The Two-Parent Privilege

Or The One Parent Penalty. In short, two provide more resources than one in raising children.

I’ve had a book sitting on my desk for the past month I’ve been picking through, The Two-Parent Privilege, by Melissa Kearney. She is an economist at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. If the same book had been by an economist affiliated with the conservative Manhattan Institute, it would likely have been titled “The One-Parent Penalty.”¹

Kearney’s basic case is set forth in her New York Times opinion column:

There has been a huge transformation in the way children are raised in the United States: the erosion of the convention of raising children inside a two-parent home. This shift is often not publicly challenged or lamented, in an effort to be inclusive of a diversity of family arrangements. But this well-meaning acceptance obscures the critical reality that this change is hurting our children and our society.

The share of American children living with married parents has dropped considerably: In 2019, only 63 percent lived with married parents, down from 77 percent in 1980. Cohabitation hardly makes up for the difference in these figures. Roughly a quarter of children live in a one-parent home, more than in any other country for which data is available. Despite a small rise in two-parent homes since 2012, the overall trend persists.

This is not a positive outcome, she continues. And, to the chagrin of a certain constituency, she bolsters this conclusion with a book’s worth of data.

• In 1980, 77 percent of American children lived with their married parents. By 2019, only 63 percent did.

• Among the college-educated, 84% of children live with married parents.

• But among those with a high school degree or some college, only 60% of children are living with married parents, down from 83% in 1980.

• Today when you enter a hospital nursery, 4 out of 10 babies will be children of single moms.

As significant as the class divide is, the racial divide is wider. In 1960, 67% of black children lived with their married parents. By 2019, it was only 38%.

Kearney found that children in mother-only homes were five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes.

So what?

But it is outcomes of these and similar socio-economic trends that ultimately concern Kearney. Her conclusions are not based on generalizations or arm waving. My eyes started to glaze over from her supporting data, so I’ll spare you. But she found that:

The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble in school or with the law.

I found that college-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise their children in two-parent homes. It is parents with less than a four-year college degree who have moved away from marriage, and two-parent homes, in large numbers. Only 60 percent of children who live with mothers who graduated from high school, or who have some college education but did not graduate, lived with married parents in 2020, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980. Again, cohabitation does not erase the education divide. Neither does looking at the numbers across race and ethnic groups.

Kearney’s analysis found that no matter what level of education a married mother had, her children were far more likely to exceed the education level of an unmarried mother of equal educational attainment. For example, 18.0% of children in a two-parent household where the mother had a high school education obtained a four-year college degree., compared to only 4.8% of children with an unmarried mother who also had a high school education. That will translate to higher incomes for the college-educated children—a lifetime advantage.

Kearney doesn’t overlook the role of fathers., noting that

boys’ development and behavior—including their educational outcomes—appear especially responsive to family environment…. As the share of children growing up in single-mother homes has increased, so has the relative disadvantage of boys (as captured by things like their level of completed education).

Specifically, for young adults between 24 and 35 (born between 1984 and 1995), 41% of women compared to 33% of men had attained a four-year college degree. The gap was even greater for White men, lower for Black men, and very small among Asians.

Many of the findings that Kearney identifies were the concerns of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Harvard professor and later four-term United States senator. He authored a report for the U.S. Labor Department in 1965 that called attention to the decline of marriage among Black Americans. Moynihan warned then that family breakdown would exacerbate social problems. For that, he was criticized by some liberals for racism and victim-blaming.

Of course, some critics

Kearney, too, has her critics. Anna Louise Sussman, in a guest essay in the New York Times, referring to Kearney’s findings, notes

This may well be true. But harping on people to marry from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.

In a book review in the Washington Post, Becca Rothfeld criticizes Kearney for the questions she doesn’t address or for not exploring unconventional remedies:

If marriage benefits children because it affords them more emotional support, why should we “work to restore and foster” the nuclear family, which privatizes affection and attention, instead of working to foster a new norm of communal child-rearing? Is there any reason to conclude that marriage is the best solution, except that it is the solution that already (although perhaps not for much longer, if current trends continue apace) exists?

Kearney does not answer these questions because she does not ask them.

Kearney’s Defenders

It should not be surprising that Kearney gets the most support from more conservative circles. Kay Hymowitz, reviewing the book for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, references the push-back Moynihan received. Kearney’s book, she observes, “is a summary and synthesis—first-rate summary and synthesis, to be sure—of decades of research on the benefits of a childhood spent with both parents.”

What makes The Two-Parent Privilege an event is not these observations, but the author herself….When a prominent scholar with impeccable center-left credentials like Kearney forthrightly makes that case, she is veering into policy quicksand. This is a danger of which she is well aware. At professional conferences, her colleagues have reacted to her research with comments on the order of: “I tend to agree with you about all this but are you sure you want to be out there saying this publicly?” Others have told her that she sounded “socially conservative,” implying that she was “not academically serious.”

Mona Charen, in The Bulwark, offers a useful and positive perspective:

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.

What to do?

As with any society-wide issue, there are no simple solutions. On the one hand, we should look for policies and changes in attitudes that boost the prevalence of two-parent households. At the same time, those policies should not penalize single-parent households which would further disadvantage children.

Some of what Kearney proposes is consistent with basic liberal orthodoxy, such as promoting a stronger safety net for all families. She also supports expanding programs that strengthen a catch-all proposal of working “to restore the norm of two-parent households for children.”

Addressing the issue, she identifies what I would label “not enough good men,” to work to improve the economic position of men without college degrees to bolster their attractiveness as “reliable marriage partners and fathers.”

There are limitations and gaps in Kearney’s work, as she has acknowledged and some critics have pointed out. Kearney says up front “I am not blaming single mothers. I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racism…. I am not saying everyone should get married…. I am not promoting a norm of stay-at-home wife and breadwinner husband.” What she says she is arguing with her copious references to data and rigorous studies is “that two parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than one parent alone.”

It may be, to shamelessly appropriate Al Gore’s headline on climate change, that Kearney is willing to say aloud “an inconvenient truth.”

1. The below photo was created by an app called Dream.ai.