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Navigating conversations about the choice to raise a child alone is a nightmare, perhaps because it sometimes feels like it wasn’t a choice at all. In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S Kearney emphasises that she is not trying to pass judgment or shame single parents. But she says we must discuss America’s striking rise in single parenthood, arguing that it is disadvantaging affected children, exacerbating inequality and leaving kids stuck in poverty.
The figures set out in her book are stark. Whereas in 1980 77 per cent of American children lived with married parents, in 2019 that share had fallen to 63 per cent. The change was concentrated among children of mothers without a college degree, making marriage increasingly the preserve of the rich. The US — Kearney’s focus — is extreme in this regard. According to a survey by Pew published in 2019, its share of children living with only one parent was triple the global average.
In a style closer to think-tank report than rightwing screed, Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, tries to explain the trend. She dismisses the idea that generous welfare benefits are to blame, arguing that they are too stingy to make much of a difference.
Instead, she points to declining economic opportunities for men without college degrees, whose earnings have stagnated during the past four decades. As men have become less marriageable, the women who might have partnered with them have struck out on their own.
The implications for the children involved follow from the reality that childcare takes huge sums of money, time and emotional energy, and having two parents at home tends to mean more of each. Figures from 2015 suggest that families in the richest third of households spend twice as much on their children as those in the poorest third. Growing up in a higher-income family (which is easier when there are two sources of it) raises one’s chances of participating in sport, music or art. Financial pressure makes the tough job of parenting even harder.
Kearney warns that the same poverty that makes parental relationships more fragile trickles down the generations. One study from 2004 found that a legal change that made divorce easier was associated with less education, lower income and higher divorce rates for the affected children. It seems that boys’ outcomes are particularly sensitive to time spent with their parents, while black boys (who are more likely to grow up in single-parent households) must contend with the vicious and compounding effects of poverty and racism.
What is to be done? Mentoring programmes can do good things for children, but are hard to scale. One trial of responsible fatherhood programmes increased the time spent on reading and playing with their children a bit, but did not noticeably affect total time together. That makes sense; parenting classes won’t help where the real problems are economic instability, crime or addiction. Neither will it do much where trust between parents has completely broken down.
Kearney calls for economic policies that might help. Those include beefed-up food stamps, child tax credits, housing subsidies and childhood education programmes to help children — anything to blunt the two-parent privilege. A huge bung of resources into public universities and community colleges to improve the plight of young men might make a difference too.
But when it comes to making men more marriageable, improving their economic fortunes might not be enough. For example, the birth rate increased when the fracking boom improved the fortunes of young men, but evenly across married and unmarried parents. Kearney calls on policymakers to foster a norm of two-parent homes for children by talking about their benefits.
Readers may worry that her arguments will energise racists on the right. But Kearney argues that one can discuss the benefits of higher education without fear of blaming or shaming those without it. The same should go for the advantages of two-parent families.
The Two-Parent Privilege: How The Decline In Marriage Has Increased Inequality And Lowered Social Mobility, And What We Can Do About It by Melissa S Kearney Swift Press £22, 228 pages/UCP $25, 240 pages
Soumaya Keynes is the FT’s economics columnist
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