The benefit of 'the two-parent privilege'

Almost a quarter of U.S. children under 18 live with a single parent and no other adults. That’s the highest rate in the world.

How'd it happen?

“We saw this new social norm forming where marriage wasn’t as important as it used to be for having kids. ... That produced this decoupling of childbearing and marriage in effected populations and areas," economics professor Melissa Kearney says.

Our guest says it's hurting children.

“It’s pretty hard to say that we could do much to address the inequality in kids’ household resources and outcomes, if we don’t tackle this divergence in family structures.”

Today, On Point: The benefit of 'the two-parent privilege.'

Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Author of "The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind."

Part I 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti.

DIANA DUKE [Tape]: I grew up in a single parent household after my father committed suicide. He was just 38 years old. At the time, I was 7, my sister was 5, and my brother was 2. My mother was only 26 years old and left with three children to care for.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Diana Duke, an On Point listener in Sandpoint, Idaho. Three years after her father's death, Diana's mother went to work full time to provide for her children. Diana took care of her younger siblings. It was hard, but she watched her mom and other friends who were single mothers. And Diana says that these women were role models who showed her she's capable of pursuing whatever she wants.

DUKE: So I went out and I got jobs at the age of 14 to save for college and pay for my college tuition. After college, I went and got a job with a big corporation and semi-retired at the age of 40 with a pension. And currently have a farm in Idaho, a small farm, and my husband works full time, so I'm under his benefits. So I'd say that we — we're doing okay.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, Diana is doing okay. But she says not everyone in her family is.

DUKE: My brother's life took definitely a different trajectory. And he may have done much better having both parents, having a father. He got involved in drugs and addiction and into the juvenile system, arrests. He currently lives in our childhood home in Philadelphia and things are working out okay. He's in a program but his entire life has been that way.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, stories like Diana's, where young children grow up with a single parent, are no longer unusual. Today, almost a quarter of all American children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adult in the household. That's the highest rate in the world.

Almost half of all babies born in the United States were born to unmarried women in 2019, a jump from just 5% back in 1960. Now, that growth has come for a variety of reasons, which we'll talk about today. But our guest says overall, one fact has coalesced around this trend: Children from single adult households have a harder time doing as well economically as children from dual parent households. But it's not just having two parents that give those kids the edge — it's having two parents bound together by marriage.

Well, Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Maryland, believes that correlation is so strong, her new book is titled, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. And she joins us today. Professor Kearney, welcome to On Point.

MELISSA KEARNEY: Thanks so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, before we dive into the data, I'm curious: What got you interested in this topic?

KEARNEY: Well, first, I have to catch my breath. You started this show with a pretty tragic, sad story that makes it hard to dig into the data right away. But um --

CHAKRABARTI: Well, actually, let's stop then. So what, what pulled at you about Diana's story?

KEARNEY: Well, all of it, right? I mean, first of all, her — the way her mother found herself a single mother is exceedingly tragic. And of course, there was no decision there, and she had no choice but to pull together. And it sounds like she did an amazing job, as many single mothers do, doing all they can to provide for their children.

And then, you know, the story about how different children in the household were able to cope with more or less success is also a bit of a familiar story. And, you know, there's some tragedy involved. As well as really some Amazing success stories. So --

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing that I — forgive me for interrupting, Professor --

KEARNEY: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: But that's the thing that I particularly appreciated about Diana's story is that it shows the complexity of outcomes that can happen in a situation where there's one parent at home. And then the fact that that that percentage of households is growing is what warrants this, you know, a deeper dive into the who's and the why's.

So if we can get to the data in a minute here, I'm still interested in what got you interested in putting together your analysis in a book now? Because it seems to me that this trend in terms of the growth of children being born into single parent households has been going on for some time.

KEARNEY: Right, right. So the way, you know, there's a few answers to this. The most immediate is the way I came to eventually decide I felt like I had to write this book is because for over two decades now, as an economist, I've been studying inequality and poverty and social mobility in the U.S. And I've been involved in a lot of policy conversations about how to address inequality, improve child well-being, and in all of those conversations, we tend — again, as people who come at this as social scientists or economists — we tend to focus on economic policy levers. Ways to improve schools, training programs, strengthen the safety net.

