Two-Parent Privilege (eBook)

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The Elephant in the Room

Some years ago, I was at a small two-day conference that brought together people from the academic and policy communities to talk about income inequality, economic mobility, and other related challenges facing the country. As is the case for many professions, being an academic economist involves going to lots of these types of conferences: traveling to a different city, attending a day of presentations and panels (often in windowless rooms), having a group dinner with other conference participants, and waking up early the next day to participate in another full day of sessions focused on a particular topic. People share their most recent research, discuss and debate ideas and evidence, make plans for additional research, and (in the best cases) inform the decisions of policy leaders with the kind of real-world evidence that economic data can provide. Then we go home, think about the new results we saw and the conversations we had, work some more, follow up with people we talked with, and repeat the process over again.

During this particular conference, we talked about the decline in US employment and widening income inequality. We talked about how the growing economic gap between America’s wealthy and poor was making it harder for Americans to achieve upward mobility—to live a life better than their parents did, economically speaking, and achieve the proverbial American dream. Over the course of the conference, the conversations focused on the usual topics that come up when economists talk about such things. We talked about gaps in pay between workers with and without college degrees. We talked about how technology and import competition disadvantaged certain groups of workers. We talked about the decline in union representation and the rise of CEO pay. We talked about the need for improved educational institutions and discussed ways to strengthen the safety net and reform the tax code.

During one of the later conference sessions, I raised my hand and asked a question that I’d been thinking about for a while: how should we think about the role of family and home environment in all this? If we are talking about how people perform in school and the labor market, isn’t the kind of household they grew up in an important determinant of that performance? There was quiet. After a few beats I continued talking, rattling off a few statistics and facts about class gaps in marriage and family structure, then suggesting that these class gaps should probably be part of our conversations about inequality and mobility. I pointed out that college-educated adults are more likely than non-college-educated adults to get married and to raise kids in two-parent homes. The resources of these homes (including money, but also time and energy in the challenging work of parenting) separated them from less educated adults and their children, who lacked such resource luxuries. The data suggest that these difference across households produce large economic differences in the lives of children. Don’t we need to contend with these facts? What should we make of them and what, if anything, should policy makers do about them?

This was not the first time I’d raised this issue of family structure among peers, but this was one of the largest audiences for it, and the group assembled extended beyond the usual group of scholars who study poverty, children, and families. My questions were received about as I expected them to be. As in earlier instances, this set of questions elicited a muted reaction—uncomfortable shifting in seats and facial expressions that conveyed reservations with this line of inquiry. The apparent consensus I took from the room, expressed through limited language and unencouraging gestures, was that family and marriage were personal matters and somewhat out of bounds for this type of discussion. While my colleagues were willing to grant the point that an increasing share of US children were living in single-parent homes and that this was much more common among less educated families—and that outcomes of children from single-parent homes tend to be worse than those of children from two-parent homes, for a variety of reasons—the implication was that we don’t really know what to do about it as a matter of policy. In my experience, people in these types of scholarly, policy-oriented settings are much more comfortable talking about the need to improve schools, expand college access, and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit than they are talking about family structure and how kids are raised. Don’t get me wrong; I think those other issues are important and I’m always up for talking about them. My point was simply that the absence of a discussion of family seemed conspicuous and counterproductive.

After the day’s sessions, in the lobby of the hotel, a prominent economist approached me and asked a series of pointed questions about the role of family structure in shaping children’s life outcomes. If kids are being taken care of, he asked, what did it matter if their parents were married? Did the evidence suggest that parental marriage per se mattered for how kids do in the world? Here I recounted some more of what I knew from the data and existing research, all of which seemed to point to a distinct social and economic advantage for kids who grew up with married parents, largely because “married parents” tends to mean a two-parent home and a two-parent home tends to mean more resources available to the child than in a one-parent home. That economist kept peppering me with specific questions. After a few minutes, he asked in a more pointed way: if parents are divorced but the dad contributes a lot financially, are the kids still at a relative disadvantage?

I cut him off, too quickly. “Look, I’m not really that worried about the kids of rich parents who get divorced,” I said. “The kids I’m worried about are the ones growing up in single-parent homes with very limited resources; they don’t have anything near the experiences and opportunities that kids from higher-income households have.” I suspected (not knowing his personal family situation) that he might be thinking of his own kids, who were most likely going to do fine in life.

That night, and the next day and the day after that, I kept thinking about the muted reaction to my questions in the group session and the follow-up one-on-one conversation in the hotel lobby. The economist’s questions hadn’t been motivated by mere scholarly or policy curiosity; if they had been, he probably would have asked them in the conference room where dozens of other economists and policy experts were gathered. His questions seemed personal, like he was asking as a father who (I suspected) was divorced and wanted the best for his kids, like every parent does. But the fact that he sought me out and asked me these questions privately is reflective of a divide between what many of us worry about personally for our own children and what we are inclined to talk about publicly when it comes to the well-being of children more broadly in society.

I thought about a conversation I had recently had with a different economist in a different setting who reacted negatively when I mentioned the importance of family structure to children’s outcomes. He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded “socially conservative,” in a way that implied “not academically serious.” I countered, “You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?”

The existence of such a divide is predictable, even reasonable. Matters of households and families are inherently personal, and it’s the nature of personal things that we don’t talk about them with just anyone. Nor do most people like to sound judgmental about people’s life choices. It seems that this discomfort and hesitancy have stifled public conversation on a critically important topic that has sweeping implications not just for the well-being of American children and families but for the country’s well-being, too.

The more I reflected on these issues, the more I wanted to look at the data and existing research to figure out how changes in family structure over recent decades mattered (or not) for children’s outcomes and for society. Much of the older social science research on family structure is narrowly focused on the issue of poverty, both as a cause and an effect. When single motherhood was closely linked in earlier generations to teen childbearing and poverty, it made sense to study how teen childbearing, nonmarital childbearing, and poverty reinforced each other. The question now was whether (and how) things had changed: How should we think about family structure now that single motherhood is so much more common and extends to so many? Why are so many adults forgoing marriage, even when they have children? How are these trends affecting children from different backgrounds?

The general approach economists take to studying the complicated issue of families and the “economics of the household,” as it is often referred to, is to try to break this highly complex topic down into a limited set of key...