Well, this is a provocative title and I'm glad because it's a very serious topic. Why your children won't marry and what you can still do to fix it, at least in some cases. From time to time, I'll have clusters of conversations with different people that align in topic and they make very obvious a common problem. And so, this is a huge huge problem.
Maybe the best place to start is to characterize the current situation. Basically, what's going on right now is that the world has changed dramatically in the last decade or two, but most parents are still acting like things are the way they used to be. Now, this is across all domains, not just helping your kids prepare for life, but that's the topic, the subtopic I will focus on
in this presentation. Essentially what has happened is we've gone from a system where it was very easy to get married and the quality of person tended to be okay to a system where it's very difficult and the only people who manage to do it. It's more a question of luck than justice. It's not that they have done
things the right way per se. Of course, this is broad brushing, but on average, it's just that somehow they got through the cracks. And unfortunately, instead of looking at the limitations of the present way of doing things, what most parents do is they just keep rolling with the punches or they make minor changes to the way they do things compared to how people did things in the
past. And they really hope that somehow it's going to work out. Well, here's the bad news. It's not going to. And even if it does, you can't build a building on a foundation of toothpicks. And that's why these these by the skin of our teeth or shortcut kind of approaches of can I just duct tape this together and get this kid married off,
they don't work because you need to have a solid foundation in order to weather the storms. And the storms are increasing in how often they are they occur and how intense they are. So I want to talk just a little bit about snares and water slides. We'll start with water slides. So if you start a company and it's a startup company,
which basically means that you're taking outside money from investors, wise counselors will suggest that you avoid that at any cost because once you take outside money, your investor is going to push you to make business decisions that aren't actually in the best interest of you or your employees or the company.
They will make decisions based on what's good for them. And they have very different objectives in that than you do. And because of the way their stock shares work, they have greater control over those decisions than you do. And so it's kind of a poison apple. And once you're on, they call it the water slide because once you're on there, you can't really get off. The only thing you can
do is build your company in certain ways in order to be able to to attract more investors later on because that's what those original investors want is they want to be able to sell their shares for more to future investors and you're just along for the ride. Now, unfortunately, you're the one on the water slide. They are not. You're the one that's got to take the blows and figure out how to
solve all the problems and do all the work. It's not a fun place to be. Unfortunately, a lot of people live their lives today like a water slide and you could divide this into smaller scopes. You could look at the water slide of education. Most parents just sort of put their kids on this water slide and they go through public school. They get out,
they go to college and no one ever stops to ask along the way, is there something better that we could be doing or why are we doing this? What is the objective and what other options do we have that we could look at? There are many other water slides in life. And when you start looking at this and seeing it, you see that is a big
problem because the water slides are going to places that you don't want to go. What about snares? Well, we could talk about snares for a long time. But the property of snares is that so these are are are loops usually made out of wire today that you put down to trap animals. You put them in places that animals go. And what happens is when the animal
walks through this thing, it's invisible to the animal and it gets caught in this snare. But by the time it realizes it, it's too tight to escape from. And the natural tendency is is to freak out a little bit. And that just tightens up the snare. When the animal just starts flailing, it'll tighten up the snare. So once you're in the snare, the only way
out is for someone to come along who's not snared and help you out of it, right? And it tends to be the case that when someone does this, and you can look up videos of this, if an animal gets caught in a trap, and what that animal does to a human that's coming to try to help it get out, they attack. They see the person coming to help them as a threat. And that's usually what we do as well as humans. When we're in a snare in our lives and someone's trying to help us get out, we we respond with violence
or with with emotional responses instead of realizing that this person is trying to help. Now, the main idea I want to get across to you is the problem of helping your kids get married is a lot harder than you think it is. That's why you're doing so little to help them because you still are operating on the fumes of a system
that no longer exists. And you think that, now again, this isn't just about marriage. You could apply this to many other things like being able to own a home one day. You think that by doing the things that you did, your kids can get into the same outcomes. And that's not true at all. The world is fundamentally different than it was when you were growing up. But you're probably still shuffling them through the same
systems that you went through thinking that it's somehow going to end up the same place you did. And you you can guarantee that that's not going to be the case. And if it happens, it will be some fluke chance outcome rather than something that was produced through justice, something that was mechanically generated step by step. It will be a sheer luck. Okay.
