The Two-Parent Privilege E-Book

Melissa S. Kearney

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A data-rich book that takes a close look at how deeply family structure influences both children's current well-being and their future academic and career prospects' - Wall Street Journal, Best Books of the Year In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution's decline has led to a host of economic woes. When two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a number of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. By confronting the critical role that family makeup plays in shaping children's lives and futures, Kearney offers an assessment of what a decline in marriage means for an economy and a society – and what we must do to change course. 'Having two parents who are married to each other, Kearney argues, provides offspring with economic and social advantages. And by joining their particular strengths, a married couple can give their progeny more than the sum of their parts'- New Yorker, Best Books of the Year

Leseprobe

THE TWO-PARENT PRIVILEGE

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America byThe University of Chicago Press 2023

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2023

Copyright © Melissa S. Kearney 2023

The right of Melissa S. Kearney to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN:9781800753747

eISBN: 9781800753754

FOR WILLIAM, SOPHIA, AND ADELAIDE

Contents

Preface

1 » The Elephant in the Room

2 » Mother-Only Households

3 » 2 > 1

4 » Marriageable Men (or Not)

5 » Parenting Is Hard

6 » Boys and Dads

7 » Declining Births

8 » Family Matters

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Preface

There are all kinds of families and all kinds of households. People make their families work in all different ways, with various arrangements. The ways in which all of our families are different—with their own personalities, quirks, routines, and traditions—are part of what makes them so special. And part of what makes family so deeply personal is that exactly how any one of them works (assuming nobody is being harmed) is really no one else’s business.

It is a separate question, however, how the structures of different families can deliver different benefits to children—and, in the aggregate, to society. It is reasonable to argue, for example, that a household with two parents has a greater capacity to provide financial and nonfinancial resources to a child than a one-parent household does. To argue this is not to judge, blame, or diminish households with a single parent; it is simply to acknowledge that (1) kids require a lot of work and a lot of resources, and (2) having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family.

The dramatic increase in the prevalence of one-parent households in the US reflects a profound change in the way children are being raised in this country, with implications for children but also for society. As uncomfortable as it might be to discuss this shift and its implications, avoiding a direct examination of the issue—well-intentioned as that tendency might be—is ultimately counterproductive.

I have studied US poverty, inequality, and family structure for almost a quarter of a century. I approach these issues as a hardheaded—albeit softhearted—MIT-trained economist. Based on the overwhelming evidence at hand, I can say with the utmost confidence that the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in the share of children being raised in one-parent homes 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—but may not be able to reverse.

When I have spoken with other scholars in recent years about my plans to write this book, the most common response I have gotten is along the lines of “I tend to agree with you about all this— but are you sure you want to be out there saying this publicly?” I have thought a lot about that. No, but yes. No, because it’s much more comfortable to talk about these issues in academic conferences, where we all are looking at the same data and evidence and can rationally and (mostly) dispassionately talk about what they mean. But yes, because even if scholars know about these trends and actively debate appropriate policy or government responses, societal change doesn’t happen in the pages of academic journals or around the tables at academic conferences. Societal change happens when the public engages with an issue and policy makers have the facts and evidence. I have been studying and debating these issues in academic settings long enough to feel like it’s time to take this evidence and the surrounding conversation to a wider audience.

I am a mom and an economist, in that order. I care deeply about children, all children, and their well-being. I care about the opportunities people have to live their best lives and thrive in society. I am constantly thinking about how economic structures enrich or impede people’s lives. I am concerned about widening inequality and eroding social mobility in the US. My research has me convinced that the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in the share of children growing up with only one parent in their home is both a cause and a consequence of economic and social challenges facing our nation. The nature of these challenges is detailed and substantiated in this book. They are wide-ranging and deeply challenging.

