In decades past, most Americans married, and similar majorities of American children were raised within two-parent families. But now marriage rates have fallen; 40% of American children are born outside of wedlock, and approximately a quarter live in single-parent homes. The United States has by far the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households — more than three times the global average.
Melissa Kearney, who is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, investigates the reasons for this sea change in American family formation and its consequences in her important new book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Kearney finds overwhelming evidence that children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. And she also finds that since college-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise children in two-parent homes, the move away from marriage and two-parent families is worsening inequality and widening the class divide between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans.
In this podcast discussion, Kearney analyzes the reasons for the decline of marriage and the rise of single parenthood, along with the significant variance in two-parent households among different ethnic and racial groups. She also talks about why academics have been reluctant to publicly discuss the impact of single parenthood on kids’ outcomes, the reasons why both the political left and right have criticized her analysis, and some potential policy solutions to the social dynamics that are “disadvantaging children and will perpetuate across generations if we don’t immediately do something about it.”
Transcript
Melissa Kearney: Outside the college-educated class, the share of kids growing up in a married or two-parent home has really fallen. And that’s why this now is such an important part of our story in this country about inequality and eroded social mobility.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And it’s a real honor to be joined today by Melissa S. Kearney. Among her many distinctions, she is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. She is the first female director of the Hamilton Group and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also the author of numerous pathbreaking studies related to poverty, inequality, and the economics of families. And she is the author of a just-released book which has already become one of the most talked-about works of social science in years: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Welcome, Melissa!
Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: And congratulations again on the publication of The Two-Parent Privilege.
Melissa Kearney: Thank you so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is such an excellent book that has struck such a social nerve and really sparked a national conversation. I know you are dealing with a lot of media obligations at the moment, so I’m especially grateful to you for taking time to talk to me today.
Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me. You’re right that it has hit a media nerve, but I swear the first thing I said when I talked to my publisher was, “I don’t want to write a hot-take book.”
Geoff Kabaservice: And it is not that. So let me lead off with a vivid set of statistics from your book. In 1960, only 5% of babies in the United States were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is 40%, and for Black babies it is 70%. And yet this is a social sea change in the country that is almost never discussed — and certainly not as a problem — in academic social science literature and conferences.
As Annie Lowrey recently wrote in The Atlantic, “The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year” — that is to say, your book, Melissa — “makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids. I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege… And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.”
As that passage suggests, the significance of your book, I think, lies in both the power of its argument and also in the ways that it violates a taboo that has prevailed for decades in academia and on the left about even talking openly about these issues.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah. It’s not that there’s not a lot of academic research on the topic. That there is. But then academics are understandably reluctant to bring up what we know about the impact of single parenthood on kids’ outcomes, or the differences in parenting across different socioeconomic classes, when we’re then asked to comment on new policy or poverty solutions. And there’s a foregone conclusion that, “Well, this is something we can’t really do anything about. So then let’s just keep talking about the need to improve schools or the need to expand the safety net.”
And so that’s why I finally decided to write the book. Because in the book, I’m not really putting forward any statistics or evidence that scholars who study inequality or the economics of family don’t already know. It’s more that I’m taking it out of the academic journals and saying, “Hey, let’s be honest about this. Let’s put this out there into the public discussion and just really be honest about the fact that we have to do something about this if we’re going to make real progress on closing socioeconomic gaps in kids’ childhood experiences and opportunities and outcomes, close racial gaps in kids’ educational performance.” It just started to feel dishonest and counterproductive that this wasn’t a centerpiece of our policy conversations about inequality, social mobility, and child well-being in America.
Geoff Kabaservice: We will definitely get to the reception of your book. But I will just reinforce one of the points you made, which is that this book is based on an incredible array of social science studies, many of which you authored yourself, and yet it’s also a very accessible book — and short. I should also add that it’s not a huge tome.
Melissa Kearney: That’s right. Good, I’m glad you found it accessible and a pretty quick read.
Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely! So let me take a first cut at articulating what seem to me to be three broad components of the argument of your book. First, marriage rates have fallen in the United States for several decades, albeit not everywhere and not continuously. And over the past forty years, there has been a dramatic decrease in the share of children living with married parents, to the point that the United States has by far the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. And in fact, according to a Pew Research Center study, nearly a quarter of U.S. children under age 18 live with one parent and no adults, which is more than three times the global average of 7%; I think it’s 23% to be exact.
Second, as you wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed, “This is not a positive development.” I think most people would share Annie Lowrey’s intuitive sense that one-parent families have fewer resources to invest in children, not just in terms of money but also time and emotional bandwidth. And you continue, in that New York Times op-ed, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble in school or with the law.” And one could add that girls from single-parent homes are much more likely to become single mothers themselves, and also that Black boys seem to be particularly disadvantaged by the absence of fathers — or to put it the other way, are particularly advantaged by the presence of fathers.
Melissa Kearney: Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: You cited a 2019 study authored by Raj Chetty and his colleagues that showed that the presence of more dads in a neighborhood is one of the strongest predictors of upward mobility for Black boys. And then, third, the move away from marriage and two-parent families is both a reflection of the class divide between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans and a compounding factor in worsening class inequality. College-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise children in two-parent homes. But while in 1980, 83% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, now only 60% do, which is a huge 23-percentage-point drop. And for children whose mothers didn’t finish high school, the share living with married parents fell from 80% in 1980 to 57% in 2019, which is likewise a 23-percentage-point gap.
Melissa Kearney: Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you write that “The result is less economic security for affected households and even wider inequality across households and childhood environments than economic changes would have wrought alone.” So that’s an extremely broad outline of your book’s argument.
Melissa Kearney: That was a pretty good synthesis of a lot of the main points and themes, though. I appreciate it.