But staring at us from the data and mounds of studies and evidence is the really huge factor of family structure. And eventually, I got to the point feeling like we're not really going to make great progress closing class gaps, addressing inequality, improving kids' well-being in this country if we don't put family structure at the top of our policy agenda when it comes to addressing all these challenges.

And so you're entirely right that this is not a new trend. This didn't sneak up on us, but it's been there for a really long time. And my sense from trying to engage with this topic in policy conversations is collectively, we've really struggled to figure out how to talk about this and think about this as a policy challenge, you know, for a variety of reasons. So that's why I decided, you know, I had to write this book.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Well, I want us to state the obvious right now, and it's something that we'll dig into a little bit more. By virtue of saying that family structure has any place, let alone a central place, in thinking of policies around reducing poverty and inequality, given how much family structure has been politicized over the past many decades, you are edging very close to that third rail. (LAUGHS)

KEARNEY: Exactly. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: But we'll get to that in a minute here. Before we dig into what the data say, I often like to sort of get a understanding of what your definitions are, because then it helps us understand the significance of the analysis, right?

So when you say — let's first start with "single parent" or "single adult households." Does that just mean there's simply just one adult who is a parent in the household? Or can it mean there is a parent, a single parent, but perhaps they're living, they and their children are living with I don't know, grandparents or aunts or uncles, any extended family?

KEARNEY: Yeah, this is super important. It's a good place to start. So I try to be really careful. And so sometimes I slip into saying "single moms," but I try to say "unpartnered mothers." So we're very clear that I don't just mean "single" in the sense of "not married."

But when I say "unpartnered" or "single mother," I'm generally referring to a parent in the household who doesn't have a partner — either a spouse or an unmarried partner. Some of those unpartnered mothers do have a mother or an aunt living in the household. The majority don't, 67% don't. It's something I checked. So when I say unpartnered, I really mean that there's no second parent figure for the child.

When I talk about cohabiting parents, so two parents who aren't married. In those situations, what I'm referring to — and, and by the way, I'm doing this all with census data, so these are, you know, the main source of data on how American households are formed — when I refer to unmarried parents who are living together, that's not necessarily the child's biological parents. It means that there is one biological parent in the house, and then someone they identify as their partner. And in a majority of cases, the unmarried second parent figure is the biological parent of the child. But in 25 to 40% of cases, it's not. So even that's a bit more inclusive than people might think.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So but I'm feeling slightly confused here. But are you saying that the distinguishing factor, though, in terms of outcomes, which we'll talk about later, is if there's another adult in the household, marriage is the thing that makes the difference versus two parent figures who are not bound together by the institution of marriage?

KEARNEY: No. No, no, no.

CHAKRABARTI: You are not saying that. Okay.

KEARNEY: No, I'm not saying that. So, basically, I treat two-parent households of any gender and any sex, whether they're two parents in the household, or really, a parent and a second parent figure in the household. That's really the difference. The reason why marriage winds up playing such an outsized role in this story and in my book is because marriage is the institution that tends to deliver two parents to the household for kids.

So this is actually a really important fact. Very few kids in the U. S. actually live with two parent figures who aren't married, certainly not through their entire childhood. And so that's why marriage makes such a difference is because in the U. S., it's tightly bound up with whether a child has two parents in the household.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And you're talking about living throughout one's childhood with those two adults, right? And it sounds like the implication is that parents who aren't married, are their rates of ending cohabitation higher than those who are?

KEARNEY: Yeah. (LAUGHS) So this is getting nitty gritty very fast.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, but the nitty gritty is what makes it so interesting.

KEARNEY: Yeah, exactly. So actually, just to keep things simple, I do things as a snapshot of census data in the data work I present in the book. So I'm actually just looking at a snapshot. And the snapshot tells me that, you know, about 21% of kids live with an unpartnered mother at any given time. About another 5% of kids live with an unpartnered father at any point in time.