I am the granddaughter of an Italian immigrant who came to the US in 1921 with an elementary-school education. I am the daughter of a woman who didn’t have the educational or occupational opportunities that I have had. And I am the mother of three children who are extraordinarily lucky to have numerous resource advantages, including the opportunity to attend good schools in safe neighborhoods. I see the role of economics and of luck, and the dreams and fears of parents, everywhere I look. I see the promise of children and the ways in which forces beyond their control shape their lives. I see the world around me through the lens of my own life, but I look to data and rigorous studies for answers about what is happening on a widespread basis, why it is happening, and ultimately what can be done to make people’s lives better.

I fully expect that there will be some people who merely read the title and form a strong opinion about what they presume fills the pages. But there are no easy-to-dismiss straw-man arguments or claims in this book. I am not blaming single mothers. I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racism in the United States. I am not saying everyone should get married. I am not dismissing nonresident fathers as absent from their children’s lives or uninterested in being good dads. I am not promoting a norm of a stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband. What I am doing is arguing, through an appeal to data and rigorous studies, that two parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than one parent alone. And furthermore, that a two-parent family is increasingly becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society. That argument leads me to ask why so many parents are now raising their children outside a marital union. What factors are behind the reduction in marriage and why are college-educated adults getting married at much higher rates than others? How does the presence of one versus two parents in a home affect children’s educational and economic outcomes and why?

I ask and answer these questions as an economist, not as someone with a moral or value-laden proposition. It is really challenging to discuss the topics of marriage and family without it feeling like a conversation about values, but my hope and intention is that by taking a social science approach to these important issues, we can take them out of the intractable culture wars and acknowledge them, debate them, and collectively take steps to improve the lives of American families.

COLLEGE PARK, MARYLANDDecember 2022

» ONE «

The Elephant in the Room

“Some areas of unequal opportunity are clearly evident. And some of these are amenable to remedial social action. The clearest cases are those outside the orbit of family relationships.”

ARTHUR M. OKUN, “Equality and Efficiency”

Some years ago, I was at a small two-day conference that brought together people from the academic and policy communities to talk about income inequality, economic mobility, and other related challenges facing the country. As is the case for many professions, being an academic economist involves going to lots of these types of conferences: traveling to a different city, attending a day of presentations and panels (often in windowless rooms), having a group dinner with other conference participants, and waking up early the next day to participate in another full day of sessions focused on a particular topic. People share their most recent research, discuss and debate ideas and evidence, make plans for additional research, and (in the best cases) inform the decisions of policy leaders with the kind of real-world evidence that economic data can provide. Then we go home, think about the new results we saw and the conversations we had, work some more, follow up with people we talked with, and repeat the process over again.

During this particular conference, we talked about the decline in US employment and widening income inequality. We talked about how the growing economic gap between America’s wealthy and poor was making it harder for Americans to achieve upward mobility—to live a life better than their parents did, economically speaking, and achieve the proverbial American dream. Over the course of the conference, the conversations focused on the usual topics that come up when economists talk about such things. We talked about gaps in pay between workers with and without college degrees. We talked about how technology and import competition disadvantaged certain groups of workers. We talked about the decline in union representation and the rise of CEO pay. We talked about the need for improved educational institutions and discussed ways to strengthen the safety net and reform the tax code.

During one of the later conference sessions, I raised my hand and asked a question that I’d been thinking about for a while: how should we think about the role of family and home environment in all this? If we are talking about how people perform in school and the labor market, isn’t the kind of household they grew up in an important determinant of that performance? There was quiet. After a few beats I continued talking, rattling off a few statistics and facts about class gaps in marriage and family structure, then suggesting that these class gaps should probably be part of our conversations about inequality and mobility. I pointed out that college-educated adults are more likely than non-college-educated adults to get married and to raise kids in two-parent homes. The resources of these homes (including money, but also time and energy in the challenging work of parenting) separated them from less educated adults and their children, who lacked such resource luxuries. The data suggest that these difference across households produce large economic differences in the lives of children. Don’t we need to contend with these facts? What should we make of them and what, if anything, should policy makers do about them?