Geoff Kabaservice:What else would you like to add?
Melissa Kearney: The first part of the book is really meant to just lay out the facts, because there’s a lot of misconceptions. And when you hear that there’s been a decline in marriage, or one in five kids in the U.S. now lives outside a married-parent home or lives in a one-parent home, there’s a lot of different misconceptions that people have about what that means. I tried very hard to just be clear about what is driving this and what is not driving this, and that matters for how we think about it.
So first, let’s consider the point that, yes, more kids in the U.S. live in a one-parent home than in any other country for which there’s data on this kind of thing. One immediate response to that might be, “Yes, because we’re richer in America and women can afford to set up their own households.” I think it’s really important to point out that it’s not the most economically successful women in America who are doing this. Quite the contrary: college-educated women are very rarely doing this by themselves. This is what’s really quite shocking: only 12% of kids whose mom has a four-year college degree are living with just their mother, as compared to 30% of kids whose mother has a high school degree and some college but not a four-year degree, or less than high school.
And so this affects how we feel about this trend, or how we view this trend in terms of child and mother well-being. It’s moms who are less likely to be economically very successful on their own who are finding themselves in the position of raising kids in their own household. So this really isn’t an economic success story of women — with the important caveat (that I suspect we’ll come back to at some point during the hour) that in many ways women’s economic liberation and their opportunities over the past forty years have allowed this to happen in some sense outside the college-educated class.
I want to be clear: On the one hand, it’s not the most economically successful or highly educated women who are doing the job of parenting in a household by themselves. On the other hand, there has been great progress made by women in the economic sphere, such that women no longer need to be financially dependent on a male who might be a crappy partner or worse. I would never lament the economic success and liberation of women. But on the one hand, it’s not the most economically successful. On the other hand, outside the college-educated class, many women are doing better economically than men, and that’s part of what’s driving this. But we’ll come back to that.
The other thing that’s important… Part of the data story that I lay out is that this is not about high rates of births among unmarried women or teenage women or women with lower levels of education. All of those rates are down. Teen births are down tremendously in the U.S. They’re down over 70% from the ‘90s. Unmarried women are having fewer babies than they used to — because actually all women under the age of thirty are having fewer babies than they used to. Births are down in the U.S. And I think it’s important to point that out because, again, another reaction I get when I talk about this challenge is, “Yeah, well, we just need better access to birth control,” or “We need to fight teen childbearing,” or “It’s all these teen moms.” That may have been true in the ‘80s, but that’s not what we’re dealing with now. Births are down. Births are down among teens, births are down among young women.
What’s happened is the share of births that are outside of a marital union has increased for everybody. The largest increase has basically been for let’s just call them middle socioeconomic groups. So non-marital childbearing… The share of births to college-educated women that are outside of marriage has increased, but it’s still only 11%. Whereas now actually a small majority — more than 50% — 52% of births to women outside the college-educated class are outside of marriage. Births to white women and Hispanic women in particular, the share of births that are outside marriage have increased over the past forty years.
And so the story here is really the decline in marriage and the de-bundling of having and raising kids from the institution of marriage and living together with your partner and your co-parent. That’s really what’s happened. And so that’s why the book focuses on the decline in marriage as opposed to what’s been going on — I spend a whole chapter explaining that what’s going on with births would’ve pushed all of this in the opposite direction. So just laying out those facts, I think, is really important.
And then again, there are level differences across race and ethnic groups in the U.S. Those were present in the early ‘80s. People wrote about them. What’s happened over the past forty years — which is a major theme of my book — is this emergence of a wide education gap that was not present in 1980. So what’s happened in the past forty years that’s quite startling is that college-educated parents continue to have their children and raise their children in married-parent homes, at largely similar rates as in the early ‘80s. But outside the college-educated class, the share of kids growing up in a married or two-parent home has really fallen. And that’s why this now is such an important part of our story in this country about inequality and eroded social mobility. And so that’s the new story now, as compared to people who might have studied this based on data and things being written about what was happening in the ‘80s.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you go through this question of why there is this decline in marriage and why there has been this rise in single-parent families. You go through it rather like a detective. You put forward one hypothesis, you consider it, you knock it down, and go to the next. So as you had said earlier, it’s not that rich women now have the ability to have children outside of marriage because they don’t need men. That’s not really what’s driving the phenomenon. Since you mentioned that it’s also not teen pregnancy, I can’t resist mentioning that you and your frequent collaborator, Phil Levine, studied the impact of the MTV reality series 16 and Pregnant.
Melissa Kearney: It’s true. A lot of the research I’ve drawn on in the book is co-authored work with Phil. We had written a number of papers about teen childbearing in the U.S., both the cause and effect of teen childbearing. And then one year, the rate of teen childbearing just went down like 7.5%, as compared to 2.5% that had been declining. And we were getting a bunch of calls from journalists: “What is it?” And we were, “We’re not sure, but it’s not abstinence education, it’s not sex education, it’s not the unemployment rate. We know none of those things matter this much.”
Actually, I’m going to give credit where credit’s due… I was talking to Sarah Brown, who was the head of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and she said, “We think it’s the MTV effect.” I asked, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “That new reality show.” And of course, Phil and I were like, “Oh, come on.” But we were intrigued by this idea, and so we started watching a couple episodes, and we’re like, “Oh gosh, this really does make it clear that being a teen mom is hard.”
And so we went and purchased the ratings data of how many teens were watching the show in different markets. We came up with an instrumental-variable strategy looking at the MTV penetration in the pre-period. The punchline is that when that show came on the air in communities where MTV viewership was higher in the pre-period — so you have a bunch of teens watching MTV, and all of a sudden this show comes on — in those places, you saw an especially large drop in teen childbearing.