Now to see the likelihood of the outcome you want, which is grandkids that you'd actually like to spend time with. That's the outcome. That's it's outside the scope of this this presentation. But especially to women, that will be the primary source of meaning in your life for the the last few decades of your
life. And so that's how you should be interacting with your kids is to make that outcome the most likely thing. By the way, that will make them the most happy, too. So it's not a selfish thing. It's best for everyone. So how unlikely is that? Well, you can only accurately see how unlikely it is
if you create if you if you visualize the the chain of events that has to occur to get there. Now, if you're familiar with sales, you know that there's this thing called the sales funnel, and it's a it's a way of diagramming the steps from an initial contact with a potential customer until you get the sale. A lot of things in life are funnels. The odds of your kids having grandkids that you want to spend time with is a
funnel. Let's go through what that funnel is. Each step has a probability. And as you go down the funnel, the likelihood that your kids will get there is much, much smaller. And it keeps getting smaller. Okay? It's like rolling dice with every step and having to land on a specific number each time. It's extremely difficult. Right?
The first is they have to have access to a set of acquaintances and from that set they have to choose dates and go on dates and from that set they'll have to get engaged and from that set which is hopefully just a set of one but it could be more than one. They get married and hopefully they stay married. That's an unlikely outcome
today. All of these things are unlikely today. Then they have kids. Now, I didn't split it out because we're running out of space, but there's a big difference between having one kid and having five kids. There's a big difference between having one kid and having three kids. And most kids today will not have three kids. Period.
Most kids today are not going to have kids. And you don't have to have a crystal ball to be able to predict that. Look at the statistics. Look at the graphs. And finally, just because your kids have kids doesn't mean you're going to want to spend time with them. Odds are they're going to be knuckleheads. And so, you have to beat the odds on every single one of these steps to end
up with kids that you want to spend time with. You see, it's not going to be as easy as finding these shortcuts or these skin of your teeth methods. You're not going to just have one random friend that has this shining star son or daughter that you can connect your son or daughter with. You're not just going to be able to push your kid to church and then they find some amazing person that beats the odds
on all these things just randomly and they happen to select them, drum roll, because of how they look. That's not good enough anymore. It takes more than that. Okay. Now, if you take 3 seconds and start to enumerate the kinds of traits that make a highquality spouse, it's not that hard. You can do it, right? You might
end up with something like this. And I'm not saying this is the gospel truth. And I really I took 30 seconds to throw this slide together. It could be much much longer. Maybe there's some things you would add in. Maybe there's some things you could take out. Here's the point. If you spend 30 seconds making a list like this, the very next step is to ask, "Is my kid more like the positives are more
like the negatives?" Now, if you ask yourself why they're one way or the other, there's a 99% chance that the answer is in the mirror. You are the answer. You are the reason your kids are the way they are. Now, do kids have agency? Yes. Are some kids naturally more Turkish than others? Yes. And some kids are ma naturally better than others, although that's rare.
But as a parent, you have an immense influence on how your kid turns out. Immense. And most parents are not doing very much at all with that potential. Okay, let's go through these just for a minute. positive loves and knows God.
Although the world does not admit it today, marriage is a fundamentally spiritual institution. You cannot you can have some really good marriages where neither person are necessarily religious. But you can't get what you're meant to get out of a marriage without being a Christian.
even further than that without being an actual disciple of Christ because the bar on self-proclaimed Christians is quite low. Okay. If both people don't love and know God, the odds of getting to the bottom of that triangle are extremely low. Okay. Now, just starting there, just starting
there. If you're a parent and you have not fulfilled God's commandment to teach your children about God and persuade them that he's real, you have done a massive disservice to your child. And if there's anything you can do to correct for that, no matter how old your children are, you should do it.