If I actually looked over the child's 18 years of childhood, those rates would be higher. So I'm being a bit conservative in my sense of — I'm just looking at a snapshot. If you want to say how many kids are ever with an unpartnered parent, it's even higher.

CHAKRABARTI: Got it. So just to be clear, before we head into our first break here, the reason why marriage crops up — I think this is exactly what you said, but I want to be sure that I understood you — is that it's the means by which most parents stay together for a long enough period of time to consider it through the childhood of their children. Is that right?

KEARNEY: That's right. And again, this is also a bit uniquely American.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We got a lot of input from On Point listeners on various aspects of single parenthood and growing up in single parent families. This is Jesse Gaines from Detroit, Michigan.

JESSE GAINES [Tape]: When I was growing up, my mom and dad weren't together, but my stepdad and my mom were together. So having a two-parent household was so beneficial. And now that I'm a single dad — I've been a single dad for maybe the last nine years. My son will be 10 next month. His mother passed away. I will say that it is a real struggle like, day to day.

I'm trying to figure out what can I do? What should I do? You know, and the resources are not there for fathers that are single parents or they're very hidden. They don't look at us like we need the help, you know, and I do have a good job. I'm a mechanic at the post office and I got benefits. So I take care of the kid, but I will say if any father is dealing with that, don't give up. And, you know, just take care of your kids, man. Try to spend time with them.

CHAKRABARTI: I do love our listeners. They are so smart and thoughtful. Thank you, as always, for giving us your life stories. Now, Professor Kearney, I appreciate your willingness to embrace the wonk with us because that's kind of what we do here at On Point. (LAUGHS)

KEARNEY: (LAUGHS) Yeah, of course. It's great!

CHAKRABARTI: But getting those definitions out was very important, because, like, your analysis leads to some striking conclusions.

I mean, first of all, the fact that I read a little earlier in the show that almost half of babies born in the U. S. were born to unmarried women in 2019. That is a major, major jump from 1960. And that you also say — I think the data also show — that the United States has amongst the highest rate of children living with one parent and no other adult in the household. So tell us, first of all, more about that. Is it truly the highest rate in the world?

KEARNEY: So I'm going to take both of these facts because they're really important. Let's start with that one. So that fact comes from a Pew Research survey that looked at 130 countries around the world and documented that, you know, by their methodology, nearly a quarter of U.S. kids lives with just one parent. That is much higher than the average across the world, which is 7%. It's also much higher than in the European Union, which is 13%. So this really is a distinctly American phenomenon.

This also relates to the earlier conversation we were having about why marriage is so important. In European countries, for instance, the sort of institution of cohabitation among parents is much stronger and much more long-term.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

KEARNEY: And so it's not that the decline in marriage among parents in the U. S. has simply taken on more of a European flavor where parents live together in a committed way throughout a child's childhood and they're just not married. What's happened in the U. S. is an increase in the share of parents who never get married.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

KEARNEY: They're not married to begin with. And this relates to the non-marital childbearing point. And so children in the U. S. are much more likely to just have one parent.

So then let's go back to the non marital childbearing point. A really key issue here — and again, another big motivation for why I'm trying to call attention to this topic — is the major socioeconomic class divide in this. So while it's true that 52% of births to moms who just have a high school degree and no college degree are now born to unmarried mothers — meaning the parents were never married — that's 66% of births to moms who don't have a high school degree. But it's only 11% of births among women who have a four year college degree.

And so this, you know, the average is really high, but it masks really important variation in terms of who's likely to be having a child outside of marriage and ultimately then raising a child in an unpartnered situation. And again, this is why it's also really interesting to think about the U.S. exceptionalism here. Because it's decidedly not the case that the reason why there's such a high rate of non-marital childbearing or mother-only households in the U. S. is because U.S. women have so much more economic independence and they're so much more successful and so they're doing this on their own. It's much more likely to be economically vulnerable parents in the U.S. who are doing this on their own.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, let me take that point here for a second. Because I'm looking at the Pew study that you cited here and they have a map, right, this color coded map. It's really striking, I have to say. Not just because the U.S. is so high — in that 23% category — but this also seems like kind of a phenomenon of the "global north," if I could put it that way. Because, basically, in sort of mustard color any country that has 15% or more of children living in single parent homes, they're almost all entirely in the United States, Europe and Russia, right? I'm seeing the UK is 21%; Ireland, 14; Germany, 12; Denmark, 17; France, 16.

