The “alternative lifestyle” of the young, married, father

A lot of my friends have been tut-tutting an NBC report (turn down your speakers) about David Wise, who won the gold medal in the skier halfpipe competition. The headline, of course, provided plenty of bait for conservatives: “David Wise’s alternative lifestyle leads to Olympic gold.”

It turns out that “alternative,” in the perspective of this NBC article, is that Wise, age 23, is married and has a young child. That’s where the outrage comes in. To paraphrase some comments I’ve seen, “NBC is saying that men who become husbands and fathers are freaks!” Underlying that is a fear that the network is seeking to delegitimize traditional family life. “What an upside down world we live in,” one might say, “when stable families are relegated to the marginal status of ‘alternative.'” The Washington Times, among other media outlets, expressed similar themes.

Certainly the U.S. has experienced some great shifts in family life: Divorce has become much more common since Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first “no-fault” divorce law, more children are what we used to say “born out of wedlock,” and fewer children live with married parents from the time they are born through the time they leave home. There are many implications for these developments, and I say that many of them are not good. (For a critical review of these trends, see From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. Full disclosure: I’ve done some work for the author.)

David Wise may be a great husband, superb father, and all-around find human being, and until I know otherwise, I’ll say that he is. But he is also, as we might say in statistics class, an outlier. According to the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States (published by the U.S. Census Bureau), only 11 percent of men aged 20-24 are married. It’s easy to imagine that among professional athletes, with the demands of a competitive schedule, the number would be even lower. So would it then be fair to say that a 23-year old man who is married and a father is living a life that is not shared by most of his peers?

Now, smart people reaching back to George Orwell (see his essay, Politics and the English Language), and in fact, thousands of years before him, argue that the words we use to describe someone or something shape social conventions and attitudes. So my traditionalist friends are not off the mark. But from a “just the numbers” viewpoint, David Wise is a rarity. Even so–or perhaps because of that–I say “good for him.”