Celebrity Families Might Solve Everything

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**John Bickley** (0:33)
The phenomenon of celebrity influence is nothing new, of course. But in the modern era, many of us underestimate just how much the celebrities we look up to can shape our lifestyle choices.

**Georgia Howe** (0:44)
I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor, John Bickley. This is a weekend episode of Morning Wire.
Joining us now is Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. Lyman, thanks for coming on.

**Lyman Stone** (1:00)
It's great to talk to you.

**Georgia Howe** (1:02)
So you recently wrote an op-ed available on the Daily Wire platform, arguing for more famous families. So can you describe what a famous family is, what counts and why you think we need more of them?

**Lyman Stone** (1:17)
It turns out that we live in a culture where celebrities matter, where people actually do care about influencers, public figures. And what we did is we surveyed almost 5,000 Americans, we asked them who do they most admire, we figured out how many kids the person that they named had, and then we checked to see, does that predict their own family size desires, their intentions to have kids, things like that. And the answer is, yes, it does.
People who admire celebrities with more kids want to have more kids. And if the celebrity they admire has more kids than they have, they're slightly more likely to actually intend having more kids. So we interpret that to just be a way of saying that public celebrity culture matters.

**Georgia Howe** (2:01)
So when you were looking up these famous families, could it be any person that they said they admired you would just, for example, there's a lot of Instagram influencers that aren't necessarily famous people, but they have a wide following. Just when you were talking about that, I thought about the Mormon mommy bloggers that were huge 10 years ago, and they tend to have very large families.
Okay, so it could be anyone, and you just looked up who they were.

**Lyman Stone** (2:27)
Yeah, and in fact, we got some people you may know.
I think we got three people who said Ben Shapiro was their number one most admired figure. We got like nine who said Alibeth Stuckey. Some people said athletes, some people said the Pope, musicians, artists. We got a whole gamut.

**Georgia Howe** (2:46)
Now, when you were creating this survey, what were the demographics that you were going after? Just American adults writ large or did you look at like Gen Z, Millennials, maybe Gen X?

**Lyman Stone** (2:57)
We're looking at Americans ages 18 to 50 But when we specifically studied the question of how do these celebrity family sizes shape your own desires, we looked at people under the age of 30 Because we really wanted to look at people just starting out their families for that question. So we had about 1200 respondents who were under 30 Obviously, we could really only study some of the bigger names. But yeah, it was an unselected population of people in the US ages 18 to 50 We did control for various demographic background traits in all of this, particularly the number of children they already had.
But it was a pretty broad slice of the population.

**Georgia Howe** (3:45)
Were you able to determine that it was causal, that the celebrity that they admire caused them to want to have more kids, or you just observed that there was that correlation there?

**Lyman Stone** (3:56)
Yeah, mostly we're just observing the correlation.
We can't see how people change their admired figures over time or something like that.
So this is mostly a correlation. At the same time, the existing academic literature makes it very clear that public culture really does cause changes. So the famous example is in Brazil, when they were rolling out the TV network, the TV network would only run telenovelas from one network. They found wherever the telenovelas expanded, people had fewer kids because the telenovelas focused on the lives of people, of these ambitious young women who were having smaller than average family sizes. You might say, well, how do you know that's really causal? You can do the math and try and prove it. But then they're like, what if we just look at the names of children? And they found that the names of characters in the show immediately spiked in popularity for the names of children born after the TV network arrived. So I don't think it's crazy to think that these effects could be causal, but we were not able to specifically show causality. All we're able to show in this first round of this project is there is an association, and the association is not small. For a young woman, for example, the effect of admiring a celebrity with one more kid on her desired family size is actually bigger than the effect of her having one more sibling. And we all know that the family you grow up in shapes your view of your own family. But it turns out the family of the celebrity you admire is even more predictive.