The Pursuit of Happiness Starts With Families: A Conversation Between Brad Wilcox and Gov. Spencer Cox

Utah has been at the forefront of a national conversation about how to grow and strengthen families, thanks in part to the leadership of Gov. Spencer Cox. I recently invited Cox to speak at the University of Virginia about Utah’s initiatives that enable strong families, as well as the governor’s efforts to protect teens from the harms of social media and technology. In our conversation for the National Marriage Project on Nov. 18, we also talked about Utah’s unique strengths, his governing philosophy and his plans for new policies related to teens and cellphones in the coming year. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

Brad Wilcox: I’ve been developing an index of family strength with my colleague, Nicholas Zill, and we’re finding that Utah is No. 1 when it comes to family strength in America. There’s no state, for instance, that has more kids who are being raised in intact families than Utah — about 70% of Utah children are raised in stable, married families. As you think about your state’s family strength, how does it relate to your own estimation to your state’s economic performance? I’m thinking particularly of the ways your state has been rated strongly on a number of economic measures, including mobility for poor kids.

Spencer Cox: So, this is really interesting, and we love the work that Brad is doing here at UVA. Fifteen months ago, U.S. News & World Report conducted rankings of the states, and they looked at over 1,000 different data points, 70 different categories, and they ranked all 50 states objectively for best states to live overall. Utah came out No. 1 for the second year in a row. We’ve had the best economy in the nation by most metrics over the past 10 years. We led the nation in GDP growth, led the nation in population growth in the last census, and I could go on and on.

People are trying to figure out why — why is Utah having so much success? And they will give you lots of reasons for it, lots of different definitions of why it’s happening. But I believe that this (chart) tells the tale. 

In fact, Raj Chetty at Harvard has done a lot of studies about economic mobility, upward mobility (for poor children), this idea that if you’re born in poverty, you don’t stay in poverty. And what he found was that Utah leads the nation in upward mobility. If you try to get to the core of what is happening here, it’s this idea that families matter, and having intact families matters.

By the way, I should mention that I come from a family that is not intact. My parents were divorced when I was 10 years old; both of them have since remarried. I was raised with my dad. My brother and sister were raised with my mom. So, I think one of the problems we have as a country when we talk about this is we feel like we can’t talk about it because we’re going to offend people who don’t have intact families. That shouldn’t be the case.

I learned from having parents who hated each other and got divorced that I didn’t want that. It didn’t mean that I didn’t want to get married, but I wanted to marry someone where we could have a very happy marriage and raise our kids together. So, I learned those lessons, but I think it’s core. That’s why I started the Office of Families, because I absolutely 100% believe that our economic success is tied directly to the institution of family.

BW: Given Thomas Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his founding of the University of Virginia, we are concerned here at UVA about “the pursuit of happiness.” When it comes to state rankings and happiness, how does what I call the “Utah family miracle” figure in your state’s rankings on the happiness front?

SC: Yes, so WalletHub comes out every year with a ranking of happiness. I think last yearUtah was ranked number one. We’re really proud that we beat Hawaii — they were number two. When you look at what makes people the happiest, it’s not the things we usually think of. In fact, we all assume that money and fame are things that make this happen. But over and over and over again, the science shows that the happiest people on Earth are married and have kids, that those things actually make you happier. Now, I want to be very clear on this. When it’s three o’clock in the morning and you have a sick kid who’s screaming — not the happiest times, right?

But over time, for sure, and I especially say this to our younger generation out there, people who really want true happiness long term — those are the things that are going to make you the happiest. And I believe that those rankings, where we continue to succeed, are because of that.

Now I also want to say that Utah’s not a panacea, and there are challenges, and we’re facing some of the same challenges as well. The number of people getting married is declining. The number of kids that people are having is declining just like it is everywhere. (We’re) still higher than most other places, but it certainly is on decline.

There’s lots of reasons for that. In fact, that’s why you are doing this National Marriage Project, to help us understand what the challenges are and how we can take the lead on them. Again, it’s one of the reasons I created the Office of Family. We wanted to make sure that first of all, the government wasn’t harming families. We should be encouraging and incentivizing marriage.

BW: Five years ago, my colleague Michael Toscano and I met with about 30 moms down in Richmond, Virginia to talk about the state of American families. Over and over again, these moms raised social media and smartphones as obstacles to their kids flourishing, and also as a real source of tension between parents and their teens. This led us to do a number of reports both on the issue itself and some policy ideas we thought to be helpful in helping the parents deal with this. Can you tell us about your interest in this issue of teens and tech? Where did that come from?

SC: It started in a couple areas, so I’ll tell you the personal and then the professional side. On the personal side, it started because I’m a dad ... I have four kids: three boys and a daughter. My older kids just started coming of age when smartphones and social media became ubiquitous, and so like most parents, we had no idea what we were doing. We thought, this is fine. It’s a good thing. We want them to be connected.

