At City Journal, Kay S. Hymowitz reviews a new book by economist Melissa Kearney entitled The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Hymowitz opines the scholarly economics in this book probably makes it a tough slog for non-economists.
On the other hand, the book makes a strong argument for the importance of traditional marriage - living together with one's mother and father - in the subsequent success or failure of the child.
It’s not because it breaks new ground. Kearney’s book 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.
The average child growing up in single-parent homes is at a disadvantage compared with their two-parent peers. On the most concrete level, single mothers have less money and time to devote to their children, and they are at higher risk of poverty and welfare dependence. On a societal level, the rise of single-parent homes has increased and entrenched both economic and social inequality.
Boys, in particular, are more likely to have academic and behavioral problems without their fathers in the house, and, statistically speaking, the presence of a stepfather doesn’t make their futures look any rosier.
In the early decades of the transformation of the family, single mothers were likely to have been divorced, but by the 1980s, the majority of single mothers had never married in the first place.
Whatever advantages increased spending on government benefits might provide for low-income children, they do not begin to compensate for differences in family structure. (skip) “We should be clear-eyed about the reality,” Kearney writes. “Parents affect their children’s lives and shape their outcomes in ways that government cannot fully make up for.”
Those who make the above observations or arguments are often accused of blaming the victims. The weight of the research presented in this book tends to argue otherwise. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.