And so then the idea was like, “Gosh, did they watch this show and take it as a real cautionary tale?” We got access to Google and Twitter data and confirmed that when episodes aired, you could see spikes in Google searching for how to get birth control. And you saw spikes in the number of tweets that both mentioned 16 and Pregnant and birth control, which is just suggestive evidence that this show was changing hearts and minds in ways that led teenagers to behave differently.
This book isn’t about teen childbearing per se, but I do think the lessons of that study and other studies that other scholars have written showing that there’s a causal influence on media content, on outcomes, even outcomes as complicated as whether people get married or have kids — it is relevant to this whole discussion. Because if we’re thinking about what shapes behaviors, a lot of the story I tell in the book, unsurprisingly, is economic. But social norms and attitudes matter a lot. And as an economist, I don’t have very many economic policy levers to pull to change social attitudes. But media images is one thing that we know — from a bunch of research, not just our MTV paper — media images matter.
Geoff Kabaservice: That is fascinating. And yes, that would be part of a further discussion. At the risk of engaging in gendered stereotypes, let me put forward a few more straw men. This decline in marriage and rise and single-parent families, is it being driven by divorce?
Melissa Kearney: No. Good, I’m glad you asked that. So that is another important fact I put out in the paper. Actually, women today who are unpartnered mothers are more likely to have gotten there through never being married than being divorced. In the 1980s, a majority of unpartnered mothers were divorced. Now a small majority of unpartnered mothers have never been married. And so again, this is really important because it’s not that women are more likely now to leave bad marriages to their children’s father. It’s that those parents were never married in the first place.
But here there’s an interesting socioeconomic or education class divide, which is that college-educated mothers who are unpartnered are more likely to be divorced than never married. And this tells us where things are happening, what’s the mechanical driver of this, and it’s really about people just having kids outside marriage rather than getting divorced after they have kids. But the class divide is actually important here too when we think about what it means for kids’ outcomes, because kids whose parents are divorced are more likely to have had their second parent in the home for some of their childhood. They’re more likely to have had the resources of the second parent in their home. And they’re more likely to be in a home, even after the divorce, where there’s income support from the second parent — almost always the dad — and they’re more likely to have contact with the dad.
And so divorced, unpartnered mothers in the data look different — and their kids’ outcomes look different — than kids whose parents have never been married. And the way I think about that is if kids who live with two parents through their whole childhood have sustained access to the resources of two parents, and kids whose parents were never married are more likely to have missed out on all of the parental resources from the second parent, kids of divorce are somewhere in the middle.
Geoff Kabaservice: One can tell you’ve had this question a lot from super-defensive divorced dads
Melissa Kearney: I definitely get the question of, “Well, if we’re still involved in our kid’s life, and paying support and seeing them, are our kids at a disadvantage?” And by the way, there’s a lot to unpack just in the fact that I get that question a lot, because it’s no secret that everybody wants the best for their kids and cares about this and really thinks that what they do as a parent matters. And then somehow — and I’m starting to get, I’ll be honest, increasingly impatient with this line of pushback — somehow when we talk about it for other kids, it’s like, “Hey, don’t talk about that. You know what? Just give them more of a tax credit.” As if all these things these men are doing as fathers could be replaced with an additional $300 from the government each month! I hear a little bit of a “Let them eat cake” when I hear them say that. You’re doing a lot as dads and you really care about your kids’ outcomes. My view is that millions of other kids also deserve and would benefit from having a second parent showering their love and attention and resources on them.
But okay, back to the point of if parents can make up for the gaps. It’s also really instructive when we think about the fact that if non-resident parents were sort of fully making up for what kids who have two parents in the household have access to — so whether that be divorced parents or never-married parents — if they were still really engaged in the life of the child, and somehow the single mother was making up for the deficits that come from not having a second parent with other sources of income or other role models or other people who supervise their kids, then we wouldn’t see the gaps in kids’ outcomes. So both in terms of mechanisms and outcomes, we see in the data that kids who live with one parent have less parental resources at their disposal, and then we see that their outcomes are different. And so basically, outside the two-parent home, the gaps aren’t being fully made up for, which is actually the point.
Geoff Kabaservice: Right. You relate that often you will be in discussion with friends, and you’ll tell them something about this question of the decline in marriage. And they will say something to the effect that, “Well, this is just people in the United States adopting a more European lifestyle. They’re raising children in long-term, stable, committed, cohabitating partnerships that amount to marriages in all but name.” And you then say, “Actually…”
Melissa Kearney: “Actually, they’re not. And your good friends who are doing that, or the very famous economist couple that we all know is doing that — they’re the exceptions to the rule.” In fact, cohabitation among parents in the U.S., though it’s risen over the past four decades, is not nearly as high as you might think — though I guess I don’t know what people think it is. But only 8% of kids in the cross-section of the Census are living with one of their biological parents and another father or mother figure. And that’s a very generous term because basically in the Census, a partner of the parent is considered the father or mother figure even if they don’t actually adopt that kind of role at all. So when we say 8% of kids are living with cohabiting parents, we need to realize that that doesn’t mean they’re living with their unmarried biological parents. Between a quarter and 40% of the second partner in the household is not a child’s second biological parent. So even that 8% overstates the case of how many kids are just living with unmarried parents.
And having boyfriends or girlfriends in the house is actually a very complicated family structure for kids. I don’t delve too deeply into this in the book… You went back to the fact it was short; I tried very hard to stay on main points and there were a lot of tangents I could have gone off on. But I will say that there is a lot of work in child development psychology and sociology looking at the effect of different relationships on kids’ outcomes. And even though I’m really focused on having more resources in the household, an unmarried boyfriend or girlfriend is not necessarily a good thing for the kids, let’s say that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Are generous welfare benefits encouraging single motherhood, he naively asks?
