How modern families increase social inequality

[Music] the family has always been a central building block of society but families have changed dramatically in the rich world over the past 50 years he knows he has a donor he knows that we're both his parents he knows he doesn't have a dad and all of that and it's just normal changes to society mean that the old model of a bread winning husband in a stay-at-home wife has all but collapsed a single mom support my own children is the normal nowadays and the different ways rich and poor families raise their children are increasing social inequality we are basically paying for preschool what I paid for college [Music] fifty years ago families didn't look like this we're so gay we work together live together and love it today gay families like Maggie and Joe ELLs are widely accepted in the rich world there are so many gay families in San Francisco it's amazing it is becoming increasingly normalized but within this photo a generation ago it was almost unthinkable that same-sex couples would get married look at this one this one's really pretty I like this one but now most people in rich countries think gay marriage is fine I really really wanted our families to accept our marriage as a marriage and not just like a girlfriend and I think until that time I swear I think my family just thought I was in a phase for you know 15 years you were right the wedding definitely had that effect on our families they they're in it with us now fears that gay marriages would undermine heterosexual ones have proven unfounded and this is one reason why marriage equality has spread so extraordinarily fast before 2001 gay marriage was not legal anywhere in the world since then it's been legalized in nearly all rich countries and developing nations are starting to follow suit in California the the right to get married was on and off but I think who months before our wedding was when it became permitted so that was a big part of our ceremony it's a far cry from the 1960s when families typically consisted of a dad who went to work a stay-at-home mum and three or more kids better access for women to contraception education and jobs has changed this traditional family portrait [Music] across the globe family is a shrinking nowhere more so than in South Korea [Music] here a growing number of women are rejecting marriage and having children all together like goalie who is 26 oh yeah all know them well Gary upon me there to Medina like many South Korean women go and have friends are well educated she says traditional employers make it hard to combine a career with marriage and motherhood took her on a hot young kid or cushy one unit and entail Koryo dog into another put on yon take our kingdoms hired a scorecard on top and I don't wanna go I don't wanna back off a choreo a look at when to the Hashi that bar let's move on to cuddly we do here is your cool it's a cool yogurt honey don't dis your king dad cook it has a Russian and also we took our food August us all go works in IT but is also a vlogger on YouTube where she urges South Korean women to be more assertive Yogi's were all bleating but soon Hong da da da da a powerful ta how you got Windham your song little dirty joke you car toy reporter a Bonnie's heroin hockey table name [Music] she believes South Korean men are part of the problem many expect their wives to do all the housework and childcare even if they have a job they call each other about the policy Tony Hall you're taller she's only because I'm cool [Music] cuts on his own then I don't have all a [ __ ] on house making humming game this is talking in a large amount got more I don't cut only rich kingdom crow woman's and then cut me about being I didn't have you I needed them there is a huge mismatch of expectations around marriage in South Korea most men want a 1950s style relationship whereas women want something more modern and equal the result is they often end up not marrying or having kids at all and that's left South Korea with a problem its population is in freefall in 1960 the average South Korean woman had six children in 2018 that picker shrank to less than one a fertility rate of one means each generation is half as big as the previous one and in South Korea this means there are fewer workers to support the country's aging population in rural areas men are viewed as poor prospects by South Korean women so the government is helping these men to find Brides from poorer countries state-funded assimilation centers like this teach immigrant brides how to cook Korean food how to speak Korean and even how to deal with Korean mothers and me like most of her classmates studying here today 19 year old went econ a toy is from Vietnam she recently married a South Korean man 40-year old Kim Dae hyung who found her through a matchmaking website the one can your wife was not any trouble troyzan sure as I wipe around half of me touching will be how important disposable over a fifth of married South Korean farmers and fishermen have tied the knot with a foreigner angle while enjoy watching the curandera always but cross-cultural unions can be difficult and around 1/5 of marriages between South Korean men and foreign women end in divorce within four years this video of a man beating his foreign wife caused widespread outrage 50 years ago in most rich countries domestic violence was considered normal now it is universally condemned and rates have fallen sharply by three quarters in America alone since the mid-1990s today other factors are more likely to affect the stability of families and these are contributing to a growing gulf between middle-class and working-class families in most rich countries if you don't go to university you're more likely to have kids outside of marriage and women who don't finish high school are more likely to end up as single mothers than women who have a degree [Music] [Music] I'm a single mom because at 20 weeks pregnant dad decided that he didn't want to be around dong-won so I let him walk it was easier to wallet and walk then than it was for him to actually build an attachment with the kids and then walk in Jamie's hometown of Hartlepool in northeast England 70% of babies are born outside marriage hey Shawny we're gonna cook these tonight like her twins Shawn and Liam I am the solar owner of the household without my income and my kids interrupt me Oh get in fetch me cucumbers because they awesome can be a financial struggle to accomplish movie in Hartlepool in the 1960s men did heavy working shipyards and factories which was much better paid than any job their wives could find so the women stayed at home with the kids but as technology advances manual workers dried up and uneducated men have struggled to find good jobs [Applause] everything's industrial here in Hartlepool is gone there's nothing left what comes with industrial decline poverty depression anxiety family breakups