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The American family continuously evolves. People are marrying later, and having fewer children. Gay people get married. People can publicly swear off marriage altogether without being ostracized. But in politics the attachment to the traditionally nuclear family seems unwavering, and especially this year. As Republicans are losing support among women, more candidates are leaning on their wives and daughters to soften their image. So strong is the pressure that one candidate in Virginia posed with his friend’s wife and daughters and left the impression he was married.

Why is there this enduring notion that there is just one version of the “ideal family”? In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk to Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of Screaming on the Inside. Grose pinpoints the origin of the American fixation on the nuclear family. And she explains how the candidates’ evoking of this ideal gets in the way of supporting policies that might actually help families

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I think it’s fair to say that the family has been deployed in this election in more overt ways than usual. A great example: the very tight, very closely watched race for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. The Democrats are hoping to flip the seat.

Their candidate is Eugene Vindman, an Army veteran and lawyer. But not only that: He’s a dad.

Eugene Vindman’s daughter: This is our dad.

Eugene Vindman: I’m Eugene Vindman.

Eugene Vindman’s son: And he is running for Congress.

Vindman: And I approve this message.

Daughter: Just say hi, Dad.

Vindman: Hi, Dad.

Rosin: Vindman’s adorable, red-headed daughter gives him the sitcom-dad treatment. She jabs him in the ribs, and his wife and son laugh. It’s all very cute, and it’s all part of a very explicit strategy.

In a place like exurban Virginia, Republicans are vulnerable, especially with women voters. The gender divide between the two parties is big and growing. So in Vindman’s other ad, he takes on his opponent, Derrick Anderson, for being a MAGA extremist and, particularly, on this one important issue.

Campaign ad narrator: When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Derrick Anderson said the Supreme Court got it right. He’s wrong because now, women face criminal prosecution and life-threatening complications.

Rosin: In campaign ads across the country, Republicans and Democrats are fighting for the hearts and minds of women by showcasing the women—more specifically, their wives and daughters.

Dave McCormick: When we call a family meeting, the first vote’s always the same: 6 to 1.

Dina Powell: 7 to 1.

McCormick: I want one thing and our six daughters want something else—6 to 1.

Powell: And me, 7 to 1.

Matt Gunderson: I believe abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I don’t want politicians dictating health care for my daughters.

Jaymi Sterling: When Larry Hogan married my mom, he became a father to three strong, independent women. As pop-pop to four granddaughters, we know you can trust him too.

Larry Hogan: I’m Larry Hogan, and I’m proud to approve this message.

Rosin: To bring it back around to that Virginia race: The Republican in that race, Derrick Anderson, doesn’t have a wife or daughters—or any children—just a fiancé.

News clip: Derrick Anderson, an unmarried GOP candidate in Virginia, posed with his friend’s wife and kids to give the impression he is a family man. The photo was used in a campaign video. But, again, they are not his family.

Rosin: He posed with his friend’s wife and children in front of a house and a lawn in a holiday-card configuration that very much left the impression that this was his family. Which begs the question: Why, in an era of declining marriages, delayed marriages in parenting, all different kinds of marriages, is the ideal of a traditional family still so strong?

Why would a candidate pull a risky move like that, rather than just say to the voters, I’m not married yet?

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

“Cat ladies,” “our dad in plaid,” “Mamala”—judging from this week’s VP debate, both sides are fighting for who has a lock on being more pro-family.

But that fixation didn’t start in 2024. It has deep roots in American history. And, weirdly, the more the American family shifts and changes, the more certain segments of society cling onto it for dear life.

Certain men are drifting conservative, while women are drifting more liberal. And the irony is, that’s affecting the actual American family. Fewer people are falling in love and starting a family.

So I wanted to understand this gap between the ideal family that shows up in politics, on Instagram, on TV and the living, breathing, actual American family.

And the perfect person to talk to about that is Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Screaming on the Inside. She writes about these stories we have about gender and family, what she calls scripts. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So, Jess, one of the things I deeply appreciate about your book is how you make explicit these scripts that we’ve inherited about what the American family should be, what it should look like. I feel like these are things we don’t even think about. We just think, Oh, yeah. That’s normal. That’s what it should be.

Can you talk about what some of these scripts are and where they come from, where their roots are?

Jessica Grose: So even these ideas of the nuclear family—so mom, dad, 2.5 kids, house, all that—that was allegedly the main and only form of family ever in the United States. It was never true for everyone, even at its peak.

There was lots of sex outside of marriage. There was lots of divorce. There was lots of separation that didn’t become a divorce. There were single parents. There’s all sorts of different family structures. But where does it come from? Shorthand is: The Industrial Revolution created a real divide between the domestic sphere and the public sphere.