This was not the first time I’d raised this issue of family structure among peers, but this was one of the largest audiences for it, and the group assembled extended beyond the usual group of scholars who study poverty, children, and families. My questions were received about as I expected them to be. As in earlier instances, this set of questions elicited a muted reaction—uncomfortable shifting in seats and facial expressions that conveyed reservations with this line of inquiry. The apparent consensus I took from the room, expressed through limited language and unencouraging gestures, was that family and marriage were personal matters and somewhat out of bounds for this type of discussion. While my colleagues were willing to grant the point that an increasing share of US children were living in single-parent homes and that this was much more common among less educated families—and that outcomes of children from single-parent homes tend to be worse than those of children from two-parent homes, for a variety of reasons—the implication was that we don’t really know what to do about it as a matter of policy. In my experience, people in these types of scholarly, policy-oriented settings are much more comfortable talking about the need to improve schools, expand college access, and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit than they are talking about family structure and how kids are raised. Don’t get me wrong; I think those other issues are important and I’m always up for talking about them. My point was simply that the absence of a discussion of family seemed conspicuous and counterproductive.

After the day’s sessions, in the lobby of the hotel, a prominent economist approached me and asked a series of pointed questions about the role of family structure in shaping children’s life outcomes. If kids are being taken care of, he asked, what did it matter if their parents were married? Did the evidence suggest that parental marriage per se mattered for how kids do in the world? Here I recounted some more of what I knew from the data and existing research, all of which seemed to point to a distinct social and economic advantage for kids who grew up with married parents, largely because “married parents” tends to mean a two-parent home and a two-parent home tends to mean more resources available to the child than in a one-parent home. That economist kept peppering me with specific questions. After a few minutes, he asked in a more pointed way: if parents are divorced but the dad contributes a lot financially, are the kids still at a relative disadvantage?

I cut him off, too quickly. “Look, I’m not really that worried about the kids of rich parents who get divorced,” I said. “The kids I’m worried about are the ones growing up in single-parent homes with very limited resources; they don’t have anything near the experiences and opportunities that kids from higher-income households have.” I suspected (not knowing his personal family situation) that he might be thinking of his own kids, who were most likely going to do fine in life.

That night, and the next day and the day after that, I kept thinking about the muted reaction to my questions in the group session and the follow-up one-on-one conversation in the hotel lobby. The economist’s questions hadn’t been motivated by mere scholarly or policy curiosity; if they had been, he probably would have asked them in the conference room where dozens of other economists and policy experts were gathered. His questions seemed personal, like he was asking as a father who (I suspected) was divorced and wanted the best for his kids, like every parent does. But the fact that he sought me out and asked me these questions privately is reflective of a divide between what many of us worry about personally for our own children and what we are inclined to talk about publicly when it comes to the well-being of children more broadly in society.

I thought about a conversation I had recently had with a different economist in a different setting who reacted negatively when I mentioned the importance of family structure to children’s outcomes. He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded “socially conservative,” in a way that implied “not academically serious.” I countered, “You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?”

The existence of such a divide is predictable, even reasonable. Matters of households and families are inherently personal, and it’s the nature of personal things that we don’t talk about them with just anyone. Nor do most people like to sound judgmental about people’s life choices. It seems that this discomfort and hesitancy have stifled public conversation on a critically important topic that has sweeping implications not just for the well-being of American children and families but for the country’s well-being, too.

The more I reflected on these issues, the more I wanted to look at the data and existing research to figure out how changes in family structure over recent decades mattered (or not) for children’s outcomes and for society. Much of the older social science research on family structure is narrowly focused on the issue of poverty, both as a cause and an effect. When single motherhood was closely linked in earlier generations to teen childbearing and poverty, it made sense to study how teen childbearing, nonmarital childbearing, and poverty reinforced each other. The question now was whether (and how) things had changed: How should we think about family structure now that single motherhood is so much more common and extends to so many? Why are so many adults forgoing marriage, even when they have children? How are these trends affecting children from different backgrounds?