Melissa Kearney: This is a point of contention. In a sense, this is what more social conservatives or conservatives don’t like about the book. There’s something for everybody across the political spectrum to dislike in my book.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’re an equal-opportunity offender.
Melissa Kearney: Exactly. So my read of that is a pretty clear no. And I say that for a few reasons. One, just as a practical matter, cash welfare in this country is not at all generous. There’s actually very little by way of income support to low-income parents. Now, I will concede that Medicaid is very generous, and 70% of single mothers are on Medicaid. But the evidence on how welfare benefits affect rates of family formation suggest to me — and there are dozens of studies of this, some of which I worked on too… There are dozens of studies that show, yes, when welfare is more generous, you see an increase in single-parent homes. I’m not denying that you could get a positive coefficient, and in some studies it might be statistically significant. But the magnitudes are quite small. Furthermore, since welfare reform in the mid-‘90s, it has been a lot harder to get cash welfare, and welfare has become less generous. So the fact that welfare has become less generous and single motherhood rates are still incredibly high suggests that that’s not a primary driver.
But again, there’s a bit of a nuanced story here. Had we not had welfare reform and had we kept increasing the generosity of welfare benefits, might rates of single parenthood be even higher today? Perhaps. So I’m not dismissing the potential impact of welfare reform on curtailing the rise of single-parent households. But when we look at the share of single-parent households today, when we look at the fact that one in five kids in the U.S. is living with an unpartnered parent, it is not because our welfare benefits are super high. And in fact, if you look at other countries that have much stronger welfare states and much more generous welfare benefits, the rates of single parenthood are lower. So even just on a cross-sectional comparison, that line of pushing doesn’t really hold up.
Geoff Kabaservice: Is the rise of single parenthood related to the increase in non-heterosexual couplings?
Melissa Kearney: In my book, I treat two-parent households or married-parent households — I just count the number of adults or see if they’re married. And so I put same-sex couples with married-parent or two-parent households. And without being dismissive of how important that group is as a demographic group, it’s not a large share of kids’ parents. And so as, again, a very practical matter, how we categorize them on the data doesn’t affect any of the trends I’m talking about.
Geoff Kabaservice: One more qualification here… There does seem to be a significant variance in two-parent households among different ethnic and racial groups.
Melissa Kearney: Yes, huge differences. 77% of white kids are growing up in married-parent homes, 62% of Hispanic kids, 38% of Black kids, and 88% of Asian kids. So again, it’s really hard to talk about race and ethnic differences in, let’s say, student outcomes in school and not reflect on the fact that the supports these kids are getting at home (in terms of how many parents are there to help them or supervise them or take care of them) is wildly different across these groups. This doesn’t just reflect differences in educational attainment among parents across race and ethnic groups. As I show very clearly in the book, if you look within race and ethnic groups, there are differences in the share of kids living in two-parent homes by whether the mom has a college degree.
Let’s take Black kids, because they have the highest rate of living outside of a married-parent or two-parent home. 60% of children who live with a college-educated Black mother live with married parents, as compared to 30% of children of Black mothers who don’t have a college degree. So there’s both a much lower level of two-parent homes among Black families, and then also within that racial group, there’s this big college divide.
I will point out we do not see this education gradient among the children of ethnically Asian parents in the U.S. For me, not studying Asian-American culture, that was a quite stark and surprising finding that I saw in the data. Basically more than 80% of kids in all Asian households live with married parents, even among the least educated, and it doesn’t seem like economics can explain that. It doesn’t seem like, from my look in the data, non-college-educated Asian men did much better than non-college-educated white, Black, or Hispanic men over this time period. But even given what happened to their economic position, those families continue to have and raise their kids in married-parent homes.
By the way, one thing to clarify: I keep going back and forth between saying married-parent and two-parent homes. Just to be clear, this is related to the conversation we were having about cohabitation. Whether a child’s parents are married in the U.S., more so than in Europe, is highly determinant of whether they have two parents in the home. And so that’s why I keep going back and forth.
Geoff Kabaservice: Point taken. One more clarification… This distinction between college-educated and non-college-educated is really a crude proxy for class. But it does seem, from what you’ve said here and elsewhere, that the phenomenon of single-parent households is increasingly a middle-class phenomenon.
Melissa Kearney: Yes, and there’s a lot to even just unpack in that. The college-educated class has become much larger over the past forty years, so now it’s something like 30% of moms have a college degree as compared to 11% in the early ‘80s. So the fact that this is so much more of a heterogeneous group and a wider group, and in a lot of ways we could say less selective or less elite — the fact that the share of kids in married-parent homes among college-educated class has not fallen further is a bit striking. Because this is an advantaged group, but it’s a much larger group than it used to be.
As you said, the fact that this has really become an issue now in let’s just call it the middle class — again, crude, thinking of people who have a high school degree — this is why this is now really an issue about economic security and income inequality beyond just what’s happening in the most disadvantaged groups. Scholars were writing about this phenomenon in the ‘80s — and in fact, of course, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed this out in the late ‘60s. But those studies were really focused on the most disadvantaged groups, like adults without a high school degree, teen parents. But now this phenomenon or this trend of having one-parent households has really moved up the socioeconomic distribution. And the fact that high school-educated moms are substantially more likely now than twenty years ago to be running their own household, and basically be the sole financial provider of their household, has made the economic security of that group, the high school-educated Americans — it’s really undermined their economic security.