So in preindustrial America, everybody was in and around the home: moms, dads, extended family, servants if you were wealthy. And kids worked.

The Industrial Revolution happens. They create this sort of separation between the workplace and the home. The home was seen as women’s domain. The workplace was seen as the male domain. And even now—where the majority of women work, the majority of mothers even with young children at home work—we still are stuck in these sort of old-fashioned scripts that, if they ever were true, were true for maybe a hundred years.

Rosin: Which is amazing to me, how enduring these scripts are and how much they pervade our sense of how things should be and what is normal, and particularly in the U.S., and particularly in American politics. It seems like in every era, the script takes on a slightly different form. We’ll just, for shorthand, say: in every political era. So how do you see them showing up now? Like, what is the ideal American family, as reflected in the current political dialogue?

Grose: I would say that it is pretty uncontroversial now for women to work. It is still valorized in some places for women to stay home, and it’s still unacceptable in some sort of cultural enclaves.

But I would say, in American culture writ large, it’s pretty uncontroversial for a woman to work. However, they are still expected to do the majority of domestic tasks, which many of them—us—don’t love. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Grose: And I think in this political era, marriage and long-term commitment is still so normative that—and I’m so curious about what you think about this—I think we will see a married, gay president before we see a single president.

Rosin: Yes. I mean, it’s funny you should say that, you know, it’s normal for women to work. What surprises me is—we’ll take the “childless cat ladies” moment: I understand that everybody made fun of vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance for saying, “childless cat ladies.” He got a lot of grief for it. But it is a little bit amazing to me that that would even come up, that you could still vilify a single, working woman.

Grose: Yeah, that’s why, you know, a lot of conservative commentators will say, The culture is so anti-marriage. The culture is so anti-family, you know, Democrats and liberals are trying to destroy the American family, when, you know, every pop-cultural thing is about marriage.

I mean, look at not even just modern things, like Bridgerton—hugely successful Netflix show about the marriage plot, right? The idea that somehow now the goal for most people still isn’t marriage and kids is demonstrably untrue based on polling. Whether or not they actually accomplish that and it happens for them—that’s another story. But still, do most people want to get married and have children? Most young people, yes.

Rosin: And is that statistically true?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: On the left and the right?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. Then I want to run this theory by you because that’s what I thought was true, that on the left and the right, the desire to be married is the same. But there’s something splitting in the—

Grose: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s the same, but I would say it is the majority on both.

Rosin: It’s the majority on both.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So I want to try and locate what is splitting between men and women. Because if men and women both still want to get married, and yet there seem to be just wide divergences about what that looks like—what the marriage looks like, what the ideal looks like—I just want to locate where the split is.

So I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The End of Men” and then turned that into a book, like, over a decade ago. So I’ve been tracking this gender divide for a while. Back then I would say it was nascent. Like, you could see that women were pulling ahead in sectors of the economy, and men were resisting adapting. And I wasn’t really sure how it would play out, either in the economy or in the marriage market.

And I would say, you know, a decade-plus—it’s gotten more extreme. And what’s gotten more extreme is that men have hunkered down in their attachment to traditional male–female roles, which is, like—that’s not obvious. It’s not how it rolled out in many other countries. And just one more part of this theory is that women are then resisting that. Like, it’s a reactive cycle. Like, the more that men dig in—in corners of the internet, in the culture, in politics—the more women resist.

Grose: I think that is true for some. I mean, if you look at the polling, there is definitely a gender divide in terms of how liberal women have become and that there are just simply more conservative men. That is true.

I think the education part of it is really important, because I think college-educated men have, for the most part, accepted more egalitarian structures. They, you know, need their wives to work. I mean, the idea that you’re going to be a two-income family, I think, is, for most people who have children, just a necessity.

Like, you cannot, you know, support in any sort of real way multiple children on one income in most parts of the country. So I think, however they feel about it, they need the money.

Rosin: You’re resisting the broader research about diverging worldviews, it sounds like. So where do men and women diverge then?

Grose: Well, no. I’m not resisting it. I just think it’s concentrated among men who are already conservative. So I think those men are becoming more polarized and more conservative.

But I’m not sure, again. Based on the sort of polling about these, it’s like: So the way the question is asked and by whom and in what way—there’s just so much noise in this data. So I definitely buy that there is a subset of young men—and there are maybe more of them—who were already conservative, who are pushed to more extreme versions of conservatism.

Does that mean that in Gen Z, we’re just going to have this massive gender divide, and no heterosexual people will ever get married again, which is what the Washington Post argued in an op-ed? I don’t buy that—for many reasons, number one being: I just think thirst outweighs politics.

