Nonetheless, determined that our own children wouldn’t make the same mistakes, all too many of us overcorrected, to the point where parents who let their kids explore their own neighborhoods are now sometimes viewed as negligent or reckless. My wife and I adopted a relatively “free range” parenting philosophy, but we knew to explain our approach to other parents when their kids came to visit. “We let our kids roam the neighborhood,” we’d say, “but we’ll keep them here if that makes you uncomfortable.” A high percentage of the parents we told this to didn’t want their kids to leave our house without us by their side.
Add these trends together, and the cultural pattern becomes clear. In the same way that one pebble can become a landslide, the sheer accumulation of isolating factors creates its own momentum. More-sheltered and cautious childhoods lead to less social engagement, less social engagement leads to less dating, and less dating lowers marriage rates.
All of this helps explain why men and women are living more separate lives, but does it explain their increasingly separate political beliefs? In part, yes. In 1999, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein published a paper called “The Law of Group Polarization,” in which he described a reality that is increasingly dominating our national life: When like-minded people gather, they tend to become more vehement in their jointly held beliefs. As Sunstein observed, among other examples, “people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed.”
In other words, if there are pre-existing political differences between men and women — and it’s true that in aggregate men are more conservative than women — then those differences will be exacerbated as men spend more time with men, and women spend more time with women. The more that men and women live separate lives, the more we would expect to see separate beliefs.
This is where smartphones and social media make their dramatic entrance. The cultural trends that separate men and women predate social media, but social media has undoubtedly made that separation much worse. Young men fall into the online orbit of male-centric celebrities, influencers and communities, and young women gravitate toward female-centric ones. As my colleague Lydia Polgreen noted on an excellent episode of the Times podcast Matter of Opinion, this self-segregation extends even to platforms: Women are disproportionately on TikTok, and men are on YouTube.
