Intact Families Do Matter

Those who fear the return of discrimination against divorced and unmarried parents have long argued that there is nothing inherently damaging about growing up in a one-parent home. As a National Review article documents, research is proving them wrong.

Since the 1970s, a range of scholars, journalists, and pundits have sought to minimize the emotional, social, and economic fallout of the nation’s retreat from marriage, a retreat that has hit poor and working-class families and children especially hard.

States with higher levels of married parenthood enjoy higher levels of growth, economic mobility for children growing up poor, and median family income, along with markedly lower levels of child poverty.

For three of our four outcomes, as the Washington Post noted, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”