But then as you look at other regions of the world, like Asia — China, Southeast Asia, the number drops quite significantly, under 5% in a lot of places. But interestingly, in South America and Africa, it's sort of in the middle there.

KEARNEY: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: And I think Pew says that the African numbers maybe come from, you know, nations that have suffered under the scourge of wars and HIV/AIDS, things like that. So the causal factors are different in those places. Do you draw the same conclusion?

KEARNEY: So I've not tried to do a full sweep of explaining the international variation. But --

CHAKRABARTI: Not yet, why not? (LAUGHS)

KEARNEY: (LAUGHS) Maybe that'll be my next project. But I looked at what's happened in the past 40 years in other high income countries to see if the trends looked similar to the U.S. trends in terms of the socioeconomic education class divide. And we do see in the other high income countries — again, their rates of single parent households are lower than in the U.S., but the growth has been disproportionately outside the most highly educated group.

CHAKRABARTI: I see.

KEARNEY: And I think this does relate to the causal factors that have driven some of the difference in the U. S., which I think, you know, I'm sure we'll get there, but is part economic. And those economic shocks have been similar in other high income countries. And I think it's reverberating to the sort of areas of marriage and family structure in similar ways, even if the rates are lower.

But another interesting thing I do take away from the comparison, from that map that you're looking at across the globe, this, I think, potentially speaks also to different social conventions and norms.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

KEARNEY: And again, like, in the U. S., even among different race and ethnic groups in the U.S., we see large differences. You know, just one in particular, because you called attention to the fact that in that global map, parts of Asia have less than a 5% rate of kids, share of kids living in one parent home. In the U.S., uniformly, the children of Asian American parents, regardless of education level, have really high rates, the highest in our country, of living in two-parent households.

And, you know, again, this is outside my expertise, but when I've sort of tried to figure out the economic story doesn't work very well in the U. S. for explaining why there's no education gradient in two-parent households among Asians. And one of the explanations they keep coming up against is, well, there are very strong social norms and conventions about married parent homes in the Asian community. That shows up in the map. To the extent that, to the extent that that gives us some clues that would be consistent.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I would also add that in many of these countries with the lower rate of single parent households, it's just much, much harder to get out of a marriage as well.

KEARNEY: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: And so sort of that fact is actually masked, I think, by these numbers. Because, you know, we've heard millions and millions of stories of mostly women who desperately need to get out of a marriage in these other countries and cannot. That's kind of a side point here.

But getting back to the United States, so again, just going over those numbers. Essentially between women who have no high school degree, they didn't complete high school, versus those who have a college degree, there's a 55% spread, as you said, between the percentage of single parent household. You mentioned Asian Americans as being an outlier here. Are there other differences that we can see  based on various racial identities in this country?

KEARNEY: If we just — and again, because I'm using census data and I'm really about aggregate numbers and trends here, as opposed to getting into the nuances of very particular household structures. Just in very coarse descriptions, if I look at the census, moms who identify as non-Hispanic white, Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Asian, the share of their children living in married parent homes is 88% among the children of Asian moms, 77% among the children of white moms, 62% among the children of Hispanic moms and 38% among the children of Black moms. So huge variation across the sort of four major race and ethnic groups.

If we look within those groups — again, with the exception of Asian Americans — we do see an additional education gap, right? So there's both race/ethnic differences and within race/ethnic groups, education gaps. So here's a striking one: Among the children of Black moms, 60% of those whose moms have a four year college degree live in a married parent household, as compared to 30% of those who don't. So children whose moms identify in the census as Black and don't have a four year college degree, only 30% of them live in married parent homes.