marriages separating suicide has all sorts at common because people feel the can provide for their family if the only men available like steady jobs and don't help around the home some women feel they are better off alone it can't be hard to be a man I presume it would be hard you know having to step back a little bit and realize that you might not be the breadwinner and that you are actually you haven't to rely on a woman to feed the family and keep the roof over the head so yeah it can't be hard for a month middle-class families have remained solid in rich countries over the past 50 years while working-class families hope grow much less stable women with the university degree are more likely than women who do not finish high school to be married and raise children with their husband as a team and this is contributing to a growing social divide a divide that's increasingly apparent in the very different ways middle and working class families are raising their children although American fathers from all backgrounds do much more child care than the previous generation today wealthier fathers spend much more time with their kids than their poorer counterparts do [Music] most of the weakness for example my wife takes care of them taking them to school thinking of the mob and then when I come from work I fit them I play with him a better pair take that and get in a bath and go to sleep and during the weekends we switch a little bit my husband always comes back home and takes care of that like dinner sometimes or breakfast during the weekend so it's a very like 5050 I would say harvard-educated Gerardo shares the childcare duties with his wife Perla who also studied there the couple are investing time and money and stimulating their children intellectually we do think her too for example like abacus classes after school or she's like starting to learn how to do additions and subtractions and sometimes we come home and do a little bit of extra work by the age of three the children of professional families have heard 30 million more words than children from poorer backgrounds from zero to five it's very important that you spend time with your kids from there it's like you feel they already have the values ingrained and the Securities positive what I think a child's early years are the most important for cognitive development so children of professionals have a head start long before they start school the pushy middle class style of raising kids is sometimes called intensive parenting [Music] so intensive parenting as it's the idea that parents are investing an enormous amount of time and energy in their children's development early on Sean Riordan is a professor of poverty and equality in education at Stanford University and has studied the influence of class on parenting and how well kids do in school it's it's as if you thought of your child as an orchid a delicate flower that needs daily attention as opposed to thinking of your child in the way that parents used to think of their children as a tree or a bush we don't water the trees or the bushes they it's in their nature to grow and barring any sort of catastrophe they'll do just fine middle-class parents not only talk more to their children and take them to ballet chess and extra math classes they also compete to get them into the best schools actually where school is less than a mile from here and he said by you also they have teacher school time Mandarin and full time English and all of them have master's degrees and very high level education [Music] Gerardo and Perlas daughter Elizabeth is learning five languages including Mandarin I think going to the school she's gonna be more open to learning and talking with people like turning around and speaking Mandarin and tooken around and speaking Spanish okay but all this education doesn't come cheap Elizabeth's preschool costs thirty one thousand dollars a year definitely costs of take care and preschool have been way more than we expected originally we were basically paying for preschool what I paid for college [Music] so in the richest communities in United States the average student scores three to four grade levels above the national average and in the poorest communities with average student scores maybe two to three grade levels below the national average so the difference in performance is a result of differences in opportunities [Music] a gulf is growing between wealthy families that stick together and raise high achieving kids and blue-collar families that struggle to do either this gap is about much more than money well-educated men are more likely than in the past to marry highly educated women the children of these clever parents are more likely to be clever and the children of stable families are more likely to raise stable and high achieving families of their own as you get a society that's more divided economically and educationally increasingly run the risk of having a society that doesn't have empathy for other parts of itself the risk is you end up with a kind of more socially and economically polarized society as a result of this well educated families have become success factories passing on their advantages to their kids by contrast many poorer children grow up with no first-hand experience of what a stable family looks like [Music] as men and women have grown more equal over the past 50 years families have grown much less so you

Channel: The Economist

Views: 1,510,462

Keywords: the economist, Economist, Economist Films, News, Politics, Economist Videos, short-documentary, family, single parents, working class family, income inequality, middle class, social inequality, single mom, single parenting, schools, school, divorce, relationships, feminist, women, equality

Id: hSmAYUnZyxE

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2019

Reddit Comments

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[u/[deleted]]

It’s kind of a trend in south, east and south-east Asia too. These cultures (I’m South Asian BTW) are so inherently misogynistic that most women choose to forgo marriage or any form of partnerships. I’d rather stay single all my life than be stuck as a second class citizen in a marriage.

[u/[deleted]]

I was reading an article recently that mentioned South Korea as one of the worst countries to live as a woman. I was surprised and had no idea about it! I wonder if those 2 things are connected somehow.

[u/[deleted]]

Women are literally out evolving men all over the world. Women are top in schools and soon they will be the top in every area of expertise. Meanwhile, men sit at home pornsick, in dirty underwear with a headset on, trolling internet forums and repeating their "hurdur womun stay home in cave, u wash my socks, that your purpose." That their fathers taught them. It's so embarrassing for them.

[u/what_about_the_birds]

The mismatch in expectation rings very true for indian women as a well.