And I show this very clearly in the data. If you look at what happened to household earnings over this time period, we know that college-educated workers have continued to do really well. Their earnings have gone up over forty years. They’ve continued to marry (often to each other), and so household income has gone up over this period. If you look at what has happened to high school-educated moms, their own wages went up. High school-educated men’s wages either went up a little bit or stagnated, depending on how you want to look at the data; people argue about that. But let’s just say the wages went up a little bit. When you look at household earnings and you don’t condition on how many adults are in the household, you see household earnings for that class of American adults actually went down. Again, the reason is because now they’re 20 percentage points more likely to be headed by one adult rather than two. And that’s just a matter of simple math. If you only have one adult bringing earnings into the household, the total household earnings are going to be lower than if there’s two adults.
Geoff Kabaservice: Exactly so. I always ask the people to come on this podcast to tell me something about their background and education, but my sense is that for this discussion those factors actually explain a lot about how you came to the subject of your book.
Melissa Kearney: Everyone wants to know what your angle is and what your lived experience is, so I’m very forthright in saying I had the privilege of growing up in a two-parent household. My children have the privilege of growing up with two parents. That certainly affects the way I feel about the subject to the extent that, for me, marriage has not been a terrible prison as it is for some people. I think it would be much harder for someone who themselves was in a terrible relationship to say, “You know what? We actually need to think about increasing rates of two-parent households.” I think at a visceral, personal level, my view is, “Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine doing this by myself.” It would be so much harder. It would be so much lonelier. It would be so much less fun. That’s why I call the book The Two-Parent Privilege, in the sense that not only do I see it in the data that this is good for kids, but in my own life I’m very aware that I’m in a privileged situation of having a committed co-parent to do this with. I see the abundance of parental resources we’re throwing at our kids, right? If I’m too tired or I’m too stressed or I’m occupied and I have to be at work, there’s another parent there to pick up the slack. And so I’m writing this recognizing my own privilege in it.
But also — and I know this is an easy thing to say, but I very much mean it and I hope it comes through in the tone with which I write the book — I’m writing this from a position of empathy. I’m not blaming single moms. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, your job is so hard that you have to do this by yourselves.” And I’m asking the question of why is it that millions of moms in this country — again, mostly those without high levels of education or high earnings themselves — why are they finding themselves having to do this themselves? That is a really hard position to be in. So I think that’s how my own experience comes at this.
I hope this is also abundantly clear in the writing of the book. I’m not suggesting that all of these women are just deciding this would be awesome to do on their own. And I’m trying to get at root causes. What are the structural issues that are making it such that so many women — again, outside the college-educated class — are finding themselves in a position of having to do this by themselves?
Geoff Kabaservice: Writing about your upbringing, you say that “My family’s trajectory of upward mobility would be almost impossible today.” What do you mean by that?
Melissa Kearney: My parents grew up in very low-income circumstances. They described themselves as poor kids, and by all accounts they were poor kids in the Bronx. But they had two parents. Both of them had two parents in the house. They get married at twenty-one, they leave New York and move to the Jersey suburbs, set up a middle-class existence, send four daughters to public school. Their daughters all wind up going to Ivy League schools on the East Coast on financial aid. It’s almost preposterous to think about how lucky we were, and my dad credits it all to luck. But my mom too, she’ll see all of the things we do for our kids and all of their activities and she’s like, “We could have never afforded that for you guys when you were kids.”
And so we just see very clearly in the data how the college-educated class are pulling away from everyone else. They’re spending inordinate amounts of money on their kids. They’re spending inordinate amounts of time on their kids. Their kids’ childhoods just look so different from what a lower-middle-class family could provide to their kids. And also just if you looked at the data, my parents — I’m not saying anything about my parents in their own marriage, but just as a statistical matter — if you were projecting, they’d be much less likely to be married or stay married today.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just to clarify, did your parents go to college?
Melissa Kearney: Yes. My mom went to college after I did. She graduated high school and became a secretary when she was eighteen — that was sort of what was available to her — and then she raised her four daughters, was a very involved mom, and did part-time secretarial work. And it’s funny, actually, because I remember her doing work at the kitchen table while she was making spaghetti sauce, which she called “gravy.” But it’s also sort of funny because I was like, “Wow, she brought work home long before that was a thing.” But then after her daughters were older, she went to our local community college and became an elementary school teacher.
Geoff Kabaservice: The mention of “gravy” suggests you were from a New Jersey Italian-American family.
Melissa Kearney: That’s right, exactly. My dad still comes over on Sundays and expects me to have gravy cooking for him. And then my dad also went to a local college. He was also in the National Guard. There’s some talk about how much of his work my mom actually did, but, yes, he also went to a local school.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you went to Princeton and you studied with Sara McLanahan, who is well known as a teacher of the sociology of poverty and launched the Fragile Families & Child Wellbeing Study. And your senior thesis advisor was Anne Case, who together with her husband Angus Deaton wrote the highly influential 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Can you tell me something about your experiences with them and other teachers?
Melissa Kearney: How amazing was that to get to study with both of them? They’re both phenomenal. I want to give credit to all of the women who got me here. I actually showed up at Princeton and thought maybe I wanted to be a comparative literature major, and then I thought maybe I wanted to go to the public policy school. And I happened to have the very good fortune of randomly getting assigned to Beth Bogan as my academic advisor. She was a lecturer — she just retired last year — and she looked at my transcript and was like, “You have really high math scores. Can you take economics?” And I was like, “I don’t know what economics is.” She’s like, “Just try it. If you like social studies and math, I think you’ll like economics.” And so she’s the one who got me interested in the discipline.
But I was really interested in a lot of social problems. I took sociology classes and had the great fortune of studying with Sara McLanahan. She taught a “Sociology of Poverty” class. She taught her work on family structure, what she was finding in the Fragile Family Survey. She was really a pioneer in this field in many ways. Without overly flattering myself, I hope she would think that this book did her work justice. I feel like what I’ve done in this book has continued a lot of the themes that she worked on and pushed forward in her career.
