How do our economic circumstances affect the role that traditional family units play in our culture? In this week’s episode of PREACH Dyalekt, Dedrick, and Pamela discuss the effect that the racial wealth divide has on the nuclear family concept. ------------------------------Episode Highlights: Dedrick: Marriage has always been an economic structure. I think it is only more recently that we have made marriage much more this idea of strictly about culture and even more so about love vs economic need or socio-economic need. Dyalekt: The reason why specifically Black families are thought of as not having fathers is because since the days that Africans were enslaved in America, we had our families separated. That is something where they knew what they were doing and decided to make it the norm. Even after folks were free and started to build their own, that idea persisted. The justification for why it was ok to enslave us became the justification of why it's ok to ignore us today. Dedrick: I think people use the two parent household for villainous purposes. I don’t think the two-parent household in any way is a villain just like the one parent household is not a villain. You can try to frame it in a negative way and use it for negative things but no, two parent households, one parent households are realities that we are dealing with.Dedrick: However, it’s not often talked about the deep costs of having kids. What does that mean in the context of racial economic inequality? Where Blacks and Latinos are making 60-65 cents on every dollar that Whites make and only have maybe 4-6 cents in terms of wealth. The costs for having children for Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are much higher than for Whites. What does that mean about how we handle family? Pam: One of the stats that you had that I found interesting is, “due to the rising costs of sports, the number of students who aren’t physically active has increased to 17.6%, being physically inactive is even more likely for low income children who are 3 times less likely to participate than children who reside in higher income households” because of the costs of these private leagues and the deterioration of public access to physical activity.Dedrick: When you have a kid you often want a bigger space, you want it to be in a place where there are parks or access to things, and better schools so that puts greater value. Again, schools are funded by local taxes, the more income you have, the more that is invested in the schools. All of this creates a radical increase in your cost of housing, just by having that child. Dedrick: Imagine, $12,000 per child, if the median income is around $50,000, that’s $50,000 before taxes. Take away those taxes, now you’re down to $37-38,000. You’re spending almost a third of your income on that care and you haven’t paid yet for your housing. Children used to be this idea that they help you generate wealth from an agricultural standpoint. You have more kids; you have more free workers for the farm. But now children are in many ways, wealth destroyers. Not many households can afford $12,000 or more going out of your pocket. Dedrick: The least we can do is recognize the unspoken reality of the economics of marriage and family and how the challenges that you are having in your life around marriage and family relate to those things. Understanding that there is this larger context, you can’t change the larger context, but hopefully by understanding the larger context you can make a better path for yourself to deal with these issues.Pam: The least you can do if you are in a place of privilege to be able to decide whether to create a family, without any economic considerations, is recognizing and acknowledging that a lot people do not have this privilege. There are a lot of economic factors and systemic things that are stopping people from being able to do that.