Moving on, there's a whole set of character qualities that are non-negotiable. If you if you want to have a high quality spouse, you have to be hardworking. You have to have a positive attitude. You have to be emotionally stable. You have to be loyal. You have to be grateful. You have to be ambitious. You need to know when it's worth taking risks and you
need to jump on them. It's very important. If you don't have these qualities and others besides, you have no business having a high quality spouse. If you have one, it's because you lucked out, not because you deserve one because highquality people are not going to accept anyone who doesn't have those qualities. It's it's these are all rare in society, but there is a bare minimum you need for
a marriage worth having. And the the essentiality of these qualities will increase as life gets harder. And it's getting harder every day. Now, I want to zoom in on one here, which is takes worthwhile risks. There are so many parents out there that say, "Oh, I have such a good kid." And they go on to describe this person,
and sure, they have some positive qualities, but in many cases, those kids are wall flowers. They absolutely positively will not put themselves out there for anything. And what that is is over in the other column here. It's a form of entitlement. Now, those parents would be the last people in the world to call their kid entitled because they see their child as a nice person.
And and we don't think of nice people as entitled people, but they are. A person who won't go out and get what they want is entitled. They expect the world to come to them. What that guarantees is they will not be grateful. And that is an enormous red flag for highquality man or woman. They want to know that that other person has a decently accurate sense of value because otherwise they're
just a person to fill a slot, right? Another thing with this that we could go on about is emotionally stable. If you've got your kids on drugs to chemically make them emotionally stable, they do not have that quality. And you're teaching your kids at at the at the time of life when it it will absolutely be the easiest to become a
stable person because you're chuck full of happy hormones more than you will ever be in the rest of your life as a young person. And life is easier than it will ever be for the rest of your life. You're giving them a crutch to like a little magic button that makes their pain go away, makes their discomfort go away, and it's a terrible, terrible thing to do. You're taking your kids out of the market of people who are entitled to a quality marriage,
and you're you're making it even less likely that you will end up with grandkids that you want. Finally, the last thing on this short list, which is just a sample, like I said, of things that could be on it, are savings. Now, this is a very foreign concept to modern young people that not only should they be working when they're young, they should actually be saving up some money and not blowing every dollar they get. The typical situation is that they have
tens of thousands or even a h 100,000 or more in student debt. And that is a red flag, no go, non-negotiable. Uh-uh. Not happening for a quality man. Okay. Now for men in particular, I tried to make these lists as as um unisex as possible, but for men in particular, they need to have a high earnings potential. And that starts as
kids. The path to high earning at a young age starts when you're are you are very young. And so if your canoe is in the water floating down the same stream as everyone else, and all you're doing as a young boy is going to school and farting around after school just like all your friends, you're not building a path to a higher earnings potential. That's something that if it happens, it'll have to happen later. And every
year you wait is another year you're unqualified to meet a highquality young lady because she will not tolerate that. Nor should she because the things that she wants in life that will give her the greatest meaning, namely kids, and the ability to stay at home and raise them, costs a fortune. All right. What are some some negative qualities? Well, if you're an atheist or you're spiritually passive.
So, no highquality person who loves and knows God is going to tolerate a person who's an atheist or spiritually passive. Why? Why would anyone saddle up with someone that has serious deficiencies that they have to fix in life before they become the kind of person worth saddling up to? A high quality person won't do that. What if you're a feminist
if you're a female or a beta male if you're a male? Yep, you're disqualified. No one wants to deal with that. The the objectives of the downstream objectives are that much more difficult to get to with those problems. What if you're promiscuous? Promiscuity nukes your ability to pair bond. And marriage is not worthwhile with someone who cannot pair bond. That's that loyalty. Okay.