And again, there's all sorts of underlying explanations for these differences. But I mean, being upfront about these differences, I think is really critical to trying to get a handle on what we could do to close class gaps in household resources and children's preparedness for school and all sorts of things.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why it is quite difficult to have a thoughtful conversation about this issue. Because when we do break it down by race, even given all the variability within racial identities — look, we're in a country where I can understand it if a lot of academics say, "Well, I don't really want to go there" because it's very easy for the conversation to quickly be hijacked by accusations of being racist, right?

So like, you know, are you passing — No, let me rephrase that. I was going to ask you if you're passing judgment on people, but clearly that's not what you're doing here.

KEARNEY: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: But is there a concern about sort of getting into interpretations that can come off as being more sociological or cultural versus economic?

KEARNEY: So I think this is one — I mean, this is certainly the main reason why I hesitated to write this book. I think this is among many social scientists and academics and probably policy observers, a key reason why people are hesitant to have this conversation.

In the past, I mean, let's go back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960's called attention to the fact that there was an emergent difference in marital childbearing two-parent households between Black and white families in the sixties. He was really focused on sort of urban black families at the time, when 30% of children were born to unmarried mothers. Now it's 70% of children born to Black women now are unmarried. At the time it was fewer than 5% among white. Now it's closer to 30%. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to this in the sixties. The trends have continued.

But that conversation, I mean, there's a long social history here. You know, that was — he was called a racist. You know, there was also some unfortunate language that would strike us, you know, as we wouldn't, you know, no one would have the conversation in I think the language that people were having it back then. That sort of shut down the conversation for a very long time.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. You know what, can I just mention about the 60s and Moynihan --

KEARNEY: Go ahead.

CHAKRABARTI: Because what was most interesting to me in looking back at that time was that, you know, we were also in the sort of the "war on poverty" era as well. And from what I can see from various bits of research is that — let's just take testing in schools, that there seems to be adequate evidence that achievement gaps in schools were actually shrinking, they were going down because of the fact that poverty assistance was going up.

So it wasn't necessarily race that became the causal factor. But the more that families got economic assistance, the better that their kids did in school. So that in and of itself kind of blows up the cultural or race-based analysis. And I wanted to mention that because does that get back to, you know, what you're talking about as the differences in life outcomes for the kids growing up in these single parent households?

KEARNEY: So a couple of things. My response to that is you can't really have the conversation about family structure and poverty separately, even though we try to. Because growing up in a single — I mean, look, poverty rates are five times higher among kids living in a single mother household as compared to married parents. They're three times higher living in a single father household as compared to married parents. So 100% we should be doing more to fight poverty in this country. 100%.

But we're only going to get so far — that's a big part of my point — we're only going to get so far by strengthening the safety net and closing class gaps. Because here's another way to put it. Only — not only, I mean, it's a really high number — but 25% of kids who live with single moms live in poverty. That means 75% don't.

CHAKRABARTI: Uh-huh.

KEARNEY: So this isn't just about fighting poverty. Which, I mean, I can't say this strongly enough: We need to do more to fight child poverty in this country. Like, full stop. Regardless of the parent's marital structure. Like, I have written a ton about this. This is, you know, I feel very strongly about this.

But even if we could commit politically to having a stronger commitment to fighting child poverty, there's still going to be big gaps in kids outcomes by whether they're living in a two-parent or one-parent situation because the income gaps, even beyond poverty, are huge. And we're never going to close those with a government check, quite frankly.

But I want to, I do want to come back to this race piece. So there was the Moynihan. Then, related to the fighting poverty, in the eighties, the issue came back up. William Julius Wilson wrote really pathbreaking work on this, a sociologist from Harvard. We had welfare reform. And there were really terrible caricatures of the welfare queen. And that was tied up with racial, you know, stereotypes as well. And so, again, we made it impossible to have a productive conversation about this topic.

What's interesting in my experience in bringing this topic back up, is being well aware of all that history. I mean, I was not a social scientist in the 60s, let's be clear. I was starting to engage in this stuff during welfare reform. You know, with the benefit of, like, 30 years passing, that feels very close to us who study social policy.