Rosin: Thirst? (Laughs.)

Grose: Horniness. Desire.

Rosin: Oh, thirst. Desire. Yes. To get married.

Grose: Yes. To get married.

Rosin: I mean, that’s cute.

Grose: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I mean, very cute. I know you love your husband. I’ve seen you post many wonderful things about him, but—

Grose: I’m a normie. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.

Rosin: It’s okay. You’re a normie and a romantic, as far as I can tell.

But there are countries where it hasn’t rolled out that way. I mean, there are countries—say, South Korea, to some extent Japan—where the pressures on women, combined with their increasing presence in the workforce, combined with the unyielding social and cultural pressures, has actually resulted in lower marriage rates, refusal to marry, and lower birth rates.

Like, that is a real thing.

Grose: It is a real thing, but we’re just so much less homogenous, culturally and racially and religiously, than those countries, and our attitude towards women working is much more advanced and always has been. So, you know, I don’t see the future for the United States as a South Korea.

Is it possible that the future for the United States could be more like Germany or one of the other Western European countries where the birth rates are really pretty low? I think that is more of a realistic possibility.

But there is a lot of variation. And I think young men, in my experience in reporting, do want to be more involved in their children’s lives. Like, they don’t see it necessarily as “unmanly.” The thing that they do see as unmanly is earning significantly less than their wives.

That always does seem to be the sticking point. So I do think we have successfully—for some, not for everybody—made caretaking seen as an acceptable thing for men to do.

Rosin: Across social classes?

Grose: It depends. It really depends. I think we live in such a big country. We live in such a specific country, regionally. I think that that does cut across class to some extent.

I often think about this Republican pollster that I interviewed, and she was talking about how paid leave is popular for everyone. Like, men really want it too. And she described talking to a rural dad who had an hourly job, and he was talking about how his wife had a C-section, and she really couldn’t lift anything, and he really wanted to be there to help her. That was not seen as unmanly or whatever to him. Like, that was extremely desirable and what he really wanted, and he couldn’t afford to take the time off work, because he’s an hourly worker. So he doesn’t work; doesn’t get paid.

So I think about that a lot. I think it just really depends. But I do think more women going to college and college graduates, for the most part, out-earning non-college graduates—I see that as a potentially bigger problem.

Rosin: Right. You just have women in the middle class who are just out-earning the marriageable men around them.

Grose: Right.

Rosin: After the break, we go back to politics and talk about how these gender dynamics are affecting the upcoming election.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so back to this election. The gender divide just keeps getting wider and wider in the U.S. between Republicans and Democrats. Given all the statistics you just said about marriage and family, what would you mark as the origin point of that growing divide?

Grose: Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. I literally saw a graph today that showed that the divide really became a yawning gap starting in 2015 among young people. Even the fall of Roe didn’t move the needle the way Trump and his rhetoric moved the needle.

Rosin: Really?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: That’s surprising.

Grose: I mean, he is so uniquely repellent to young women. And who can blame them?

And I wonder if also—I mean, and this is more speculation—the outpouring of #MeToo, which I think is an immediate cause, was a response to Trump being elected, in many ways. And perhaps, seeing that sort of outpouring of storytelling and upset, and then seeing that nothing really changed, right? Like, can we point to sort of any demonstrable policy outcomes of #MeToo? Harvey Weinstein’s in jail. But sort of on an individual level, is young women’s daily experience of sexism markedly different? I don’t know.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: And then seeing, like, We did this whole movement. We marched in the streets. And what’s changed, socially and culturally, you know? We’re now—what?—the third generation post-sexual revolution, post-women really flooding into the workplace and colleges. And so I wonder if that is sort of another frustration.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Grose: Well, cultural progress has stalled somewhat for women, right?

Rosin: I see.

Grose: So you know, obviously Roe was overturned. But it’s like, my mom was one of—her medical-school class was like 5 to 10 percent women, right? And so I was raised in a community where my mom was one of the few full-time working moms, right?

And now my daughters are being raised in a community where, I think, all of their friends’ moms work full-time.

I do think that there is possibly a sense among young women—it’s like, Well, I saw my grandma. My grandma was working. My mom was working. Why, culturally, am I still doing the majority of the work? Why am I still more mature than all of these boys? Why are the expectations on me to be different, a certain kind of way, still what they are when we’ve been fighting for this for so long?

Rosin: I see. That makes some sense to me, that we had for the last, let’s say—it’s not even that long, but let’s say—50, 60 years been making progress on quantifiable issues, like wages, workplace participation, certain kinds of social acceptability, and now we’ve landed at the difficult, murky cultural issues, and those do seem stalled in many ways.

