Frank T. Pool

I seldom find myself pre-ordering a book, but reading some reviews of a new book led me to get it, despite knowing pretty much what it would say. I was not disappointed.

Melissa S. Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and holds other academic and research positions. She has been publishing on issues involving the economics of families for over two decades.

Her book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” has received many positive reviews from a wide variety of publications, from the left-leaning New York Times and Washington Post to National Review and City Journal on the right, to an excerpt from the book’s first chapter published by the venerable and center-left Atlantic.

It is notable how many of the positive reviews are by women authors.

Kearney is a scholar writing for a general audience. She includes asides and anecdotes from her own life to illustrate her points. Including references and notes, the book is 225 pages long, and the main body is only 184 pages. It can be read at a couple of sittings, and she highlights many of her main points by printing them in boldface headings. There are some charts and graphs, and lots of numbers and percentages, but she keeps all this to a minimum and repeats observations, which means that sampling a chapter or two will give a good idea of the book.

Her central idea is based on some facts that have been very apparent for a while. She says, “Children who have the benefit of two parents in their home tend to have more highly resourced, enriching, stable childhoods, and they consequently do better in school and have fewer behavioral challenges. These children go on to complete more years of education, earn more in the workforce, and have a greater likelihood of being married.”

The book is about children and their lives. It is not a book of polemics. She goes out of her way to avoid stigmatizing single mothers and the men who do not stay in stable relationships with them or their children. She recognizes that governmental policy can help sometimes, but does not regard it as a panacea. Social attitudes toward single motherhood have shifted, and she would like to see different attitudes, but she’s not a scold or trying to score culture war points.

The other central fact about childhood and its outcomes is that more highly educated and wealthier people have higher rates of marriage than poor people do. The less educated and poorer the mother, the greater chance that they will live without a spouse, sometimes with their mother as the support for the children. She can give you the numbers and the charts and the demographic breakdown.

Children benefit from the presence of two parents, especially boys, who in the absence of fathers and father figures are more likely to have low educational levels, more risky behavior, more encounters with the law, and fewer prospects for economic success. Recently Richard V. Reeves has written a book on the problems of boys and men, and a healthy future for our country will depend on less-educated men being able to support themselves and the people they love.

She investigates many aspects of the central problem. One thing that repeatedly becomes evident is that women are unwilling to marry men who cannot be stable contributors to a family. As our country has de-industrialized, and formerly well paid jobs held by men have gone away, men at the bottom of the social and economic system have been hit hardest.

Yes, very affluent women seem to raise children with good outcomes. Money matters, for sure. I’m old enough to remember Vice-President Dan Quayle criticizing a TV character for choosing to have a child and to remain unmarried. (People forget that he also advocated changing marriage penalties in the tax code.) But with the benefit of hindsight, in the broad social context, he was right.

Many single mothers do magnificent jobs raising children, but as Kearney points out, parenting is hard, even with a spouse. She describes how she came home stressed, only for her 10-year-old daughter to tell her that maybe mom had a bad day, but she shouldn’t take it out on the kids. People who are struggling to get by are stressed all the time.

The rise of out-of-wedlock births also occurs in Europe. In Iceland, for example, almost 70% of babies are born to unwed parents. In Denmark, the number is about 55%. Yet even in Denmark, which has a much stronger social services network than we do, Kearney notes that the outcomes from married households on children’s education and income are higher. Countries like Israel, Japan, Korea and Türkyie have very low rates of single parent households.

Kearney tries to explain why things may be, and considers several explanations. People often try to minimize or explain away these declines. She sometimes admits that some ideas made sense to her, but the evidence just wasn’t there. This kind of honesty is a strength.

Naturally, there has been a pushback. From the left, one author claims the call for “everybody to get married” is an attempt to repeal women’s autonomy, abortion, and affirmative action. Yet the author can’t deny that richer families also tend to get married and stay married. From the right, an author claims that Kearney advocates government transfer payments to men. She never says that. On the other hand, even if she’s right, some might say, should we use government to fix the problem?

In general, liberals are less committed to the idea that marriage is an important fact for success. This is despite the reality that affluent liberals are more likely to be married, with all its benefits and inherited privilege, than are less-educated working-class populists. There’s a term going around these days, “luxury beliefs,” attitudes that rich people adopt to show status but which turn out to be harmful to the poor.

As a scholar who is trying to show us what the reality is, and what explanations hold up, she does not spend a great deal of time arguing for ways to make the situation better. Perhaps this is one of the strengths of the book. She makes some recommendations, some of which appeal to the left, others to the right. Perhaps her forthright and common-sense approach may cut through the culture-war madness that afflicts social policy. She’s right. Now what?

On a personal note, this summer my daughter announced her engagement to be married to a fine man, and as I was writing this, my youngest friends, a wonderful married couple, welcomed their first son into the world. May they all find happiness in their lives.