But I'm having this interesting experience where a lot of sort of younger journalists I'm talking to, they don't know that history. And they ask me, "Why is this a sensitive topic? Are people worried they'll sound Republican?" I'm like, "Oh, that's, that's like the least of my concerns." (LAUGHS)

Like you could — I mean, yes, people have said I sound socially conservative. And there was one article that said I was a Republican propagandist, which of course is absurd for anyone who's followed my writing or career for the past 25 years, but I can take that criticism. And so that all makes me a bit optimistic that maybe we can have this conversation now in a way that doesn't get dragged down, right?

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Well, I'm laughing there slightly because I understand your optimism but it comes from a lack of historical awareness from young journalists, which isn't the best thing in the world for me as a journalist to hear!

KEARNEY: (LAUGHS)

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: And Professor Kearney, before we go forward, I just want to listen to another story from an On Point listener. This is Richard Gil from Portland, Oregon. And he says his mom raised him and his sister with no other adults in their home. And here's how he describes his life story.

RICHARD GIL [Tape]: I am sure that I was better off being raised by just my mother. My father was not ready to be a father, and not ready to be an adult, really. My mother, on the other hand, she gave us so much love, taught us right versus wrong, kept us in a town that was relatively safe and had good schools. Kept us in our own home until we were both graduated from high school.

I was able to go on to get an advanced degree and make good money. I'm married and have two kids and couldn't imagine raising them alone. I see my mother every day. She's older and forgets things, but remembers how hard it was to raise us by herself. And still she remembers those times fondly, validating her life by validating ours.

CHAKRABARTI: Once again, I think I'm still in a Thanksgiving mood because I have great gratitude for listeners who share their stories and trust us with their stories.

Now, Professor Kearney, it's probably long past time we did this, but what would you say are the drivers to this major change in single parent versus partnered parent households in this country over the past, I don't know, 30, 40 years?

KEARNEY: Yeah. Interestingly, this is perfect in the sense that it fits the three readers', listeners' stories that you highlighted. Because the first two, their parents, their mothers found themselves — first one was a single mother, second one was a single father, they found themselves there by spousal death, which is very rare. That's like less than 4% of unpartnered mothers.

The last story we just heard is much sort of more typical of, I think, where we are now. Which is the father wasn't ready to be a father and so the mother winds up doing this by herself. And that's what we've seen in the data is what's happened is there's been a really large increase in the share of parents who have never been married. So this is coming from a decline in marriage, not a rise in divorce.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

KEARNEY: Right. So now 52% of unpartnered mothers have never been married as compared to 39% have been divorced. And that's a big change from the past 40 years. In 1980, only 22% of unpartnered mothers were never married. Most people found themselves there through divorce.

So that's a key driver here, is it's really, if you look at what's happened over the past 40 years, is there's been a decline in marriage among adults who don't have four year college degrees. Again, this is really critical to understanding the education class divide in all this.

College educated adults, both those who, you know, are and aren't parents, they really haven't seen a decrease in marriage after the social cultural revolution of the 60s, 70s sort of worked itself out. Their rates of marriage have been fairly constant. But below that education group, marriage has decreased. And that's led to a corresponding rise in the share of kids born to unmarried parents and therefore living in one parent households.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, going upstream, though, from the marriage has been decreased, I hear labor economics, right?

KEARNEY: Yes. Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Poking, or seeing it poke its head up. Because the way you're describing it, it almost sounds like marriage now, in and of itself, has become a privilege of higher educated, higher income households. Because I guess the economic instability that Americans without a four year college degree have been, you know, undergoing and experiencing for 40 years now. Is that one of the factors that makes getting or staying in marriage harder for lower income Americans?

KEARNEY: So this is my read of the data and the evidence and it's both cause and effect. So like, on the one hand, the economic instability, the insecurity, contributes to this rise in one parent households, which then amplifies the economic insecurity. Right? So I'll unpack that in a minute, but let me just emphasize off the bat: That is precisely why anyone who cares about inequality, class gaps, equity should be really concerned about this issue.

Because the economic stability — not to even mention the stuff I don't talk about as an economist, like the partnership, right? The fun and support that comes from having another partner in the home. That has become another disproportionate advantage of the already advantaged groups in society.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here? Because I think what you're saying is very important. And I understand it's not your area of expertise. But, you know, as a parent myself --  and we have a two-parent household — but every time my husband goes traveling I have this very profound experience about how, you know, parenting is both the greatest and hardest thing in the world.

