[Key quotes] Episode 95: Rob Henderson

(From Spotify):

Impact of Family Stability on Childhood Outcomes: "even among sort of middle or upper middle class families, if there's a lot of sort of disorder and divorce and remarriages and separations and just sort of day to day uncertainty in a young child's life, they're much more likely to go on to get involved in crime or become addicted to substances, or commit self harm or hurt others compared to living in a materially impoverished environment. But the family is stable and the child sort of has a predictable routine and a schedule and attentive parents."

— Rob Henderson [00:14:31 → 00:15:08]

Childhood Trauma and Its Long-lasting Impact: "If you've had a lot of stressful or traumatic or upsetting childhood experiences, and then later on you go on to earn a fancy degree and make a lot of money, those things don't magically make up for everything that happened before."

— Rob Henderson [00:23:34 → 00:23:49]

The Two-Parent Privilege: "And so if we're going to blame anyone, I would rather blame the absentee fathers or the deadbeat dads or the fathers who aren't involved in their children's lives, more so than the women who are often left holding the baby and having to care for it on her own."

— Rob Henderson [00:29:29 → 00:29:47]

Social Mobility and Family Influence: "University education is free in Denmark, but the same amount of poor kids go on to graduate from university in Denmark as in the US. And I think a lot of that has to do with. And they point this out in that paper, too, Heckman and his co authors, that families are overlooked."

— Rob Henderson [00:32:07 → 00:32:24]

Reproductive Technology and Societal Expectations: "Pregnancy is like, we have reproductive technology, but I'm not sure that they had necessarily the intended effect. I mean, I think they do manage to control pregnancy. But one thought experiment that I've suggested elsewhere is if you traveled back to 1945 and you told people, within a couple of decades, we're going to have a pill you can take that's going to prevent pregnancy, we're going to have, at least in most states, depending on the laws and so forth. But abortion will be pretty widely available, and you're just going to have this massive expansion of reproductive technology, morning after pill and so forth, much different than the situation in 1945, which was basically nothing or like whatever crazy back alley abortions and sort of homeopathic approaches to try to protect or prevent pregnancy. And so you ask people, you were going to have this future, do you think there are going to be more foster kids or fewer? Do you think there are going to be more single parents or fewer? Do you think there are going to be more unwanted kids or kids who are living in squalor, chaos or poverty or what have you. And I think a lot of people in 1945 would have said, no child's ever going to be born again unless their parents want them. There's probably not going to be any foster kids because any parent, any person who wants to have sex doesn't have to get pregnant anymore."

— Rob Henderson [00:46:09 → 00:47:43]

Resilience and Recovery from Trauma: "But part of the way that works is you can sort of get through a difficult situation, but you eventually do have to sort of pay the cost later. Whatever it is, whether it's a physical trauma or a mental trauma or psychological trauma, right, where in the moment, you could be in a car accident and have a serious injury, but because your body's in shock, you can actually move and the adrenaline is going. You can actually do things you ordinarily couldn't do because your body is in fight or flight and you're trying to survive, and then you don't even feel the pain, right?"

— Rob Henderson [01:14:22 → 01:15:00]

Cultural Influence and Health Perception: "And so collectively, if we all sort of look around and see tv shows on Netflix or op ed columnists or radio show hosts, just sort of, in the aggregate, all of the sort of media around us, all of the people around us, people who our culture deems as relevant and important voices to listen to. And all of them are saying, like, hey, healthy at any size, instead of like, hey, it's a good idea to sort of monitor your weight and your health and take care of yourself. Gradually, people are going to sort of follow into one pattern or the other based on the messages that they're hearing over and over from, quote unquote, important people."

— Rob Henderson [01:32:46 → 01:33:22]

Cultural Influences on Dating Trends: "There was one example of this, a friend of mine, he told me that when he set his dating app, radius, to just around the campus, which is like a 1 mile radius or whatever, he said that most of the women at this point, I think he was either a grad student or undergrad. He was early twenty s, and he said most of the women around him would have in their bios, I think. I don't remember what app this was, but a lot of them would say, like, polly, or keeping it casual, or nothing serious, or just kind of having fun and seeing what's out there. Just this sort of relaxed, casual attitude to relationships, or just like the poly thing of just like non monogamous, whatever. And then he said when he extended the radius to the dating app to encompass the rest of the town in its outskirts, which was a more sort of blue collar, low income area, same age category of women, whatever it was, 18 or 19 to 24, something about half of the women were single moms."

— Rob Henderson [01:34:11 → 01:35:11]

Educational Disparity and Lifestyle Choices: "If you go to an expensive university, being poly or casual or whatever just means having fun and having a good time. But for women who are not in that situation, who are in a more sort of more low income, more impoverished, dysfunctional environment, often you just get. You have sex with some guy, and then you end up having to take care of the resulting kid, and the kid goes on to have a difficult life. So, yeah, it just looks very different. And it would be nice if we thought more about this, that maybe you yourself, as a highly educated, intelligent, high impulse control, careful person with access to resources and cultural capital and so on, you yourself may be able to have a lot of different sexual partners and try different substances and sort of partake in things that may be fun and technically, maybe isn't hurting anyone in the short term, but in the long run, if people who are less fortunate than you partake in the same behaviors, it will cause their life to spiral out of control."

— Rob Henderson [01:35:20 → 01:36:30]

Managing Emotions and Finding Role Models: "But when you're young, it just feels like everything is either super great or the end of the world. And to just sort of understand that, don't assign too much value to whatever emotion you're feeling in the moment and try to think more about the future."

— Rob Henderson [01:40:50 → 01:41:06]