“It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the family.”
Monitoring the Future, a long-running survey of American teenagers, has been tracking agreement with this statement for decades. In 2024, agreement among boys jumped to 41 percent, up from the lows of the late 2010s. Among girls, it nearly doubled to 23 percent.
Neal Milner cited those numbers in Civil Beat this week. He warned that gender equality is under threat. The manosphere is winning. Tradwife influencers on TikTok are radicalizing your children. The Groypers, Milner explains, are a network of white nationalists, antisemites, and anti-feminists. They are the vanguard of a new and more threatening Republican Party. Democrats, he warns, have no answer.
Read the statement again. Does it condemn single mothers? Does it forbid women from working? Does it bar women from leadership? It makes a modest claim about what usually works. “Usually” is not “always.”
The wording also loads the dice against agreement. Paid work is called “achievement.” Home life is something else. A teenager who sees raising children as an achievement is nudged toward disagreement.
“It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the family.”
I generally agree with the statement, though I’d add that a woman caring for her family is achieving just as much as a man working outside the home. I suspect many readers agree.
Now look at the trend line, as analyzed at Generation Tech.
Agreement climbed from 1991 to a peak around 2013. It fell through the late 2010s. It rebounded in 2024 to roughly where it had been. The puzzle is not the recent rise. It is everything before it.
Teen agreement was rising for 20 years — before broadband, before the iPhone, before Instagram. No tradwife influencers existed. The manosphere had not been named. Yet the line rose. Milner does not mention this. A theory that blames TikTok for the 2024 number has to explain something: Why was the same belief already climbing, decades before TikTok arrived?
There is a risk in believing polls and not talking to people, so I asked my wife.
She is 34, too old to have grown up with tradwife content. She pointed out that most talk about sex roles frames it as a binary choice — family or career. The real question is usually sequencing.
She started having children at 19. At 34, she’s home with a 10th grader, an 8th grader, a 6th grader, and our three-year-old. Most days she takes the youngest to the park. The other mothers there often express regret — not that they had careers, but that they waited to have children.
There are inspiring stories of women starting careers at 50. There are far fewer stories of women leaving careers to give birth at 50. The order matters.
My grandmother started having her five children in her teens. She was a homemaker first and later worked as a waitress. She didn’t become the schoolteacher she once dreamed of being. She’s 94 this year, with five children, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. A few years ago she wrote that she has no regrets.
Milner’s column performs a move Democrats have been making for a decade. Take a belief most of the Silent Generation held. Associate it with the worst actors who share some version of it. Insinuate that anyone holding the belief today must have been manipulated into it. Agreement with progressive conclusions is reasoning. Disagreement results from manipulation.
Were the Boomers who rejected traditional sex roles not also shaped by the media of their day? The universities, the press, the sitcoms that made Archie Bunker the butt of the joke?
Plenty of parties have been out of touch and recovered. The party that cannot recover is the one that treats its fellow citizens as inert clay, molded by whichever machine is in charge.
If you want to know why young people are returning to tradition, ask them. The families raising these teenagers are not a problem to be explained. They are neighbors worth listening to.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