We didn’t let them have smartphones in middle school, but when they started high school, we let them have smartphones and let them sign up for Facebook and then Twitter and Instagram and the rest. We started seeing some things that were concerning us at home. I was also involved ecclesiastically with my faith, and working with young people in that position as well. I started seeing some concerning trends, and then hearing just anecdotally from other people who were having struggles with their kids when it came to anxiety, depression and self harm.

Then, as lieutenant governor, I started working with our Department of Health and Human Services, and starting to see some of the data that was coming out. We’re a little behind the rest of the country (in Utah), but certainly we were following suit. Anxiety, depression and self-harm started skyrocketing, especially amongst young women.

I followed you, Brad, on Twitter — I think it’s where I first started to see what you were doing, as well as another friend, Jonathan Haidt, and looking at some of his data. I ended up calling Jonathan a couple years ago just to ask his policy ideas and reached out to you shortly thereafter as well. He sent me a presentation he had given in Congress, and I took that, sat down with my legislature and presented it to them and said ‘we have problems, and we’ve got to do something about this.’ So that’s really where it started to formulate in my head that it wasn’t just something that we could deal with as parents or as faith institutions, but we actually needed some public policy.

I learned from having parents who hated each other and got divorced that I didn’t want that. It didn’t mean that I didn’t want to get married, but I wanted to marry someone where we could have a very happy marriage and raise our kids together.

BW: Can you tell us about what you did specifically on the policy front in 2023 and how that’s evolved? Including Utah’s subsequent battle with Big Tech?

SC: Now, I want to be clear about my own philosophy. I’m a small-government conservative. I believe that government and government regulation should be only used in the most serious of cases, that more liberty is better. So, as I sat down and started looking at what we can do and what we can bring together, I didn’t want the government taking the role of parents. That was never the idea behind this. But what I was hearing from parents, and what I was experiencing as a parent, was that we need some help. We need some tools.

When I started looking at what Big Tech was doing, that’s when I got really concerned. The parallels, and you may have been the first one to point this out to me, but the parallels between Big Tech to tobacco companies in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I thought the parallels were incredibly strong in that they knew they were doing harm. The harm was occurring to young people. They knew it was doing that harm, and they were doing it anyway. And they were actively trying to hide what they were doing.

To me, that’s where the government does have an obligation to step in to hold these companies accountable who were profiting off destroying our kids. That’s a line for me. So we passed a couple bills in 2023. We tweaked them this last session to help them stand up to some of the court cases that have been filed (against the state). Eventually we’re going to have to get to the Supreme Court.

But in a nutshell, this is what we did. We passed a law that required these companies to get parental consent for their kids to sign up under the age of 18. By the way, we do this in every other industry in the world; we do not allow companies to enter into contracts with young people. We don’t allow them to profit off our kids. Somehow, we’ve allowed this to happen with our young people.

But in Utah, we also gave a private right of action, to parents and to kids, to be able to sue social media companies. There’s an assumption of harm, and Big Tech would have to be able to overcome that assumption of harm. Then, we gave them a way to get out of that as well. If Big Tech companies are willing to do age verification, they can overcome that direct action. We required them to get rid of some of the most addictive features.

Basically, what we’re requiring them to do is to create kids’ accounts. So, the idea with the kids’ account is that you wouldn’t be able to receive messages from strangers, so only people that you actively follow and know would be able to message you. They would have to turn off the algorithms so you would just be able to see the posts of the people you follow, so they wouldn’t be able to spam you with all kinds of other accounts to keep you addicted. Those are the big ones; the auto scrolling and the autoplay functions would be turned off. Then another one that required them to turn off your account from 10:30 at night to 6 a.m. Again, parents can override any of these, so these are just the defaults.

In the wake of these policies, Big Tech filed multiple lawsuits. We’re in the process of fighting those lawsuits, and ultimately, we truly believe that it’s going to take a Supreme Court decision to get this right. We feel very optimistic that we’ll get there.

BW: So, in terms of the next legislative session, are there any new ideas that you are aware of on the legislative front? As you probably know, here in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order allowing public schools to take smartphones out of kids’ control during school days. What other kinds of ideas on the smartphone front do you have going forward in the next year or so?

SC: I issued letters to all of our school districts in the state. There’s only so much you can do through executive order; you need some legislative action, and we’ve got fairly broad support. Look, it’s amazing. We have some schools that have done it, some have not. (In the schools that took phones out of school) test scores shot up. Student discipline problems have shot down.

I feel pretty good that we’re going to be able to get (a bill getting phones out of Utah schools) passed — not clear if it will be “bell to bell” or just classroom time. Now, the science is pretty clear on this, bell to bell is what you want. So, when you arrive at school in the morning, you put your phone in the pouch, you get it when you leave at the end of the day. I’m not sure we have a political will to get bell to bell done right now, so I’m going to take whatever we can get.

Editor's Note: This article appeared first at Deseret News. It has been reprinted here with permission.