The Two-Parent Privilege: Understanding Contemporary Family Formation

Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly recently interviewed noted economist Melissa Kearney on her important book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Professor Kearney, who works as the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, shared some very important statistics about what the decline of marriage as a social norm is bringing to our world in terms of well-being for women and children, poverty rates and other important measures of general well-being. She explained how marriage is becoming the new class divide among the haves and have-nots in our communities.

The following are edited block quotes of Kearney’s most salient points as a scholar on the topic of marital decline among certain socio-economic and ethnic groups.

Growth of Single-Parent Families in U.S. Outside the Well-Educated Class

And critically, what I see in the data that’s happened over the past 40 years is that the share of kids growing up in a single parent home or outside a two-parent home has grown quite shockingly.

Only 63% of U.S. kids are growing up with married parents today. That’s a really major change in the past 40 years.

And the other really, really critical feature of this trend is that it’s happened almost entirely outside the college educated class.

Marriage is holding pretty steady among adults with a four-year college degree, but outside that economically advantaged class, single parenthood has really risen.

American kids have the unfortunate distinction of being more likely than kids in any other country, for which we have this kind of data, to be living in a one parent home.

The Pew Research Center has this data from 130 countries: 23% of U.S. kids are living in a one parent home. The average across the 130 countries is 7%. In Europe, it’s 13%. In Asia, it’s like less than 4%. So we see, relatively, very high rates [of unmarried parenthood] in the U.S.

Single-Parent Homes: Divorced or Unmarried Parents?

What’s actually happened for kids in this country is that fewer and fewer of their parents are even getting married in the first place. So, in fact, the rise in the share of kids living in a one parent home over the past 40 years is almost entirely driven by an increase in never married parents. From a kid’s perspective, [economically] that’s even worse than parents getting divorced.

Because what we see is only a quarter of kids who live with a single mom get any child support [from a father]. So those kids are much less likely to ever have had during their childhood the benefit of two parents in their household. They’re less likely to have the benefit of continued engagement with a nonresident parent or even financial support going forward. And so, it’s almost worse [that a marriage never existed] than just not a commitment to keeping marriages together.

Class Divide in Family Formation

Between 1980 and 2020, the share of kids born to unmarried parents went from 18% to 40%. [Nearly all this change is among non-college educated women.]

So today, it’s really … with moms who don’t have a four-year college degree, and slightly more than half actually are outside of marriage. So, it’s an even bigger divide that the parents were never married in the first place.

In 1980, the least advantaged moms, moms without a high school degree, 73% of their kids were being raised in a married parent home. And that raised a lot of concerns in the 1980s about this very disadvantaged groups of moms because [at that time] about 83% of the kids whose moms had a high school degree were being raised in a married parent home. And 90% of kids whose moms had a four-year college degree [were raising their kids in marriage].

What happened over the next 40 years, nobody really would have predicted in the 80s or 90s, but the middle group, high school-educated moms, the middle-class Americans, their rates of marriage basically converged downward to the most disadvantaged groups.

So, the majority of moms with a high school degree or some college, the share of them living in a married-parent home fell from 83% to 60%. So now, what we have is the college-educated really standing apart. Those moms are about three times less likely to be doing the hard job of raising their kids in a single parent home as compared to moms without a four-year college degree.

Higher Poverty Rates in Unmarried-Parented Homes

The poverty rates among kids growing up with a single mom as compared to two married parents, it’s five times as high. It’s like 25% versus 5%. Kids growing up with a single dad, their poverty rate is three times as high as kids growing up in a married-parent home.

Racial/Ethnic Demographic of Married Two-Parent Families

So, children whose parents identify in the census as ethnically Asian, 88% of those kids are living in married-parent households. And remarkably, the data don’t show a large education gradient for that group, meaning that marriage rates are really high all across the education economic distribution for Asian-Americans.

77% of white children are living in married-parent homes.

62% of Hispanic children are living with married parents.

Only 38% of black children are doing so. So, I mean, there’s so much we need to do to address racial disparities in this country.

But the fact that only 38% of black kids are growing up with the benefits of the resources of two parents in their household, that is going to perpetuate racial class divides in resources and opportunities and ultimately outcomes, which is why I’m so convinced that we need to do something to break this cycle, to address those gaps.

So, we are seeing declines in married parenting among all ethnic groups, save for Asian-Americans. But we must note Kearney’s distinction in marriage- and married-parenting rates are hanging steady among the college educated, while they are declining sharply among the less educated. Most single-parent homes are created, not by divorce, but by out-of-wedlock births among non-teens and non-college educated women. This has been true since the mid-1980s.

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