Married parents: A clear advantage for children
It’s “the one privilege liberals ignore,” said
Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Children of married parents have better outcomes on average than those in single-parent households, as economist Melissa S. Kearney shows in devastating detail in her new book The Two-Parent Privilege. Nearly 30 percent of American children now live with only one parent or none—more than in any other country that tracks such data—and they are falling behind. Compared with their two-parent peers, they’re less likely to finish high school, more likely to become single parents themselves, and up to five times more likely to spend childhood in poverty. Liberals have been “reluctant to acknowledge” this strong connection between family breakdown and poverty “for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.” But the depressing truth is that the “collapse of marriage” is disproportionately hurting children of color: Only 38 percent of Black children live with married parents. The “two-parent privilege” is real.
Yet you can’t “just conjure stable romantic commitments on command,” said Rebecca Traister in New York magazine. It’s easy to blame mothers for failing to get or stay married, but the root problem isn’t family structure. “It’s the racist and economically unjust policies that leave some Americans with less.” That’s a choice our society has made, said Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. Kearney’s work shows that the two-parent advantage isn’t entirely “a correlate of other factors,” such as education or wealth, but that “marriage itself matters.” But what good is it to point that out? The fact remains that “a large share of children are going to grow up with one parent,” while the U.S. refuses to craft policies to make sure they can thrive under those circumstances. Instead, most states require single parents to be all but destitute to qualify for assistance, and then force them to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get it. “It’s not single parenthood that’s failing these kids. We all are.”
“We should absolutely do more to lift children out of poverty,” said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. “But no government program can replicate the benefits of two parents” with twice the time and energy. This is at heart a cultural problem, a mindset shift we need to make as a nation—starting with “the progressive tastemakers of the entertainment industry.” If we return to treating two-parent families as the ideal, it “could help a lot of kids.”