Review of The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney
The gist of the book will be familiar to many well-informed readers: on a wide variety of measures, 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.
Growing up apart from a father carries considerable risks for children aside from economic hardship. 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. Growing up in a single-mother household is associated with poorer college completion, even after controlling for a host of other variables, as well as with diminished likelihood of marrying or staying married upon reaching adulthood.
These well-researched facts have evidently failed to impress Americans. Since the 1960s, the percentage of the nation s children living with a single mother has only gone up. Today, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; that s double the share in 1980. In many subgroups, the all-but-universal tie between marriage and childbearing has been completely severed. 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.
The vast majority of single mothers are not simply skipping the wedding and living with their child s father in a European-style de facto marriage. In the U.S., cohabiting relationships are fleeting and frequently sequential. Kearney notes that American children are much more likely to experience two or three parental partnerships by age 15 than children in other countries.
That puts kids at a double disadvantage: not only do the children of unmarried parents not live with their fathers; even if they maintain relationships with them (and many do not), those relationships are often strained. Never-married dads are far less likely to remain involved with their children than divorced dads in part, perhaps, because their child s mother, or the fathers themselves, have moved on to new relationships. These trends have turned the U.S. into the global capital of fatherless families.
We’ve known all this for a long time, but not officially I guess.