Economist Melissa Kearney has studied poverty, inequality and family structure for more than 20 years and has come to the conclusion that America’s drift away from the two-parent norm has “contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore.”
She is hardly alone among her social science peers in reaching this conclusion. As she relates in her new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” these insights are more or less commonplace among those who study the matter.
The facts aren’t in serious dispute — the wisdom of saying it out loud is another matter. Wary of seeming preachy — or worse, conservative — most social scientists recoil from talking about family structure when considering poverty and child outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, her book has been greeted skeptically by progressives and enthusiastically by conservatives. Progressives were quick to label Kearney a “scold” and to object that they were being “lectured” to get married.
As I documented in my own book, “Sex Matters,” marriage has been in decline at least in part because it was sabotaged. Feminists argued that marriage was essentially a male conspiracy to keep women unfulfilled, submissive and servile. Radical feminists scorned married women for “sleeping with the enemy.”
Their arguments carried the day, or at least contributed to what came next. Marriage rates, especially for the poor and working class, cratered.
The consequences for children were stark. In 1980, 77% of American children lived with their married parents. By 2019, only 63% did. Among the college-educated, 84% of children still live with married parents, down a bit from 90% in 1980.
But among those with a high school degree or some college, only 60% of children are living with married parents, down from 83%. As significant as the class divide is, the racial divide is wider. In 1960, 67% of Black children lived with their married parents. In 2019, only 38% did.
Emotional as well as financial benefits
It’s unfair to suggest, as many of Kearney’s critics have, that she is a scold. She’s not chastising single mothers. Her book overflows with sympathy for the difficulties of raising kids alone.
If she’s scolding anyone, it’s the educated class that has imposed omertà on the subject of family structure. Nor is she unaware that some marriages cannot be saved and that many kids raised by single parents turn out fine.
Progressives tend to respond to the family gap with calls for more government support for single-parent families. Kearney is fine with that and advocates it herself.
But her book is realistic about the limits of financial resources. Two parents provide more to kids than money. She notes a “child born in a two-parent household with a family income of $50,000 has, on average, better outcomes than a child born in a single-parent household with the same income.”
One reason is that two parents share the stress of parenting — the sleep deprivation, the appointments, the scheduling conflicts, the missed work, the terrible twos — and both have more “emotional bandwidth” to meet their children’s needs and more opportunity to take care of themselves. In true economist style, Kearney notes having two adults permits for “task specialization.”
Frankly, the case that two are better than one when it comes to raising children is open and shut.
But the critics do raise a point that Kearney cannot answer — and neither can I. It’s the problem posed by The Washington Post’s Christine Emba, among others, who agrees two-parent families are best and marriage is the gold standard, but “plausible marriage partners for heterosexual women are thin on the ground.”
Pew estimates that one in four unmarried adults (as of 2012) would likely never marry. But for the kids growing up now, Kearney does have ideas.
These include increasing the earned income tax credit and other programs to enhance the economic position of low-income men, scaling up the efforts of groups like Big Brothers/Big Sisters and Becoming a Man, promoting co-parenting among non-married couples, and above all, reviving the norm that marriage is best for kids.
As a bonus, it’s also good for grown-ups.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
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