Someday I’ll read Melissa Kearney’s new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, but because of the nature of think tank book promotion these days, I don’t have a copy, while Nicholas Kristof, Kay Hymowitz, National Review, American Enterprise Institute, etc., all had time to drop glowing reviews before publication day. (And of course, because she had Op-Eds in the New York Times and the Atlantic on the same day, this is clearly going to be one of those books people don’t need to read in order to weaponize.)
So here are a few quick comments for publication day, based mostly on her NY Times Op-Ed.
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.
“Often not publicly challenged or lamented”? That is hilarious. I’ve only been writing about this for 12 years, but here are my receipts. We have been through many rounds of lamentation. Including rounds in which liberals lament that liberals don’t lament enough. This is really empirically wrong.
Related aside: In the Atlantic article, Kearney describes “a conference on fighting poverty” “this year”, at which “a member of the audience asked … ‘What about family structure? … Does family structure play a role in poverty?'” and, “The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else.” The Atlantic shouldn’t publish this without evidence. Name the people (it was presumably a public event) and let them speak for themselves, to corroborate or challenge this super convenient account.
Back to NY Times:
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 just a terrible, misleading description. Just look at the last sentence: “Despite a small rise in two-parent homes since 2012, the overall trend persists.” It literally says the trend has reversed, but it persists. Anyway, the trend arrived by about 1996, and hasn’t “persisted” since. Here are the rates of children living with two parents (counting cohabiting couples as parents), and married parents where both are present. (I limit the ages to 0-14 because after age 15 children can be married and have their own families, so it’s dicey, but doesn’t change the trend.) Census has produced the same trend for married parents, in table CH-1, here. (Note: I fixed a small error 19 Sep 2023. Stata code is here.)
Of course, Kearney will say it’s still a super serious problem. Fine, just don’t say it’s getting “worse” when it’s not.
Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire at the end of 2021, rejecting a policy that provided families who met certain income thresholds with annual tax credits of $3,000 per child age 6 to 18 and $3,600 per child under 6. What are the odds that the government will start providing one-parent families with, say, benefits equal to the median earnings of an adult with a high school degree, which comes to around $44,000 a year? I would put the odds at zero. As long as that’s the case, income gaps between one- and two-parent homes will be substantial, and income matters a lot for kids’ prospects and futures.
This is terrible policy logic. We literally had a policy partly solving the problem she is upset about LAST YEAR but Republicans torpedoed it. Her interpretation is that, therefore, such a policy approach is futile and we should — do what exactly? (something, unstated, that is “multifaceted”). There is zero evidence ever, ever, of any policy directly increasing marriage rates in the U.S. This is what passes for policy analysis when your preconceptions are extremely acceptable.
Only 1 percent of the budget of the federal Administration for Children and Families is allocated to “promoting safe and stable families,” as compared to, for example, 15 percent for foster care.
I have written voluminously (as have others) about the utter failure of that 1 percent (more than $1 billion so far) to promote marriage. There is a strong evidence base. It has failed utterly. On the other hand — what exactly is the implication about foster care. This money is for foster families, and there should probably be more of it. It is not promoting foster care. Is the implication that the federal government prefers foster care to marriage? I’m pretty floored by the wrongness and offensiveness of this sentence.
Conclusion
We need to work more to understand why so many American parents are raising their children without a second parent in the home, and we must find effective ways to strengthen families in order to increase the share of children raised in healthy, stable two-parent homes. Doing so will improve the well-being of millions of children, help close class gaps and create a stronger society for us all.
“Stronger society for us all.” Kill me now. Read a book. (Speaking of which, I’ll read this book for you if you invite me to review it for your publication.)
Note: My reading of the evidence is that most people would rather have and raise children in two-parent families, and that the best way to help them do that — and other things they might choose to do — is to reduce incarceration, increase access to affordable housing, and provide people with comprehensive, guaranteed healthcare. A policy to promote two-parent families is a proven failure, but providing for people’s needs is good.
Addendum: A correspondent on Mastodon, Josh Buermann, reports that Kearney’s plea for the maritally privileged to drop their political correctness a little and tell the truth about family structure sounds a lot like one made by Charles Murray in 2012.
Kearney wrote:
For decades, academics, journalists and advocates have taken a “live and let live” view of family structure. Mostly this reflects a well-intentioned effort to avoid stigmatizing single mothers and to promote acceptance and respect for different family arrangements. But benign intentions have obscured the uncomfortable reality that children do better when they are raised in two-parent homes.
Murray, writing not just about marriage but also about the “work ethic,” wrote in 2012 (paywalled | ungated):
There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need–not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.
The details do differ significantly, but this is a very old argument, and a very tired appeal.


