The social sciences have long demonstrated that all family forms are not equal in terms of providing optimal benefits for children and society.
But a major new report from the scholars at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) demonstrates in persuasive detail that the married mother/father family is even more powerful today in providing essential goods to children that ever before. University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox explained to The Washington Post that “Kids benefit even more today from two parents than they did 16 to 40 years ago.”
As such research regularly comes off the academic presses however, the proportion of educated Americans who think family form doesn’t really matter all that much is growing. The first line of this report notes, “The share of American men and women who think that marriage and a stable family are not important for children in our contemporary world is growing” and they attribute this belief to “increasing progressive ideas about family diversity” and those “who discount the unique value of marriage” for building strong families, healthy children and thriving communities. The data bear this out. In 2006, 76% of Americans thought it was important for unmarried couples who have children to “legally marry.” That number fell to 60% in 2020.
The report also shows who gets this most wrong. Only 30% of college-educated liberals believe children are better off with a married mother and father while 91% of college-educated conservatives correctly believe this. This drastic diversity in belief is demonstrated in the following chart.
Facts Contradict Present “Elite Insight”
The IFS scholars assert,
A growing body of evidence not only contradicts the conventional wisdom, journalistic narratives, and academic assertions that a stable, married family is of little or no importance to children, but also indicates something quite different.
That difference is that married mother/father families matter more for children excelling in life than previous social science research and elite minds have ever realized. The IFS report states,
Recent research suggests that an intact family is increasingly tied to the financial, social, and emotional welfare of children – and family instability is more strongly linked to worse outcomes for kids than it used to be. The upshot for children is that marriage not only still matters, but it seems to matter more than ever. Children who have the benefit of two parents are comparatively more advantaged today than they were in previous decades.
The report documents that differences between children from single-parent and married-parent families in critical educational outcomes have doubled and tripled over the last few decades.
This means all other things being equal, children raised by only one parent are walking with a substantial limp in their academic careers compared to their significantly advantaged peers living with married moms and dads. And again, this inequity is growing wider. IFS reports that scholars studying this divide “found no evidence that the link between family structure and student outcomes is diminishing.”
Kids from intact homes are more than twice as likely to graduate from college and this disparity has grown even wider for Millennial off-spring compared to their peers in the Boomer cohort, as demonstrated here.
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