Then I was an RA in the Industrial Relations section. I did RA work for David Card, who was there before he went to Berkeley. And I took econometrics with Hank Farber and Orley Ashenfelter. And then it was time to write my senior thesis. I remember going to them and saying, “I want to write something about the economic lives of poor women.” And they were like, “Why don’t you talk to Anne Case?” So I went over and I talked to Anne Case — I was a junior — and she was amazing. Even now when I advise students, I have to remind myself when students come to me and are like, “I want to write about inequality,” you have to say, “Okay, that’s a lot to parse.” She was such a wonderful mentor in saying, “Okay, let’s try to get a specific question out of your interest in the economic lives of low-income women.” And so the thesis I wound up writing my senior year in college was on the economic determinants of when women initiated childbearing — which is actually sort of amazing because here I am thirty years later still writing about the same topic. But she was fantastic. It’s embarrassing how many awesome professors I had both as an undergrad and a Ph.D. student.
Geoff Kabaservice: That is a very impressive lineup. The economics field is now and was then pretty heavily male-dominated. And just parenthetically, I’m wondering if the relative paucity of economic studies of family formation has something to do with this gender imbalance.
Melissa Kearney: NBER has a program on children and the economies of children, and you find a lot more women there than in any of the other NBER groups. There are plenty of men who also study this, but it is sort of striking when you think about the fact that children are the future of our economy, and households and families are the fundamental economic unit. For too long, many men in the profession would write this off as too much like sociology or not serious or not hardheaded. And so this is one of the ways in which I think we see that having a more diverse group of people studying economics brings more attention to certain questions than others.
This applies broadly. This is why it’s important to have women studying economics. This is why it’s important to have more people from racial and ethnic minority groups studying economics. This is why it’s important to have people from different backgrounds and parts of the country studying economics. People look around them and see the world in different ways and ask different questions. And I happen to think questions about the family and how kids are being raised are really important to economics. And because I am so enamored with the methods — both theoretical modeling and econometric techniques — in economics, I think this issue deserves the attention of those very rigorous methods. But let’s be clear, this whole niche field in economics was brought to the fore and sort of elevated as a serious topic by Gary Becker.
Geoff Kabaservice: True. I was fascinated to note that you did junior-year work in Bridgeport, Connecticut with poor women, given that my mom was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Melissa Kearney: No way! Oh, wow!
Geoff Kabaservice: So I’ve always known about Bridgeport and its travails as well.
Melissa Kearney: Okay, let’s pause on that for a minute, because that summer really was so instrumental in getting me started on this line of research. The Princeton Class of ’55, as their gift back to the university, basically paid for students to have summer internships in organizations that worked for structural change. What’s so amazing about that is that if there wasn’t a group paying for kids to do internships, basically, with nonprofits who didn’t have money to pay us, I would’ve spent the entire summer (rather than just half the summer) waitressing at the Jersey Shore — which by the way is its own awesome experience. But it was nice to be able to spend half of the summer at an internship that I was paid for, even though the nonprofit wouldn’t have had money to pay me. So hats off to Princeton Project from the Class of ‘55.
And so what that was… I went and worked at Jobs First. It was a welfare-to-work center in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was part of welfare reform. At that time, the state of Connecticut was operating under one of these waivers, or maybe… I can’t remember if it was an AFDC waiver or new TANF rules at that time. But whatever it was, at the time women in the state of Connecticut, in order to maintain their welfare benefits, had to be either employed or moving to employment.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is a post-Clinton-welfare-reform development?
Melissa Kearney: During Clinton, yes. It was like ‘95, so during the Clinton administration. These women were all young moms who were on welfare, who weren’t yet employed but were at this training program. I taught business math classes and word processing, and we worked on resumés. It was really eye-opening, one of those amazing experiences. And that’s probably why I went back to Princeton and was like, “I want to write about this.” It was pretty striking. You’re twenty, working with other twenty-year-olds, and they have kids. I’m nowhere near expecting to have kids right now. And so this is really what got me to write my senior thesis, or ask the question of what is it about the economic determinants — in the way one’s growing up, the economic environment that they’re living in — that determines whether or not they initiate childbearing?
Geoff Kabaservice: Terrific. To shift gears a bit, Megan McArdle in her Washington Post column on your book, cited a poll by Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies showing that only 30% of college-educated liberals agree that it’s important for children to have two married parents. And I myself have found that when I’ve laid out the thesis of your book to some of my liberal friends, their reaction is sort of like so many cobras flaring their hoods. What’s involved with this sensitivity on the left?
Melissa Kearney: I am going to be generous and say that I think it’s a very well-intentioned desire not to sound like you’re judging somebody else’s choices. And so they don’t want to say that what they’re doing — which by the way is almost all raising their kids in two-parent married homes — is better than what someone else is doing. But I actually think not only is it just on average not true in the data that they’re not loading their kids up with tons of resources. I don’t think it’s as generous as a position as they sort of like to think it is.
I mean, when I look at it, I ask why do those millions of moms have to do this by themselves? That’s really freaking hard. What are the structural barriers or the structural conditions such that they’re doing it by themselves? And to just pretend that it’s a lifestyle choice I think, frankly, is just not productive and a bit divorced from reality. I think also a lot of these people are thinking of their own friends who are 41-year-old women who make a lot of money, maybe have an MBA or a law degree, didn’t find their life partner and so are choosing to become a single mom by themselves. That is a very, very, very different scenario from the modal single mother in this country.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had mentioned the Moynihan Report… Just to go back to the historical background of that, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 was an assistant secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration. And he wrote what was supposed to be an internal memorandum entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” I think fewer than 100 copies of it were printed. But it was leaked to the press, and then all hell broke loose. And Moynihan wrote essentially, if I’m remembering this correctly, that the rise in Black single-mother families was driven by dynamics that were not solely economic and that would hinder the progress of African-Americans toward economic and political equality — which he devoutly desired.