The general approach economists take to studying the complicated issue of families and the “economics of the household,” as it is often referred to, is to try to break this highly complex topic down into a limited set of key features so that we can study tendencies and trends. We hypothesize potential relationships among factors, in terms of both cause and effect. Then we look at data to see whether a hypothesis holds. If the data don’t support the initial hypothesis, we revise the theoretical model or framework. Then we look at the data through that revised lens. The conceptual framework guides our empirical exploration of data and the interpretation of empirical patterns. We try to ascertain what is happening in general. In other words, we look for the patterns and the rules, not the oddities and exceptions, to tell a data-driven story.

A key factor that turns out to be relevant in a study of the economics of family today is the growing gap in family structure between the children of college-educated and non-college-educated adults. I focus on the factor of four-year college degree attainment as a marker of socioeconomic class divide. To be sure, a college degree is a crude measure of economic status, but it is a meaningful one nonetheless, and it is something that we observe in almost all national data sets. College-educated adults in the US today have higher earnings, on average, and they are more likely to be employed, on average. Their children are more likely to grow up to earn a college degree and have high earnings themselves. Of course, none of this accounts for whether someone is a good person or has a strong sense of selfworth or a fun sense of humor or finds love, or whether their child will be or do any of those things. But to the extent that a college degree is predictive of economic security and well-being, it is a useful marker of socioeconomic class distinction. It is also a driver of income inequality, which features prominently in the story I tell in this book.

The United States today is characterized by tremendously high rates of income inequality that exacerbate the country’s cultural and institutional divides. As the income gaps between those with more and less education and those with higher and lower levels of income have widened, shared experiences and the promise of equal opportunity have eroded. Children growing up in these separate spheres do not have anything close to equal opportunities in life. Children born to highly educated, high-income parents are almost all being raised in highly resourced two-parent homes; they live in safe neighborhoods with well-funded schools, surrounded by high-test-scoring peers; most of them graduate from high school and then enroll in college; a majority of those who enroll in college graduate with a degree. In other words, they are predisposed by virtue of their family background to reaching the milestones that are likely to help them achieve an economically secure life. In contrast, children born to unmarried parents are more likely to grow up in a one-parent household and are statistically less likely to have these resources or advantages. This correlation is exacerbated by the social trappings of American inequality. Children in families with fewer resources (as compared to those who come from having two adults in the home) often live in low-income neighborhoods and attend inferior schools, because they have no other choice. They graduate high school and enroll in college at lower rates. Those who do enroll in college are much less likely to earn a degree.

Closing these class gaps will require many changes in society and vast improvements to a variety of institutions. Economic trends related to inequality will not just reverse themselves if left unchecked. When economic and social conditions reinforce class gaps, closing these gaps becomes increasingly difficult over time. Family structure perpetuates privilege and disadvantage across generations through its effects on the lives of children. While it is more comfortable to talk about elements of inequality, threats to social mobility, and policy interventions that are outside the orbit of family relationships, we need to discuss this metaphorical elephant in the room. This book aims to spotlight how an increasingly unequal economy has led to a class gap in family structure that perpetuates inequality and undermines economic mobility through its effect on children. This book puts a spotlight on the most fundamental institution to society: the family.

Over the past 40 years, there has been a dramatic decline in the share of children living with married parents; this shift has happened largely outside the college-educated class.

In 2019, only 63% of children in the US lived with married parents, down from 77% in 1980. This decline has not been experienced equally across the population. There has been little change, for example, in the family structure of children whose mothers have a four-year college degree: In 2019, 84% of children whose mothers had four years of college lived with married parents, a decline of only 6 percentage points since 1980. Meanwhile, only 60% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980. A similarly large decline occurred among children of mothers who didn’t finish high school; the share of children in this group living with married parents fell from 80% in 1980 to 57% in 2019. Figure 1.1 plots these trends.1

Figure 1.1 Percentage of children living with married parents, by maternal education level

SOURCE: Author’s calculations using 1980 and 1990 US decennial census and 2000–2019 US Census American Community Survey.