What if you're lazy? What if you're dishonest? What if you're selfish? What if you're hedonistic? What if you have a negative attitude? What if you have massive amounts of debt? I already mentioned that. Or no high earning potential if you're a male. What if you have nothing to say for yourself? This is a huge problem. Again, parents will will put their kids up on a
pedestal and say, "Oh, my kid, I've got such a good kid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But they're shy. Shyness is an enormous negative fault. It makes it even harder to see what someone's all about, but it's also a very strong form of dishonesty. So, if you've got a kid who has that problem, it's worth the trouble to try
to break them out of it. And there are ways of doing that. Some of them are quite easy, like help them get a job as a teenager. So, let's move on. So instead of developing kids that have greater preparation for for modern challenges than the random person on the street, in many cases, what parents are doing is they're injecting additional constraints to make it even
more difficult for their kids to get married. What are these? Again, this is just a random smattering from recent conversations I've had. the the the full list is much longer than this, but it's worth thinking about. What kinds of ideas or behaviors or character qualities are you instilling into your children to make it even harder to get married? In no particular order, here's just a few. Age gaps. The modern world
has taught young people that if they are that essentially they can only date someone who's their exact age. So, not only does this put a ridiculous constraint on the set of people that you could date, it's also an absolutely terrible idea for reasons that go far beyond this presentation. But even if you end up marrying such a
person, you are going to be much less happy with them on average than if there were a few years between you two with the man being older than the woman. Now, the primary reason for that initially is earnings potential. It's in the woman's best interest to not seal the deal with any man who can't today afford her. And what I mean by that is afford to retire her, afford to have her
stay at home and raise as many kids as she's willing and able to have. Later in life, that inverts and it becomes in the man's best interest to have a few more years before that lady hits menopause and that can make an enormous difference in life. Okay, that's the long and short of it. That could be a whole presentation. Age gaps are a good thing, not a bad thing.
Second, religious beliefs. I think we already covered that in the prior slide, but you want your kids to get married. Why? The answer to that question matters. It's not just a checkbox to make you feel good and make you feel like you're a halfway decent person or parent. Okay? This is just as dumb as young people saying, "I want to get married." Well, you want to get married to who? What do you want? A spouse or a
wedding. If you don't have a list of why you're doing this or exactly what you're looking for in marriage, it becomes enormously difficult to recognize it when it comes. And you will miss out on the opportunity. This comes back to this character quality of taking worthwhile risks and being grateful. If you just are looking to fill a slot and I want to get married to who? I don't know what kind of person. I don't
know. Well, how are you going to define what risk is worthwhile to get that? You can't. Okay? How are you going to know if Mr. Wright or Miss Wright walks right by you at the grocery store? You can't. you don't have any eyes to see them if you haven't made the list of what you're doing and why. So, how do religious beliefs um
in mesh with this? Well, it comes back to what I was talking about in building a foundation if you're just trying to achieve this arbitrary outcome and you're not thinking about why you'd like your kid to get married because like hopefully you want them to be happy. It's not just that you want them to sign some arbitrary contract with an arbitrary person, right? You want them to be better off than they would be alone.
Well, that's not most marriages, folks. Sorry. It's certainly not most people. And then you go down this this chain of improbable events. So, if the religious beliefs aren't there, what are you even trying to do? If someone's not a disciple of Christ, they're probably better off never getting married.
And that might seem like an extreme position to you, but if you think through it, it's really not. What are you doing if you're not a disciple of Christ? What's the point of any of that? You're better off just having a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend if that. Okay. Now, now we can get into details there, but uh it'd be a broad conversation, but one one thing to pluck
out of that potential conversation is if you're a high earning male, you should not get married to any woman who you think has any chance of divorcing you because you're going to lose half your stuff and probably all your kids. And you'll wish that you had never been married. And if you don't believe me, go talk to someone to whom that has happened. Okay? All right,
we already talked about the willingness to take risks. What about geography? If you're raising kids that don't have faith, and I'm using my definition for that word, which I'll get to later. I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Through Faith. You should read it. If you have kids that aren't willing to do what needs to be done to get the things that are worth having
and you live in the middle of nowhere, the geography of your situation is making it even harder for them to get married. Now, again, coming back to these other things, if you're the kind of person where geography would stop you from finding a quality spouse, you probably shouldn't get married at all because you don't have the faith necessary to have a happy marriage. Not today.