Bravo! Kearney’s argument that the R’s focus on family structure is right, and that it’s culture not economics, after all, is great for getting NYT coverage and right-wing think-tanks to shill for her book. But the data are clear that it’s economics, not culture, that is driving family instability in the US, and that the public policies helpful to dealing with this phenomenon involve economic support, which both increases the wellbeing of children raised in single-parent families and increases stability of partner relationships, rather than empirically-discredited public policies admonishing poor, unmarried folks about the benefits of marriage.
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This is a really good retort to the op-ed Philip. This is the thing Melissa, Murray, Brooks, Wilcox, Kristof and Summers will not do: Criticize themselves and members of their own class for destroying two-parent families. Will Larry Summers (who is touting Melissa’s book!) say, “Yeah, it was bad and disastrous for me and my children when I got a divorce in the 1990s and spent a lot of of my free time with Jeffrey Epstein (!!!).” Will anyone say, “Yeah, Murray’s kids all smoke crack-rock now that he divorced his disabled wife and admitted to partaking in commercial sex in Thailand.” Will any of them attack Elon Musk for having 9 kids (!!!) with three different women, which is almost impossible to spend time with generally especially if you are running a bunch of businesses. All I know is if Elon Musk was African American and in the NBA all sorts of white people would be attacking him and “his culture” and not race of course!
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I mean more or less the “marriage promotion” movement are literally privileged elites who will lecture the masses about why two parent family are so essential and hint that what they are doing is shameful but not attack anyone like them for destroying two parent families. Oh and not want to provide resources to children who happen to be stuck in the situation. It is like this ridiculous form of Nineteenth Century Victorian morality in which only elites can be decadent. Call Oscar Wilde! What is crazy is that these individuals don’t try to compensate for not spending time with their children from divorce in a prior marriage but date and get remarried (often times with younger women, see David Brooks), spend time with Jeffrey Epstein (!!!), or leave a bunch of their kids on another continent (see Rod Dreher)….
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Thanks for this. I did buy the book and read as much as I could stomach. The errors in logic hurt my head, and the way the op-eds have unleashed a round a liberal commentators opining about how their family structure is objectively the best has hurt my heart. This soothed my soul a little, so now I can focus on prepping to go teach my students about how we need affordable housing for all families.
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How much would decent affordable housing make it possible for people to have the families they want? Very much.
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Does section 8 disallow cohabitation? No, it does not. And if overall couple income disqualifies said family from section 8 housing then life together must be better, that’s a win. And dude, referencing your obscure work as nullifying Kearny’s claim of something having yet to be challenged is laughable. Get a clue. This Kearny chick is smarter and CLEARLY has a wider, further following and you’re just jealous. Which is just regressive idiocy, I feel like a turd even having to write such silliness, you man child. Funnel that “pay attention to my shit too” into something worth while.
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Thank you for this! I haven’t read
Kearney’s book, but I’ve read the reviews and readers’ comments on them and it’s given me a migraine.
I’m not sure what rock people have been hiding under if they’re unaware that the two-parent family is assumed to be the preferred “family structure” in the U.S. and always has been. But unsurprisingly and as usual, there’s plenty of lamentation about the collapse of family values in America today (because things are ALWAYS worse “now” than ever before, amirite?). Nobody takes marriage seriously these days! It’s that horrible “no fault divorce!”
And yet in reality, the divorce rate hit its historic high of 22.6 per 1,000 back in 1980. It fell to a record LOW of 14.9 per 1,000 in 2019. That’s even lower than it was in 1970.
Of course, one factor in the falling divorce rate has been the societal acceptance of unmarried cohabitation, but you can’t complain that “nobody takes their marriage vows seriously anymore” when the majority of first marriages today do remain intact.
As for how being born out of wedlock (and thus more likely in a single-parent home) affects one’s chances for success in adulthood, economic and otherwise, it would be helpful to compare U.S. data to that of other countries. Because when it comes to childbirth outside of marriage, the U.S. is nowhere NEAR the top.
An OECD chart, “SHARE OF BIRTHS OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE, 2018,” ranks the United States at #23 of the 38 OECD countries. How do American kids in single-parent families fare compared to kids in France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and the other nations where it’s more common than here? Does Kearney get into that?
I kind of doubt it, given that a UNICEF chart comparing the child poverty rate in 41 “advanced countries,” also in 2018, the U.S. is fourth from the bottom. And look! Far fewer children live beneath the poverty line in France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, and the other countries with more out-of-wedlock births than in the U.S. Hmmm.
Statistics and charts aside, though, it’s important to ask what’s to be gained by pointing out how hard it is to be a single parent, since most single parents are quite aware that it’s difficult. It’s good news for kids that most parents would prefer to be alone than with an abusive partner, but also, most people would prefer a loving, committed, functional relationship to going it alone.
But it’s hard to find that person, and it’s even harder amongst minority groups. Meanwhile, childbirth rates are dropping in the U.S. and worldwide; if that’s a concern, it seems like we should make life easier rather than harder for families of ALL configurations.
~ Jonesing for Prosperity
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