NOTES: Observations are weighted using child’s survey weight.

Some might argue that placing marriage at the center of a conversation about children is antiquated and unhelpful: marriage is in many ways less fashionable than it was four decades ago. Marriage rates have fallen significantly in the US, including among adults who have children. It’s important to recognize that these changes in marriage patterns are not without consequence for how children are being raised. Data show conclusively that parents are not cohabitating without marriage in a way that remotely accounts for the decrease in two-parent married households. These kids are more often living with one parent. What’s more, data show that these trends are highly correlated with the parent’s education: The share of children living in two-parent homes is 71% when the mother has only a high school degree and 70% when she does not have a high school degree. A much higher share, 88%, of children of mothers with a four-year college degree live in a two-parent home.

Why does this issue matter for kids’ outcomes? Because children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do. That is not to say that children who are raised by a single mother can’t go on to achieve great things. Of course they can, and many do! But there are also mounds of social science evidence that shows how the odds of graduating high school, getting a college degree, and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in a singlemother home. The odds of becoming a single parent are also substantially higher for children who grow up with a single mother, again illustrating the compounding nature of inequality. It is not only that lacking two parents makes it harder for some kids to go to college and lead a comfortable life; in the aggregate, it also undermines social mobility and perpetuates inequality across generations.

The forces that drive inequality are contributing to these demographic changes at the household level. Meanwhile, these household changes are exacerbating inequality. It is a vicious cycle. It has become increasingly difficult, for example, for someone without a high level of education or skill to achieve economic security and success in the US. Adults who have lower levels of education and earnings are less likely to get married and raise their children in two-parent homes. Their kids grow up with fewer resources and opportunities, and they don’t do as well in school as their peers from married, higher-income families. Boys from disadvantaged homes are more likely to get in trouble in school and with the criminal justice system; girls from disadvantaged homes are more likely to become young, unmarried mothers. These children grow up to have children who are more likely to be born into disadvantaged situations. Social mobility is undermined, and inequality persists across generations. It is an economic imperative for the United States to break this cycle, and doing so will require coming at the problem from all dimensions.

This is a book primarily about data, interpreted through the lens of economics.

This book draws heavily on data and empirical research, including the economic interpretation of statistics from public sources. The thesis of the book and the conclusions I draw are solidly grounded in evidence and in my professional expertise, which is analyzing and interpreting data. My training as an economist also leads me to approach data and evidence with a particular theoretical framework, one that thinks in terms of resources and the cause-and-effect relationships between factors and outcomes. In this book, I apply that approach to the complex issues of marriage, childbearing, and raising children.

I am keenly aware that behind every data point is a person or a family, people with their own unique stories and experiences. While economics is great for describing aggregate trends or identifying the cause and effect behind them (and indeed, this book will do both), such analysis can fall short when it comes to acknowledging exceptions, including the nuance—both wonderful and messy—of people’s actual lives. As I write this book, I think of the mothers I met at a welfare-to-work program back in 1994; that was a job that animated my early interest in what has become a focus of my career as an academic economist. For a summer after my sophomore year in college, I worked as an intern at Bridgeport Jobs First, a job-training center in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that helped mothers on welfare train for and find employment. (At the time, most welfare recipients in the state—those without multiple, hard-toovercome barriers to work—had to participate in job-training or job-hunting efforts in order to remain eligible for welfare benefits.) I taught math and computer classes and helped clients write their résumés. Working at that program gave me the opportunity to get to know, and in some instances truly love, economically struggling single moms whom I wouldn’t otherwise have met. We’d go to Mc-Donalds for lunch, or we’d grab food at the nearby pawn shop (where bagels and snacks were sold next to the guns) and eat together on a park bench. The women would tell me their stories; I would listen and both laugh and cry.