KEARNEY: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: And not having that mutual adult support between two adults in the household just contributes to the exhaustion that I can only imagine that single parents already feel. So there's a whole sort of psychological and sociological aspect, which we won't get into here, but I just wanted to acknowledge how important that is.

KEARNEY: So I think your listener Jesse referred to that. He said he had a good job, but it's still really hard, right? It's really hard. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to what's driving this. So what's happened? You know, let's start with the sixties and seventies. There was, you know, gender norm changes, social, cultural revolution, everyone, you know, there's greater acceptance of being unmarried. And we saw a decrease in marriage sort of across the board, across education groups.

The way I think of this is then we come into the 80s, 90s, early 2000s with new social expectations and I think that social paradigm is important to the story. But then what happens is a whole bunch of economic shocks that are really great for college educated workers — advances in automation that complement their skills, increased import competition from China, which is not so great for workers with only a high school degree. A lot of different shocks happen that reduce the economic security, stability and position of men in this country without a college degree, both in an absolute sense and relative to women.

And so outside the college educated class, the value of marriage or, you know, heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman, when the man is more likely to have economic instability, lower earnings, lower earnings than the woman. The proposition there from both sides, from whether the woman decides, "You know what, I really want this guy. I want to commit to him even though he's sort of in and out of work." Or him deciding, "I want to commit to this family, even though I'm not sure I could support them." That's a bit eroded. And you're now in a new social norm, right? Which gets heightened over time as more and more people are having kids outside of marriage.

Again, that's the story that we see in the data. And there are a lot of really compelling causal studies showing that in communities where there was a loss of well-paying jobs for men without college degrees — a loss of manufacturing jobs, a loss of industrial jobs because of the adoption of industrial robots. When those jobs go away, we see a reduction in marriage and an increase in the share of kids living with only their mothers and a corresponding increase in child poverty. So economists have drawn this causal link from these economic changes to this change in family structure.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Can you just tell me for a moment then: What are the differential outcomes? Because we've been talking about parents, but I mean, ultimately it's about how the different paths that their children follow because of the household structure. So what are those different outcomes?

KEARNEY: Yeah. So this I'm drawing from, you know, dozens of studies which have looked at the the immediate of a kid's childhood, you see, you know, kids growing up in one parent households are more likely to grow up in poverty. They're more likely to grow up with lower resources in the household. That translates into a higher likelihood of behavioral issues — getting in trouble in school, getting suspended in school, getting in trouble with the law, ultimately having lower rates of high school completion, college completion, lower earnings in adulthood.

So you can trace these outcomes from childhood into adulthood. And this is also why it contributes to this intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage. Kids who grow up in one parent households, they tend to be lower resourced Then they wind up having lower levels of education, earnings, and higher rates of finding themselves as single parents in their adulthood. And the cycle perpetuates.

The other thing that has been documented is that growing up without a dad in the home appears to be particularly disadvantaging to boys. And so there's, you know, a few recent studies, again, really trying to drill in on causal effects and causal mechanisms. The gender gap we see that now favors girls such that girls are less likely to get in trouble at school, girls are more likely to do well in school. They're more likely to graduate. Those gaps are larger when you look at kids who grew up in homes without dads in the homes.

CHAKRABARTI: Uh-huh.

KEARNEY: And so, you know, this — I mean, again, it's interesting, I don't think you did this deliberately, but the first story we heard from a listener, she was doing quite well, but her brother was struggling.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

KEARNEY: That's actually consistent with what you see in a general sense from the research.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. That was Diana from Sandpoint, Idaho. So, you know, to bring this back to where we began, because you talked about how we can no longer ignore the importance of family structure when it comes to the kinds of policies that might assist Americans, right? So let's look right at that then. One of the conclusions that I draw from this conversation is that there's a lot of room for policy which can help or benefit or further support men, non-college educated men in this country.