Grose: That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

Rosin: So digging more into this election, the interesting thing to me in this election is that everyone is fighting over the “normal” territory, like who’s weird and who’s normal. And while it’s novel that Democrats are making headway, it does actually make me a little nervous when people start defining normal—like, collecting around normal, because we all kind of know who they mean and who they’re excluding.

So to start with just the low-hanging fruit—that’s J.D. Vance. In 2021, when he was running, this is when the “childless” situation came up. And he used the word normal. He said: “Is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”

This is a policy view that some people in the conservative world like, that people with children should have greater voting power, sort of greater influence in how the country is run.

Grose: One of the things that I find saddest is that there are a lot of policies that pro-family liberals and pro-family conservatives agree on, or at least can come to the table to talk about—child tax credits being the main one, but paid leave is pretty universally popular. I think childcare will never happen, because that is something that they can’t agree on, because many conservatives feel the government should not have a role in supporting children being cared for by anybody but their own parents. But, you know, that’s another topic.

There are a lot of low-hanging fruit of policy that we could come to a somewhat bipartisan agreement on, but when you frame it as, you know, quote-unquote, “normal people,” “parents versus everybody else,” it just makes it impossible.

Rosin: Yeah, what’s confusing about J. D. Vance is sometimes he talks about the family issues in this culture-war-ish ways, like the Vance who talks to Tucker Carlson about cat ladies, but then there’s the J. D. Vance who, in mixed company, talks in a lot more measured ways about being pro-family. Like, maybe he could come to an agreement on child tax credits.

Grose: Well, you know, listen—I don’t know what is in this man’s heart. I have never spoken to him. But I suspect, based on the things he said before he became pro-Trump and the things that he said after he became pro-Trump, that this is calculated. I don’t know that it’s a sincere belief. I just don’t know.

He has, you know, explained his sort of change and revelations, and he’s converted, and he’s moved to a different mindset. And that’s, you know—maybe that’s genuine. I don’t know.

I mean, to me, it’s just bad politics, because there are a lot of people without children who vote Republican. So why are you alienating voters? Like, that’s number one: Don’t alienate huge groups of people.

Like, it’s just a bad idea. But I do think, number one, if it is not genuine, it’s to appeal to, you know, his potential future boss and all of his followers. And if it is genuine, I think it is pushed further and deeper by reading and listening to sources that just echo a very narrow idea and push you further into the same talking points, and surrounding yourself with the same people who only believe these things and sort of gets you into sort of more extreme territory on these issues.

Rosin: Yeah, I suppose that’s other whole version of J.D. Vance, which is the very-online version of him.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Like, when he’s gone on conservative podcasts in the past and talked, for example, about how childless leaders are “more sociopathic.” This is the kind of language that comes from certain corners of the internet.

Grose: Yeah. And if you hear him talk on all these podcasts that people were furiously clipping, it’s clear when he speaks to this audience of conservative bros, it’s almost unintelligible to people who are not versed in their shorthand. Well, one thing they often say about parents versus nonparents is that nonparents don’t have quote-unquote “skin in the game.”

And it’s just like, What do you mean? They’re part of society. They’re in the community. They’re using parks. They’re using roads. Like, they do have skin in the game. Like, they do.

Rosin: I just want to say: I am the parent of three children. I love my children. I find this argument to be absolutely absurd because people who have children are narrowly focused on their family and their children. And anybody who doesn’t have children is probably spending a lot more time thinking about the community, making more-logical decisions about broader issues and what should be done. Like, I would not pick a busy parent of three kids to be the one to make, like, broad social policy and decide what our future is.

You’re welcome to write me all the hate mail you want, parents. Again, I have three children, and I love them all. But I find just, like, the base idea that parents are more invested or intelligent about the future to be absurd.

Grose: Well, actually, the part of it that bothers me more is the idea that parents are more moral than nonparents. In statements defending them—both Sean Combs, [who] is accused of really vile sexual assault, and then Justin Timberlake, who was pulled over for driving under the influence—they said that they were family men. And they use that phrase, “family men.” And it’s like, Who cares?

Rosin: Right.

Grose: It has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

Rosin: Yes. Absolutely.

Grose: And that it’s even in the year 2024 used as some kind of defense—or, you know, moral superiority or whitewashing or whatever it is—is, like, insane to me.

Rosin: I mean, I think this is why I love in your book this surfacing of the scripts, because there’s just an unconscious, assumed “family equals good.” And so you can just call that up in any moment that you need to. It’s just so—exactly. He could be a terrible father. I wouldn’t, I mean—Puff Daddy—I wouldn’t want him to be the parent of a young girl.