But activists and writers on the left, and some though not all civil rights leaders, declared that this was Moynihan “blaming the victim,” that his conclusions were racist and sexist, that he was shaming single mothers of color, and he was diverting responsibility for poverty from social-structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor. And one official within the Johnson administration soon announced that “I have been reliably informed that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists.” Now, you can’t say that he was canceled exactly, because he did go onto a modicum of fame in other areas…
Melissa Kearney: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: But I think that, long ago as that was, that really handed the issue of family formation to the conservatives, to the right. And liberals, I think, have really avoided it almost ever since.
Melissa Kearney: There was sort of a resurgence of writing on the topic in the ‘80s. William Julius Wilson, the prominent sociologist at Harvard, wrote a book which had a similar emphasis on the economic situation hindering Black men. That was a big part of the Moynihan memo. But as you said, there’s also a lot of other language that I think would make most of us quite uncomfortable, sounding like it’s putting the blame on norms among Black women and Black moms.
But what Wilson wrote in the ‘80s was about the decline in what he called the marriageable men, and he created this marriageable men index. And basically the argument he put forward was that the Black-white gap in marriage and single-parent households — which is also what Moynihan had been focusing on — is reflective of the fact that there are fewer marriageable Black men, because Black men were more likely to be out of work and incarcerated. Again, this raises all sorts of issues about structural problems, about discrimination, about mass incarceration; it’s not blaming the victim. I think that characterization has really made it difficult to talk about this issue.
What he says is, “Look, there are fewer marriageable Black men around, and that’s a driver of this racial gap in family structure.” And now what I’m doing is I’m taking that marriageable men idea, as other scholars have done in academic writing, and applying it to education class differences, not just race — because again, that’s the gap we’ve really seen open up over the past forty years. So whereas the concept that Wilson wrote about (and to some extent before him Moynihan wrote about) is, “Let’s look at the employability of these men and recognize that when men are out of work, they’re less attractive marriage partners, they’re less reliable fathers” — now let’s look at how that’s happened outside the college-educated class. And in the book, I push on that as one of the key drivers of why marriage rates have decreased and single parenthood has increased outside the college-educated class, which is because of the economic changes that have hurt (in both an absolute and relative sense) non-college-educated men of all races and ethnicities.
Geoff Kabaservice: One more point about the reception of your book… I think people on the center-right and center-left have kind of the same experiences when they will come forward with findings that get used by the extremes. So in your case, the right will say, “Why, even the liberal Melissa Kearney now agrees with the conservative position on the importance of two parent-families, though of course her prescriptions are wrong.” While the left will say, “Well, Melissa Kearney’s tract supporting the Republican position on families shows that neoliberals inevitably carry water for the far right.”
Melissa Kearney: I think yesterday I was scooped in as part of a “Republican propagandist movement.” That was a first for me.
Geoff Kabaservice: That was relating to Brent Staples’ comment on Rebecca Traister’s piece in The Cut. And a lot of this is guilt by association, right? “Here are these social scientists talking about the importance of marriage at the same time that the far right is trying to recenter hetero marriage by reversing the progress that has enabled women to have lives outside of marriage,” and so forth.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I think I went in with my eyes wide open. But I also am ex-post realizing that there was a little part of me that I guess held out hope that maybe if I was rational and data-based enough that maybe we could all just agree on the facts and agree that this is an issue that should be an urgent policy priority. I think my sense is most people who are bristling the strongest actually haven’t read the book or engaged with all of the data and evidence that I’m putting forward, but just have this expected knee-jerk reaction to the topic. Which of course is unfortunate, but that’s, again, the unfortunate world we live in. Everyone has to have their quick take in twenty-four hours.
Geoff Kabaservice: I said that your book is at the center of our national conversation, but I didn’t say that that national conversation was good.
Melissa Kearney: Right, or well informed.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. So you write, like I said, very excellently about the problems that have been caused by the decline of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. So what is to be done?
Melissa Kearney: I think it’s fair to say that, like most books that lay out a problem, I spend more time trying to convince you there’s a problem than I do articulating a detailed five-point plan about how to move forward. That said, I do have ideas about what needs to be done at a large structural level, and then of course there are huge agendas under both of those. We need to double down on all of our efforts to improve the economic security and position of people outside the college-educated class, and in particular men — so all of the policy conversations we have about expanding access to family-supporting wages and jobs, and increasing skills, increasing employment among primary-age, non-college-educated men. All of that takes on heightened importance when we realize how much that is trickling down into families and disadvantaging children and will perpetuate across generations if we don’t immediately do something about it.
Along with that — and this is where plenty of people will disagree with me — but I think we need to reestablish a social norm acknowledging that two-parent families are beneficial. This gets back to your poll that 30% of college-educated liberals reject that proposition. You can’t honestly reject that proposition based on data. And so we need to reestablish that and be honest about it. And of course the trick — which some people say is unachievable, but I don’t think it is — is we should be able to do that without going back to the time where single moms and their kids were so stigmatized that moms were banished from the communities or felt like they couldn’t escape abusive relationships. We should be able to acknowledge that two-parent families are beneficial, and make strengthening families a policy priority, and still love and embrace single moms who are doing all of this heroic work on their own.
Okay, now let’s just think about direct programming. There’s no immediate economic policy lever that we could pull that’s going to reverse this. But at very low-hanging fruit, let’s get rid of the marriage disincentives which are all over our tax code and transfer policies. That’s an obvious thing. I think that will matter at the margin; I don’t think that’s going to dramatically turn things around. But that is a very immediate, direct thing we should be doing.
