The Two-Parent Privilege
– By Howard Sierer –
Stay in school. Graduate from high school. Get married and stay married. Then have children. If more of today’s young people would follow this advice, many of society’s ills would be dramatically lessened.
Economist Melissa Kearney’s new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, examines how fragmentation of the ordinary American family drives modern inequality. “It is not only that lacking two parents makes it harder for some kids to go to college and lead a comfortable life…it also undermines social mobility and perpetuates inequality across generations.”
I am pleasantly surprised to see a liberal like Kearney – who is associated with the liberal Brookings Institution – willing to attribute societal problems in no small part to family structure. In contrast, the current liberal narrative blames the rise in single-parent households on globalization and automation that have reduced opportunities for working-class men without college degrees who then leave their families.
According to Kearney, 63% of American children lived with married parents in 2019, down from 77% in 1980. What’s more, 29% of children whose mothers don’t have a college degree and 30% of children whose mothers lack a high school degree were without a second parent in their home.
She emphasizes that cohabitation outside of marriage does not explain the drop in married mothers. Nor is the dramatic shift in marriage rates a reflection of college-educated and economically independent women raising children alone. Instead, the decline is concentrated among society’s lower classes while the college-educated are marrying at significantly higher rates.
Trends suggest that despite the welcome drop in teen pregnancy – a major issue in the 1980s and 1990s – the rise in single-mother households and overall decline in marriage have persisted despite that success. Kearney writes that in 2019, almost half of all U.S. babies were born to unwed mothers, up from just five percent in 1960.
Over 20% of these unpartnered mothers live in poverty. The erosion of marriage – not just because it is a cultural norm, but because it allows parents to share resources, mutually support engaged parenting, and foster opportunities for young children – has contributed mightily to America’s widening socioeconomic disparities.
The increasing number of single-parent families traps whole neighborhoods in cycles of fracture and despair. In contrast, neighborhoods with significant numbers of two-parent homes boost community stability and have been especially beneficial for black neighborhoods. Drawing on recent studies, Kearney writes that two-parent families not only provide a foundation for a child’s future success, but that the strong, steady presence of black fathers increases healthy outcomes and economic prospects for other local black boys as well.
Kearney highlights unambiguous data that shows that the benefits that flow to children in two-parent homes cannot be duplicated easily through welfare programs. Illustrating her point, Kearney notes that in Denmark – an exemplar of the kind social democratic welfare policies many progressives wish to emulate – “the influence of family background on many child outcomes is about as strong as it is in the US.” At the very least, this suggests that even radical welfare reforms cannot substitute for household and neighborhood societal factors that promote stable families and limit harmful outcomes later in life.
Many progressives will find it uncomfortable to agree with social conservatives who have long supported what seems intuitive and natural to many Americans: healthy, productive and hopeful lives are, for the most part, linked to stable two-parent homes, typically bound by marriage.