Grose: Donald Trump is a family man. Like, Who cares?

Rosin: Yes. That’s, like, a data point about someone, like their age. It doesn’t say anything about their moral worth or goodness.

Grose: Well, my spiciest take, which is: I just think that we still have a first lady or first gentleman in the year 2024 is absurd. This is an unpaid job. Why? For what? Pay someone to do that job, and stop making the president and the vice president our mommy and daddy. Like, What Freudian nonsense is this? Like, I don’t like it at all. (Laughs.)

And I hate the focus on, you know, the scrutiny. I felt so bad for the scrutiny on the Bush twins and Malia and Sasha Obama. Like, Leave the kids alone. Leave Barron Trump alone. Let him live at NYU. I don’t care what he’s doing. Like, I hate it. I hate all that.

And that is the one thing I agree with Melania Trump about. Like, Leave them alone. Just leave them all alone. Do not bring this sideshow into the government. Like, it has nothing to do with the job of being president, and it shouldn’t.

Rosin: Right. Right. So what is the Democratic vision of families? Like, what do we actually see from the left?

Grose: Well, I do think it is, again, these cultural scripts, and these were around when you wrote your book. For college-educated people—and now there is an association with college education and being a Democratic, liberal voter, so that’s an association that exists—children are seen as the capstone. So you get married. You get a good job. You then have kids.

And I think that there is more room in conservative cultures to have kids when they come. And there’s also a lot more pressure not to have, in religious circles, to not have sex before you’re married, and if you do get pregnant, to get married. And that association has actually loosened over time. But it’s still, I think, somewhat of the attitude—that, like, You should have kids really young, and even if you can’t fully financially provide for them, that’s okay. You’ll figure it out.

I think that is, you know, not the norm [among the] college educated and especially urban, college educated. I mean, if you look at the average age of first-time moms in places like New York and San Francisco, it is now, you know, pushing 35. It’s like 33.

Rosin: Right, so it’s not childless cat ladies. It’s just, like, “delay the children and also have a cat” lady.

Grose: Well, delay the children because you’re getting educated and because living in cities is really expensive. I mean, I think I would like just to generally push back on the negative framing of all of this. It’s like, It’s good that women have access to education. It is good that it is much more unusual for people under 19 to have children. Like, these are all things that we saw as unalloyed societal goods, right? Like, and now there’s sort of this funhouse mirror of, like, No. It’s bad. Now it’s bad. It’s like, Well, is it? Is it just: We have new challenges because of these changes?

And so I sort of just always want to make sure we’re framing it that way, that it’s like, There’s new challenges. Yes. We do have to think about the birth rate more. We do have to think about how hard it is for people to start wanted families. We do have to think about, you know: Are people not meeting people that they want to have children with anymore, and why is that? And it’s so complicated.

I can’t, I mean—I just don’t think that there is some crisis of the liberal family. I just don’t buy that. I think many liberal men and women in their 20s have anxiety and dread about having children, but people have always had anxiety and dread about having children.

For my book, I read the diaries and letters of women going back hundreds of years, and their emotions were identical to what people feel today about having children. It’s scary. It’s, you know—the greatest responsibility you can have is for other humans. The only difference now is many people have an actual choice about whether to become parents. It is somewhat socially acceptable to not have children. And it’s like: The second it is even barely socially acceptable to not have children, there’s this huge backlash and panic and fear. And I think we should be really highly suspicious of that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: Like these feelings are not new. People have always felt this way. Why are we—

Rosin: —so afraid of them?

Grose: So afraid of them, saying these emotions are aberrant and not, you know—if having children is the right thing for you to do, these are normal feelings to have on the journey to get there.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

In terms of political theater, that is, if you could mandate something, what would it be? Would you be like, You’re never allowed to talk about a politician’s family? You would ban the term, you know, first gentleman, first lady. Like, what would Jess Grose’s rules of political theater be?

Grose: Oh, it would definitely be: We never talk about anyone’s family. We just never talk about it. We only talk about their policies. We do not parade them around at conventions. We do not blow up their Instagrams. Like, it’s ridiculous. Like, I just—it only turns negative, I think. And I think it’s, especially to minor children, unfair.

Rosin: Yeah. And I think in a deeper way, what it does is perpetuate the script that the only person who can be in charge of us, our leader—the only person we can trust, the only person of good character—is a person with a so-called normal family.

Grose: I agree with that.

Rosin: All right. Well, we’re in full agreement. Jess, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Grose: Anytime.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Morgan Ome. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.