Not today. It's quite a battle. It's quite a battle. It's not for weaklings or wussies. Okay. What about cell phones and social media? If you give your kid a cell phone as as a young teenager or worse earlier, you're just asking for loads of trouble. Tons of studies have been produced on this. Books have been written at this point. The message is out there and most parents are just ignoring it and they're they're marching off the cliff with the
rest of of the lemmings doing what? Oh, but Jenny has a cell phone. Why can't I have a cell phone? Todd has a cell phone. Why can't I have a cell phone? Don't fall for that stuff. It's it's a huge huge trap. Social media. Uh, the other day I was out in society and I saw a a young couple together at dinner and they didn't say a word to each other.
They just scrolled through their phones the whole time. Those are the kinds of kids that are being produced today. Don't make your kids one of them. A lot of folks in specific church specific churches today their kids are floating down that river in their canoe headed straight to for a mission. This is a water slide example. And so let's
talk about one particular religious persuasion which is being LDS. I know a lot of people who are or were LDS and they have spouses who still are. Look, if your kids's going to a specific church every Sunday that you don't believe in, you don't need a crystal ball to see how that's going to go. They're on a water slide, buddy. They're going to do the
things that the people in that church do. And if that doesn't lead to happiness, you better up the amps of what you're willing to do to put a stop to it. It is insane to me that there are fathers today who tolerate their wives taking their kids to that church or whatever church every Sunday when they don't agree with those religious teachings.
At a minimum at a minimum half and half should be implemented. meaning you get them every other Sunday because if if you're not at least giving getting 50% religious time with your kids, I don't know like what if your wife was a crackhead, would you allow her to give your kids crack every Sunday just to keep the peace in your marriage? No, of
course you wouldn't. This is just as insane, if not worse. Because at least with crack, it's really obvious that it's bad and maybe they actually have a chance of getting out of that themselves. But when they're brainwashed into a certain religious perspective and the people are sort of fuzzy happy all the time, it's not going to be obvious that that's not the best way to be.
And now we get into much deeper implications of how you live your life and trying to be an example to show that there's something better instead of just claiming that there's something better. But I digress. Another worldly water slide is like I mentioned before the education system which ends in college which is an absolutely terrible idea for most people today. And yet there go the kids.
Now, beyond wasting several years of life, there's an enormous financial consequence of this. But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that young person, be they male or female, has now spent that many years of their prime years wasted on getting a degree that probably doesn't actually help them make any more money than they would while being fully immersed in woke crazy ideas that they will get substantially
delued in through the the required general education courses that they have to take. at a minimum while surrounded by people that you really don't want them to marry. So consider that if you're pushing them towards these things, you're absolutely decreasing the odds of these outcomes
which are low to begin with. So at the end of the day, you have a choice. Do you want to help them increase the odds of of good outcomes in life or make it even more difficult than it would otherwise be? And unfortunately, most parents make it more difficult than it would otherwise be. So, what can you do to make it better? Well, we've talked
about some qualities, some character qualities that can be developed, some life choices that can be made. And it turns out that there is a resource for doing this in a more organized way and I call it the life plan and I wrote all about it in a book called Joy on Purpose. Now you can get that book for free at upwardthought.org/borgbooks.
You can get it for print cost on Amazon.com. You can also watch short videos I've made on the on related topics which you can search for on YouTube or upward.org and the the phrase to use there is life plan. I would also highly recommend reading this book that I wrote called through faith which talks about envisioning envisioning outcomes
potential outcomes and then building plausible plans to obtain them and why that is what faith is in a nutshell. Alternatively, or I guess not alternatively, but at at the same time, another tactic for this is to find highquality parents, especially fathers. Highquality children are usually found in the families of highquality parents,
especially fathers. These kids are going to have a higher likelihood of all the qualities you're looking for. And what you're doing by finding these these parents is you're increasing the set of acquaintances and by making this part of the funnel as wide as you can. You're maximizing the odds of everything else. And that goes
down the line here. But the very first one is acquaintances. So you want to find other families that have highquality parents. Okay. So, between those two things, helping your kids put together and live a life plan and finding highquality families,