It was a stark lesson in how much more complicated and unpredictable people’s lives are than policy conversations often assume. One of my coworkers at the center, who was a graduate of the center’s program, was a person I remember for being cheerful, kind, funny, and bright, someone who seemed to face one major challenge after another with resilience and good humor. Even while her steady, well-paying job had stabilized some aspects of her life, it remained the case that some problems seemed unnavigable. One of her biggest worries that summer was what to do about her teenage son, who would begin high school the following year—a school where, she was sure, he would have to join a gang in order to survive. Together we researched scholarship options, to no avail. She was desperate to find a safe way for her son to attend high school, but given where she lived and her limited resources, she felt (and indeed seemed) trapped.

One of the people in my class that summer was a woman in her early twenties who had two children. By midsummer, she was visibly pregnant with her third. If she was worried about having another child, she didn’t let on, seeming instead to take the development in stride. That same summer I read a news article about how the state of New Jersey, where I grew up, was experimenting with a welfare “family cap”—a policy that capped monthly household benefits based on the number of children a woman had at the time she enrolled in welfare, eliminating increases for additional children who might be born thereafter. The policy, motivated by the notion that women might be having additional children to qualify for more benefits, motivated some of my earliest research. A few years later, I investigated the policy as part of my dissertation research at MIT.2 I found that policy makers’ hunches were not supported by the data; specifically, births did not go down in response to family-cap policies. Instead, welfare recipients were having to make do with less income per child. When I wrote up the results of that analysis, I thought of that young woman in my class who had been pregnant with her third child, and I thought of all the other moms out there trying to provide for their children with increasingly stringent and less generous welfare assistance. Their lives were made more difficult by a public policy that was rooted in bad assumptions.

In the more than 25 years since my time in Bridgeport, I have conducted numerous studies that examine the economics of family formation, children’s well-being, the effects of government safety-net programs, and the link between economic conditions and people’s decisions about schooling, marriage, and having children. My summer at Bridgeport Jobs First was the first step in a research journey that ultimately led me to write this book about family formation in America and how it both reflects and reinforces economic structures and inequality.

Other people and experts are trained and experienced at eliciting the deeply personal stories of others through extensive interviews and relaying them through powerful vignettes. That is not my particular expertise. My training as an economist is about looking at complicated social phenomena and figuring out how to represent them with parsimonious mathematical models that can be empirically tested with data. My job is to look at vast amounts of data with nuance and precision and produce and interpret the resulting evidence. While this book will not contain mathematical equations or econometric specifications, it will present the findings of analyses that use them. As we say in econ-speak, that’s my “comparative advantage.” So, that’s what I do in this book.

In addition to being an economist, I am a parent, and I have been shaped by my own family.

I have three children. I love being their mom more than anything in the world. But I will be the first to admit that parenting is hard— sometimes overwhelmingly so. Being a parent is at once wonderful and exhausting. There are plenty of occasions—more than I care to admit—when I don’t parent the way I would like to or know I should. There are plenty of days when I feel like I just don’t have the energy to deal with whatever kid stuff I have to deal with, whether that be cleaning yet another mess in the kitchen, making another meal, negotiating curfew time, helping with homework, driving one kid in one direction and another in another—this, despite the reality that I have a lot of resources to draw on, including a spouse who is a devoted dad to our children and partner to me. I think often about how much harder this would all be if I didn’t have a partner to share the burdens of raising children or a steady income to reliably cover the bills.

I am also struck by how my own childhood experience and my family’s trajectory of upward mobility would be almost impossible today. My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island from Italy with an elementary-school education and a trunk of personal belongings. He made a home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, making a living selling ice (before the refrigerator was invented), then working various WPA jobs, and eventually selling used cars. He married my grandmother, also an Italian immigrant, and they lived in an apartment building with her brother and five sisters, raising my mom alongside her brothers and many cousins. My parents met at a street-corner dance when they were 15 and were married at 21. They raised four daughters in a New Jersey suburb, with my dad working odd jobs, including stints as a bus driver and an apprentice with an electrical union, before eventually starting a printing business that he ran out of our house. My mom did part-time secretarial work while she raised my three sisters and me. Later she enrolled at a local college and became an elementary-school teacher. All four of us went to college with the help of financial aid, scholarships, and loans.

