy. Kids happily wander into neighboring houses, sometimes solo and sometimes with parents in tow. Our townhouse has become a particularly hot destination since we got kittens in January, and it’s not uncommon to see my wife shooting the breeze with a fellow mom while the kids play with the kittens.
The Blue adults in our social circle increased their social capital by getting married in the first place.
This sort of community is important in any context, but it’s particularly important in a big city of transplants. Few of us grew up in DC. We generally don’t have extended family nearby. This can be a recipe for loneliness and atomization. But a community of families—especially at walkable human scale—is a good antidote. It’s an antidote that would prove equally useful in San Francisco, or New York, or other cities that educated liberals commonly move to.
A Roadmap for Blue Families?
How much of this is causal? Do the Blue adults in our social circle have strong families because of their quasi-trad lifestyles, religiosity, family-friendly careers, and strong communities? It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s easy to envision the causal arrow. For example, family-friendly careers and supportive communities obviously promote stable families. Churches are famous for inculcating familial mindsets. Quasi-trad lifestyles are a more dicey proposition fraught with potential sexist assumptions, but the sheer prevalence of income hypergamy across cultures and time periods suggests that it’s something couples generally tend to value. If income hypergamy persists even in my milieu of highly-educated liberal professionals, it’s hard to say this is a meaningless statistical blip.
Thus, if I had to sketch a family roadmap for Blue Americans, it would look something like this: be open to a marriage that mixes trad and egalitarian features. Give religion a serious look, even if most liberals don’t. Choose your career with an eye towards family-friendliness, not just money. And be intentional about community. If you find yourself in a new city removed from extended family and childhood friends, do your best to build a community of neighbors and fellow parents. The nuclear family is a wonderful thing, but parenthood is easier and more fun with a village around you.
A cynical observer might retort that it’s easy to build a successful family life when you have plenty of educational and social capital, which describes the Blue families in our social circle quite well. But there are some obvious responses to this critique. First, the Blue adults in our social circle increased their social capital by getting married in the first place. Second, education is no guarantor of marriage or children, particularly among today’s Blue Americans. So, when you see a group of deep-Blue Americans who are almost universally married with children, it’s worth considering the factors that may have helped them get and stay there.
Joshua L. Sohn is an attorney and author in Washington, D.C. His writings have appeared on the IFS blog, Public Discourse, America (the Jesuit Review), Commonplace, Plough, the Washington Examiner, and in numerous law reviews.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.
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