KEARNEY: Yeah, I think that's right. So in terms of turning this around, I mean, improving the economic stability of men, in particular, men without college degrees, that is, you know, to use the language of social scientists, necessary, but not sufficient, right? We've got to restore the sort of financial — you know, men's ability to be reliable economic financial providers is sort of critical to all of this.

And actually, when you look at the evidence from fatherhood programs and parenting programs that work with families where they are now, and, you know, regardless of whether the parents are married, how to get dads more involved in their kid's life, in nurturing helpful co-parenting. Many of these studies or these programs have limited evidence of success. And a big part of the reason seems to be that there are underlying barriers.

And so even if dads go through these parenting classes and want to engage with their kids more and want to be better co-parents, they're dealing with economic instability and lack of employment. And with that comes all sorts of other challenges — mental health challenges, alcohol and substance abuse. So I absolutely think that a big part of this is we have to help those men at the same time, of course, as we help single parent households — again, whether they're mothers or fathers — but single parent households, addressing their resource deficits. So this is not an "either-or." This is an "all-and."

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So just the resource deficit between the single parent and dual parent household. Again, there's many ways we can do that, right? I mean, we saw that in a sense with the pandemic and the child tax credit. Rest in peace, expanded child tax credit.

KEARNEY:  I'm not resting it in peace yet. (LAUGHS) We have to get that back on the table!

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Okay. But it's a perfect example. Or let me ask you: Did you see that as an example of an effective policy solution that can close the gaps you're talking about?

KEARNEY: Okay. I actually think this is a great illustration of a lot of things. One: That was an additional, what did we do? We moved from $2,000 to $3,000 or $3,600, depending on the age of the kid, child tax credit. It reduced child poverty during a recessionary period. This was an amazing success story. And we did not have the bipartisan political will in this country to come up with a way to preserve that expansion.

So there's a lot of lessons here. One, if we had the political bipartisan agreement, we could do more to address child poverty. But two, notice what we're doing there is we're sending basically $2,000 more — or if you have more kids, up to $9,000 more to families each year. That is never going to fully close these class gaps.

So even if, again, moving beyond poverty, we see that kids who grew up in married parent households are twice as likely to graduate college. I want to do more for kids than just keep them out of poverty, right?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

KEARNEY: Getting through college, it's not until you basically have two married college educated parents that a majority of kids graduate college. It's not just about an additional $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a year. The gaps in income between two and one parent households, it's like, on average, the median, it's like $55,000 a year. We are never gonna have a policy that closes that. But as has come up in this hour already, it's not even just the income. So even if we could close these income gaps, having two parents there to supervise kids, to read to kids, to help them with their homework, to help them navigate life is really beneficial.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we have just two minutes left and this gets me to the last question I wanted to ask. Because it occurs to me that I have been approaching this whole conversation with the, you know, the mindset of, "Well, how can we economically support parents so that they stay in two-parent households?" But maybe we should be talking about it in the completely opposite direction. That, I don't know, maybe somehow marriage or staying together in the same household when undertaking the privilege of parenting or the exciting journey of parenting that we ought to try to normalize that again so that parents stay together in the household and thereby can confer more of the advantages that you're talking about. I mean, this is a sociological kind of argument here. It sounds like, though, you're not saying that's wrong?

KEARNEY: No, I'm fully endorsing that. And again, part of this is my humility as an economist, which is there's more we can do in economic policy tinkering, but we're never really going to close these class gaps unless more kids have the benefit of two parents in their households. And frankly, more mothers have the help of more dads co-parenting reliably with them. And so I, you know, now we put that out there for other people to figure out how to do that, but I do think restoring that social convention ultimately has to be part of the solution to this challenge.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder if one way to do that is to make it less of a political lightning rod, because people do automatically think, "Well, that's an argument from the right wing."

KEARNEY: Exactly. Right. Yes. (LAUGHS) Right. So let's talk about this in the terms of wanting to advance child well-being, women's well-being, and advancing equity. Having a two-parent household should not just be a privilege of the college educated class.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Melissa Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, and her book is The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Professor Kearney, great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much.

KEARNEY:  Thank you.