As was reflected in my dad’s favorite saying, “Sh*t will do for brains if you’ve got good luck,” my family inhabited a specific time and place in American history when people could thrive on hard work and good fortune. That middle-class lifestyle and the upward mobility we experienced are harder to come by today. The demands and pressures of the modern economy, which delivers such unequal rewards to those at the upper and lower ends of the income distribution, would have likely made it impossible for a family like mine to experience the upward economic mobility we did.

I share this personal history because I know many readers will want to know where I’m coming from and what my experience is with the topic I am writing about. It also illustrates an essential point: just as I am a product of my family environment, my family was a product of our economic and social environment. The same is true today, albeit with an economy that is blisteringly unforgiving, a policy environment that doesn’t sufficiently account for it, and a set of social norms where the separation of raising children from marriage is commonplace. In this setting, the disproportionate growth of single-parent households among America’s non-collegeeducated population is both a reflection of and source of growing inequality—if left unchecked, these class divisions will deepen and perpetuate across generations.

I want to emphasize that I have no interest in waxing nostalgic for “simpler” times when the family construct meant married parents, defined by a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother. This convention does not describe my own marriage, nor would I wish it to, though I can easily see how it might work well for others. What marriage looks like for different people, and how various marital arrangements work better for different adults (including whether the marriage is between adults of the same or different genders), is not the topic of this book. This book is focused on how kids are raised, with an emphasis on whether a child has both a mother and father in the household or, more generally, two resident parent figures; on how these issues relate to broader economic trends and growing inequality in society; and on how policies and programs can shape these trends and their trajectories, for better or worse.

This book necessarily puts a spotlight on the role of marriage between parents.

This book necessarily puts a spotlight on the role of marriage between parents and the benefits that institution brings to children— not as a religious or cultural institution but as a practical and economic one that makes the challenging work of raising kids less impossible. Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children. There is simply not currently a robust, widespread alternative to marriage in US society. Cohabitation, in theory, could deliver similar resources as marriage, but the data show that in the US, these partnerships are not, on average, as stable as marriages. (Another possible interpretation of these data: relationships are inherently difficult, and marriage provides an extra layer of institutional inertia that keeps them in place where simple cohabitation might not.) Over and over, study after study, empirical studies bear out the following reality: Children thrive in strong, stable families, and the breakdown of the twoparent married family for a large segment of the population—driven by a decline in marriage that has led to more children being born to unmarried parents—has generally not been good for children.

There is no doubt that marriage can be a terrible prison for some, and the argument of this book is not that such marriages should be maintained. But over the past 40-plus years, American society has engaged in a vast experiment of reshaping the most fundamental of social institutions—the family—and the resulting generations of data tell us in no uncertain terms how that has played out for children. The data present some uncomfortable realities:

•   Two-parent families are beneficial for children.

•   The class divide in marriage and family structure has exacerbated inequality and class gaps.

•   Places that have more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility.

•   Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.

Children’s trajectories in life are also profoundly shaped by schools, and it is unquestionable that improving the life trajectories of children in this country will require improving those institutions. But that’s not what this book is about. We already rely on schools to do too much in this country. Schools are tasked with equipping children with academic lessons and knowledge, as well as with the numerous cognitive and social skills they will need to ultimately be successful in today’s demanding workforce. In addition, school faculty and staff are increasingly being tasked with addressing the nonacademic or academic-adjacent needs of students. Schools hire social workers and mental health counselors and train teachers to notice the signs of family trauma. Our schools need more of these kinds of supports. But, realistically, schools can only do so much to make up for a disadvantaged family life and to close class gaps in children’s outcomes. Children bring the consequences of their family environments (both good and bad) with them to their first day of school and every day thereafter.

