Ya Gotta Have Relationships to Make Relationships

A rising tide lifts all boats, because boats are inanimate objects designed to float. It will drown a person who has not been taught to swim. Yet conservatives—so sensitive to the importance of institutions and relationships for human flourishing in the social context—have spent recent decades abandoning their intuitions while still expecting people to behave like buoyant pieces of plastic when thrown into the deep end of the market. We’ve just recently begun re-integrating concepts like “social capital” into our public policy, but we are not yet grappling with its implications.

In 2021, I began working with scholars and think-tankers in Washington to create the Social Capital Campaign, intended to create an off-the-shelf policy platform for an incoming president who wanted to help support America’s voluntary and private relationships. Our general, rather pessimistic conclusion was that all forms of social capital face downward pressure. Marriage rates, church attendance, volunteering, philanthropic giving, neighborly interaction, and number of close friends are all in decline. Beyond the workplace, adults have ever fewer venues to meet. More parents are sending their children into child care facilities at an earlier age, for longer periods. 

Harvard economist Raj Chetty has done some of the best work exploring the implications of this deterioration. Chetty has shown that stable families are an essential ingredient to a successful childhood. As my colleague Brad Wilcox and I wrote, Chetty finds the share of married parents in a child’s neighborhood is the biggest indicator of whether that child will escape poverty, while other academics have observed that neighborhoods with high rates of single-parenthood experience more crime and violence than neighborhoods with a greater proportion of two-parent families. But the main finding to emerge from his research is slightly—and importantly—different: Upward mobility depends more than anything on having more friends from a higher income group. “Social capital” per se—the density of relationships in a community—may be nice to have, but what matters most here is cross-class exposure.

“Cross-class exposure” is pleasantly neutral—antiseptic even. It may well be good to know people who are better-off in economic terms. People with greater economic opportunities themselves may be able to connect their friends to more of the same. Having a higher share of Facebook friends with higher incomes—the data Chetty uses—probably means access to better jobs and an application sent in with a better reference, for example.

But “cross-class exposure” obscures something more essential. And that is the effects of relationship role-modeling. Cross-class relationships bring exposure to different parenting and marriage styles, different approaches to goal setting and emotional regulation, and so on. This is especially the case where, crudely put, the wealthy are stockpiling relationships while the poor aren’t, as seen in the marriage gap. The wealthy enjoy stable-family life and the emotional means to get there. The less well off, not so much—reducing the number of positive relationship role models they have to follow.

When I worked on these issues in the United Kingdom, before moving to the United States, the most effective, life-changing efforts I saw could be described as cross-class exposure by small nonprofits who worked with drug addicts, those who had left foster care, ex-offenders, the homeless, and single mothers. We would bring nonprofit CEOs to speak to politicians and journalists, and place Members of Parliament in four-day volunteering experiences, all to drive the same message home to decision-makers: most of these people in need found themselves in dire straits because of a failure of relationship, usually the case of an absent father, that had left them under-equipped to handle life. In working to address the challenge, a unique feature of civil society—the voluntarily entered-into network of organizations—was that these mechanisms provided alternative relationship role-modeling to the ones those involved had experienced in their life up until that point.

The health of America’s relationships is important for both individual life outcomes as well as the vibrancy of America’s democracy. It is from this perspective that we should view policy interventions from government. 

One visit to an after-school youth club in a rough area of King’s Cross, London, was quite instructive. The team there worked to prevent teen pregnancy, truancy, drug habits, and juvenile detention. A high school student who went to the youth club explained the unique benefits the experience provided to a very senior MP in a carefully managed site visit with the media. Enthused, she told the politician, “I love it here. I go to school, and I hate it. My teacher tells me he hates it too, and that he has to be there because it’s his job. And that’s the difference, this youth club, these leaders, they don’t have to be here. They want to be here, they love us, and that’s made all the difference, you know?”

I visited an elementary school project that taught nurture approaches to students, faculty, administrators, and parents alike—emphasizing self-awareness, appropriate expectations, empathy, and positive discipline. As a result of this commitment, they saw violence and bullying at school eradicated. One parent, at risk of having her child taken by social services, had been sent to the program as a last resort. She told me plainly as we stood outside the brick building, “I had this ‘aha moment.’ I realized I was parenting my child the way what I was parented. So now I can change.” This statutory bad cop met with nonprofit good cop routine works well. Only the nonprofit could create the relationship role-modeling that allowed for this “aha moment.”

In our highly technocratic age, with almost limitless ability to administrate, we can forget the limits of administration and governance itself. The network of relationships between individuals—such as in marriages, friendships, neighborhoods, churches or nonprofits, and volunteer opportunities—are so crucial because of their voluntary quality, which generates trust within a group. This in-group security in turn allows one group greater generosity toward other, different groups. Apart from such relationships, an individual is both more vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and, in practical terms, to conspiracy.

The health of America’s relationships is important for both individual life outcomes as well as the vibrancy of America’s democracy. It is from this perspective that we should view policy interventions from government. Knowing that there are limits to how government can intervene, because one’s relationship with the government is often compulsory, the approach must be to foster voluntary relationships in lieu of direct government intervention. Family Resource Centers, known as Family Hubs in the U.K., bring together voluntary actors who can provide parenting courses, relationship advice, and practical support. The voluntary nature here being critical, because who would want to go to something like the DMV to be told how to raise your kids? 

Opportunity is in part economic, but it is primarily about relationships. As America experiences inequality of financial and relationships assets, our policy focus must be to work with the grain of voluntary relationships. Rebuilding our ecology of relationships—friendships, neighborliness, church-going—will boost the number of relationship role-models available to all of us. Increasing truly nonprofit activity accelerates trickle-down relationships, this “cross-class exposure,” and may even help to end the inequality of opportunity to that gold standard of relationships, marriage. For that to be achieved, a whole lot of relationship role modeling is required to be built across neighborhoods, workplaces, friendships, and nonprofits, as well as private enterprise. Voluntary relationships are the bedrock of our pursuit of happiness. 

Chris Bullivant is Director of Communications for the Institute for Family Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Social Capital Campaign.

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