Also, an immediate and direct thing we should be doing… Once we’re willing to recognize that families are important — this radical idea that Annie Lowrey associated me with — once we recognize that families are important, we should be pumping as much money and research effort and innovation into experimenting with programs designed to strengthen families — not programs telling people to get married, but programs that are meeting families where they are and saying, “Okay, let’s use this trauma-based research education curriculum. How can you co-parent better? How can you engage with your child and your child’s parent more effectively? How can you navigate having a parent in prison or returning from prison?” Why are we not doubling down on these programs aimed at strengthening families? I’m all for spending more money on Head Start and childcare subsidies, but investing in the family actually needs to be one of our funding and policy priorities as well.
Geoff Kabaservice: You do actually offer a very wide array of potential solutions, or at least contributors toward a solution. And one of them is just bolstering federal support to community colleges. I was reminded of the paper you had done with Bill Evans about ways that mentoring and emergency financial assistance can actually help improve throughput at community colleges, which do serve so much of the college population.
Melissa Kearney: It always feels ungratifying to people when they’re like, “Wait, you tell me about this major problem and then you tell me to mentor community colleges or have relationship education classes for low-income unmarried parents?” But we have to chip away at these things in a whole bunch of little ways, and eventually they all add up and they make a big difference.
Geoff Kabaservice: But there was the unsettling finding in another paper you wrote on the fracking boom of the first decade of the 2000s. There had been a somewhat similar boom and bust in Appalachia for coal, which had led to an increase in births among married couples. But that was not what you found with the fracking boom data.
Melissa Kearney: Yes. This is a study that contradicted my priors. I went into that study very much thinking about, “Let’s look at the reverse marriageable male possibility.” In the fracking boom, those were localized positive economic shocks that affected communities, increased jobs — not just in fracking industry jobs, but also it was good for the local communities. You had an increase in jobs and an increase in earnings, especially among non-college-educated men. So I thought this was great, because we have all these studies showing that when communities get hit with manufacturing shocks or the adoption of industrial robots, men lose their jobs, their earnings decrease, the share of kids living in single-parent homes increases. What I expected to find here was a positive shock: the earnings and employment of non-college-educated men go up. And so did the non-marital birth share fall, did marriage increase? And the answer was no.
But as you said, when there was a very similar shock in the ‘70s and ‘80s in coal-producing Appalachian counties, you actually saw that marriage increased. Actually, you saw that marriage increased and the non-marital birth share fell. And so this was a sobering finding to me because it made me realize the way I thought about it and interpreted it was: We’re now in a new social paradigm where the convention of having kids in a married-parent home, and raising kids in a married-parent home, has essentially been broken in many communities. And so now when there’s a positive income shock, you do see that people have more kids. But they have more kids whether they’re married or not, and there’s no change in the share of kids born to married parents. So that was part of what led me to ultimately conclude, as I do in the book, that economic changes alone aren’t going to be enough, social changes alone aren’t going to be enough. We need them both to happen together.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you are admirably honest, I think, in acknowledging that social change will be very difficult to achieve.
Melissa Kearney: Exactly.
Geoff Kabaservice: And maybe that goes back to the point you made about even the impact of education and other kinds of messages that come from the society that people receive.
Melissa Kearney: Even at a causal level, we know that what community leaders, what mentors, what role models, what celebrities, what they all say matters. And so people who are influencers in their various spheres should take to heart that what they’re saying actually matters, and the way they’re living their lives matters. And here’s one thing where the social conservatives don’t think I do enough of in the book, which is blame the elites — whoever the heck the elites are. But I do think messaging matters. And that’s something that you hear anecdotally: that a lot of pastors or preachers don’t want to talk about this. They don’t want to take up the topic because they’ll alienate their congregation. But again, I think that dishonesty is ultimately counterproductive.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a final observation, there are obvious affinities between your work and that of your former Brookings colleague Richard Reeves, who I interviewed on this podcast after his book Of Boys and Men was published. And I did want to just do a PSA that Richard is now president of the new American Institute for Boys and Men, and I wish him a lot of luck. But I also wanted to comment that there are also some similarities between your work and that of your Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill. She is well known for having written, with Ron Haskins, a book on “the success sequence,” which involves the three steps of getting at least a high school education, working full time, and only then marrying before having children. And I wondered, just as a last question, do you see some similarities with her work and yours, and how do you relate to that?
Melissa Kearney: Belle and Ron have been really instrumental in this space and quite consistent in putting across the message over the past 20-30 years that family structure matters for kids. Responsible parenthood is something they talk about a lot with their success sequence. Belle has also written a book arguing that we need to change the default on pregnancy, as she says: expand LARCs and other contraceptive technologies and access to long-acting reversible contraception, so that people who, if they’re not being super-careful about avoiding pregnancy, the default is that they are contracepting, as opposed to having to take action in the moment. And so her view is that is all part of the line of emphasis and argument that both Ron and Belle have made: that people shouldn’t just drift into parenthood, but it’s something that people should do deliberately and responsibly.
Of course, Belle I think would consider herself left-of-center, and Ron is right-of-center. One of the things that was always so admirable about them is that they would come together with their different political ideological leanings and agree on this topic. I consider them both mentors to me professionally. I don’t want to say that they would agree with everything I’ve written, but I am writing in a line of discourse that the two of them have been instrumental in pushing forward.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have reminded me that at one point in your book, you define marriage as “a long-term contract between two individuals to combine resources and share the responsibilities of keeping a household and raising children.” It’s not terribly romantic, but it does point to the economic importance of marriage as an institution.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah! Doesn’t everyone think about their marriage that way?
Geoff Kabaservice: Well spoken. Well, Melissa Kearney, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, and congratulations again on the publication of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me on your show.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform, and if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact at niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.