Here, economic data tell a compelling story about where the United States is and where it needs to go in terms of arming families and children with what they need. But this conversation also requires honesty, even the difficult kind. It is precisely because of its importance that I have endeavored to take up this challenging topic—to bring the social science evidence on family structure from the obscurity of academic journals into the public conversation.

There is no easy answer to the challenges described in this book, but there are things that can be done. A strong, stable family life is the foundation upon which children find their surest footing in this difficult world. What can our society do to make sure that more children have that advantage in life? The answer is not nearly as straightforward as simply declaring that more parents should get married. We need to first understand why so many parents are not getting married and why so many dads are not living with their children. One important set of factors behind these trends are the same economic changes that have made it harder for people without a college degree, especially men, to be economically successful. These forces have contributed to the erosion of the two-parent family for a large segment of the population. For instance, the decline of manufacturing employment in recent decades has stripped many men—and the communities they live in—of jobs that have historically paid relatively high wages to workers without college degrees. Extensive factory closures in manufacturing towns across the country drove non-college-educated men into lower-paying, less secure jobs, or out of the workforce altogether. In affected communities, marriage rates fell, more children were born to unmarried mothers, and more children were living in poor households. These same communities also experienced increased rates of mortality from drug and alcohol abuse, or so-called deaths of despair.3

The fact that economic challenges have spilled over from the labor market and economic sphere into the sphere of family, with profound implications for children and society, heightens the imperative to address these economic challenges and promote policies and reforms that expand economic opportunity for all.

In addition to grappling with the economic challenges that have contributed to the erosion of the two-parent family, it is equally imperative to devise ways to strengthen families as they currently exist. Doing so means encouraging and supporting marriage among parents, but it also means working to promote strong and healthy family units in cases where parents cannot, should not, or do not want to be married. Policies are often made in a “second-best” world. If marriage won’t work for some parents, then policies and programs should foster productive co-parenting and the healthy engagement of two parents in the lives of their children.

There is also the need to bolster the childhood experiences and opportunities of children who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in a disadvantaged family situation. This problem is not new, nor even specific to a landscape in which fewer people are marrying. But the challenge remains: how do we ameliorate childhood disadvantage through both government and community programs? Fortunately, the evidence-based policy movement has made great strides. Advances in data and scholarship mean there is now a lot of accessible evidence about what types of programs and policies help children succeed. Here, economists find some of their greatest value: producing rigorous studies of the causal effects of policies and programs. Those who design policies and programs should implement and expand policies and programs with evidence of success. Whatever choices adults make or barriers they face, children should not be left to suffer the consequences of an under-resourced or unstable home life.

As a social scientist, I am convinced that the two-parent family structure is, in general, advantageous for children and that we cannot ignore what the growing prevalence of one-parent households means for children and inequality in this country. We cannot throw up our hands and decide that family structure is a topic not to be discussed or an intractable issue that cannot be meaningfully addressed. For the sake of kids, we need to tackle this challenge head on, in a variety of ways.

A road map to this book

This book puts a conversation about family—and the evidence of its economic importance—at the center of the policy discussions about income inequality and eroding social mobility. The sources and arguments here come from a broad literature; what follows is a short road map to the chapters and their pieces of the argument.

Chapters 2 to 4 document the changing landscape of children’s family structures in the US, why it matters, and what’s behind it. In chapter 2, I show how the divergence in family structures has exacerbated income inequality across children’s households. In chapter 3, I explain why marriage is such a relevant institution for children’s economic well-being and life trajectories. I describe marriage as a long-term contract between two individuals to combine resources and share the responsibilities of keeping a household and raising children. The chapter describes theory and evidence showing that this more highly resourced arrangement leads to better outcomes for children. But the resource gain to marriage depends crucially on what both partners have to offer. If marriage has declined because fewer men are reliable partners or economic contributors, then the challenge is at least partially economic. Chapter 4 takes up this issue directly and describes the link between the economic struggles of non-college-educated men and their declining rates of marriage.

The next two chapters focus more directly on issues of parenting. In chapter 5