The marriage gap is the real problem

Published 9:13 pm Thursday, January 30, 2014

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday was remarkable for its unremarkable proposals. As Doyle McManus noted for the Los Angeles Times, “Instead of grand bargains and sweeping change, the president proposed holding a summit meeting on working families and extracting a promise from colleges to admit more low-income students — not exactly sweeping solutions to middle-class stagnation and college debt.”

But there was one important part of the speech that was notably missing. While attempting to frame economic questions around the idea of income inequality, Obama failed to even mention the most important factor in success and failure: the family.

“Obama was strangely silent when it came to addressing a major obstacle to his agenda of expanding ‘opportunity for all’: the divided state of our unions in America,” says W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “Judging from the president’s speech, you would never know that marriage has emerged as a major source of division between college-educated Americans and everyone else.”

The so-called income gap is eclipsed in both severity and effect by the growing marriage gap.

“Today, marriage is in good shape among Americans who are more educated and affluent; for this group, divorce is relatively rare, marital quality is high and most children enjoy the shelter and security of an intact, two-parent home,” Wilcox wrote in USA Today. “By contrast, poor and working-class Americans are much less likely to get and stay married, and their kids are more likely to be exposed to family turmoil and single parenthood. For instance, less than 10 percent of college-educated mothers have their children outside of wedlock, whereas almost 50 percent of mothers without college degrees do.”

That marriage gap has real consequences for children.

“Children from single-parent families are about 30 percent less likely to graduate from college, about twice as likely to run afoul of the police and approximately three times as likely to end up pregnant as teenagers,” Wilcox notes. “Thus, partly because they are more likely to be exposed to the disadvantages associated with single parenthood while growing up, children from lower-income families have a much harder time making it in America today.”

There are legitimate questions about what, exactly, the government can do about marriage rates. But there are some proven steps that can be taken.

“Democrats and Republicans should get behind a major public health campaign to promote what Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have called the ‘success sequence,’ namely, the idea that young adults are most likely to realize the American Dream when they sequence education, work, marriage, and parenthood in that order,” he explains. “Skeptics of such campaigns need to recognize the success the nation’s campaign to reduce teen pregnancy has achieved in a similar area.”

President Obama seems to be playing “small ball” in his remaining years in office — seeking to shore up the Affordable Care Act and maybe enact some other policies through executive orders.

But working to promote marriage would further his goal of increasing opportunities for all far better.